Wages of Rebellion (19 page)

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world—743 adults per 100,000.
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Of the 2.3 million adults incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails, nearly 60 percent are nonwhite.
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He who has not been in jail does not know what the state is, Leo Tolstoy said.
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The Omnibus Crime Bill, pushed through the Senate with the help of Joe Biden, appropriated $30 billion to expand the nation’s prison program, state and local law enforcement, and border patrols over a six-year period.
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It gave $10.8 billion in federal matching funds to local governments to hire 100,000 new police officers over five years.
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It provided nearly $10 billion for the construction of new federal prisons.
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It instituted the three-strikes proposal that mandates a life sentence for anyone convicted of three “violent” felonies. The bill permitted children as young as thirteen to be tried as adults. It authorized the use of secret evidence. The prison population during the Clinton presidency jumped from 1.4 million to 2 million.
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Between 1982 and 2001, total state corrections expenditures increased each year, rising from $15.0 billion to $53.5 billion in real dollars, according to the Department of
Justice (DOJ). Between 2002 and 2010, according to the DOJ, expenditures fluctuated annually between $53.4 billion and $48.4 billion.
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Abu-Jamal talked about being a Black Panther and the use of violence as a form of political resistance throughout history. He remembered visiting the Chicago apartment where Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was shot to death by Chicago police and the FBI while he slept on December 4, 1969. He called Hampton, who was twenty-one when he was killed, “one of the bright lights.” Abu-Jamal choked up and his eyes glistened with tears. “Fred …,” he said as his voice trailed off.

“It used to be that a politician promised jobs, a chicken in every pot,” Abu-Jamal went on. “But in our new national security state, they promise law and order. They get elected by saying they will be tough on crime and by calling for the death penalty. Death sells. Fear sells. What was a crime by the state in the 1960s is now legal. The state can wiretap, eavesdrop, listen to phone calls, and break into homes. And there is nothing we can do about it. The mass incarceration and the mass repression impact every community to make people afraid and compliant.”

Abu-Jamal has written: “In this place, a dark temple of fear, an altar of political ambition, death is a campaign poster, a stepping-stone to public office.… In this space and time, in this dark hour, how many of us are not on death row?”
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“The brutality of the empire was exposed under George W. Bush,” he said to me. “The empire desperately needed a new face, a black face, to seduce the public. This is the role of Barack Obama. He is the black face of empire. He was pitched to us during the most recent presidential campaign by Bill Clinton, the same Clinton who gave us NAFTA in 1994 and abolished good-paying manufacturing jobs for millions of workers. The same Clinton who locked us up. Clinton and Obama represent the politics of betrayal at the heart of the corporatist machinery. And they have fooled a lot of people, especially black people. During slavery, and even post-Reconstruction, there were always a few black people who served the system. The role of these black servants to white power was to teach passivity in the face of repression. This is why Obama is president. Nothing has changed.”

Abu-Jamal saw hope in the Occupy movement, largely because white middle-class youths were beginning to experience the cruelty
of capitalism and state repression that had long been visited on poor people of color. But, he added, we must recover our past if we are going to effectively resist. We must connect ourselves to the revolutionaries, radicals, and prophets who fought injustice before us. We must defy the historical amnesia that the corporate state seeks to cement into our consciousness. His book
Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People
sets out to do precisely this, to recover a past intellectual and spiritual life for African Americans that has been trivialized, ignored, or censored by the dominant culture.
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He was worried that the mindless diversions of popular culture and the assault by corporate power on education are keeping many from grasping not only what is happening but the continuity between modern systems of oppression and older systems of oppression.

“We would not be who we are as African Americans of this date were it not for the Reverend, the Prophet, Nat Turner—who brilliantly merged the religious with the political,” Abu-Jamal said in the film. “Who didn’t just talk about the world to come but fought to transform the world that is. You know, [Nat Turner] is honored and revered today—not because he could quote the Bible well, he could do that, but because he worked in the fields of life to get the slave master off of his neck, off of all of our necks.”

The vending machines in the reception area dispensed White Castle hamburgers, soda, candy, and Tastykake cupcakes. I dropped in the prepaid tokens—no money is allowed inside the prison—and the fast food tumbled into the vent. For Abu-Jamal, forced to eat prison food for decades, it was a treat, especially the Hershey’s bar. He watched as a boy darted past him toward his father.

“I didn’t see children for thirty years on death row,” he said quietly. “It is a delight to see them here. They are what is most precious, what the struggle is finally about.”

T
he effort to silence Abu-Jamal is part of the cultural drive to crush the remnants of the black prophetic tradition. This tradition, which stretches back to Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, has consistently named
and damned the cruelty of imperialism and white supremacy. It has been our most astute critique of empire. The black prophetic tradition expressed radical truths with a clarity and moral force that have eluded most other critics of American capitalism. Obama first displayed his fear of this tradition when he betrayed his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, abetting the brutal character assassination of one of the nation’s most prophetic voices. And Obama has sustained this assault, largely through black surrogates such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, Tom Joyner, and Steve Harvey, in vicious attacks on Cornel West.

“Jeremiah Wright was the canary in the mine,” West told me when we spoke in Princeton, New Jersey, where we both live. “The black prophetic tradition has been emptied out. Its leaders have either been murdered or incarcerated.… A lot of political prisoners who represent the black prophetic tradition [are] in jail. They have been in there for decades. Or we have leaders who have completely sold out. They have been co-opted. And these are the three major developments. With soldout leaders, you get a pacified followership or people who are scared.

“The black prophetic tradition has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf,” West said. “What has kept American democracy from going fascist or authoritarian or autocratic has been the legacy of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Martin King, Fannie Lou Hamer. This is not because black people have a monopoly on truth, goodness, or beauty. It is because the black freedom movement puts pressure on the American empire in the name of integrity, decency, honesty, and virtue.”

The tradition is sustained by a handful of beleaguered writers and intellectuals, including Glen Ford and his Black Agenda Report, James Cone, Carl Dix, Bruce Dixon, Boyce Watkins, Yvette Carnell, Robin Kelley, Margaret Kimberley, Nellie Bailey, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, Maulana Karenga, Ajamu Baraka, and Jeremiah Wright, but none have the public profile of West, who is relentlessly attacked by Obama’s black supporters as a “race traitor”—the equivalent of a “self-hating Jew” to hard-line supporters of Israel.

It is understandable why this tradition frightens Obama. It exposes him for what he is—the ideological heir of Booker T. Washington, a
black accommodationist whose core message to black people was, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, “adjustment and submission.” Obama’s message to the black underclass in the midst of the corporate rape of the nation is drawn verbatim from the Booker T. Washington playbook. He tells them to work harder—as if anyone works harder than the working poor in this country—to get an education, and to obey the law.

“Obama is the highest manifestation of the co-optation that took place,” West said. “It shifted to the black political class. The black political class, more and more, found itself unable to tell the truth, or if they began to tell some of the truth, they were [put] under surveillance, attacked, and demonized. Forty percent of our babies are living in poverty, living without enough food, and Obama comes to us and says quit whining. He doesn’t say that to the Business Roundtable. He doesn’t say that to the corporate elites. He doesn’t say that to AIPAC, the conservative Jewish brothers and sisters who will do anything to support the Israeli occupation against Palestinians. This kind of neglect in policy is coupled with disrespect in his speeches to black folk, which the mainstream calls tough love.

“He is a shell of a man,” West said of Obama. “There is no deep conviction. There is no connection to something bigger than him. It is a sad spectacle, sad if he were not the head of an empire that is in such decline and so dangerous. This is a nadir. William Trotter and Du Bois, along with Ida B. Wells-Barnett, were going at Booker T tooth and nail. Look at the fights between [Marcus] Garvey and Du Bois, or Garvey and A. Philip Randolph. But now if you criticize Obama the way Randolph criticized Garvey, you become a race traitor and an Uncle Tom. A lot of that comes out of the Obama machine, the Obama plantation.

“The most pernicious development is the incorporation of the black prophetic tradition into the Obama imperial project,” West told me. “Obama used [Martin Luther] King’s Bible during his inauguration, but under the National Defense Authorization Act, King would be detained without due process. He would be under surveillance every day because of his association with Nelson Mandela, who was the head of a ‘terrorist’ organization, the African National Congress. We see the richest prophetic tradition in America desecrated in the name of a neoliberal
worldview, a worldview King would be in direct opposition to. Martin would be against Obama because of his neglect of the poor and the working class and because of the [aerial] drones, because he is a war president, because he draws up kill lists. And Martin King would have nothing to do with that.

“We are talking about crimes against humanity—Wall Street crimes, war crimes, the crimes of the criminal justice system in the form of Jim Crow, the crimes against our working poor that have their backs pushed against the wall because of stagnant wages and corporate profits going up,” West explained. “Abraham Heschel said that the distinctive feature of any empire in decline is its indifference to criminality. That is a fundamental feature of our time, an indifference to criminality, especially on top, wickedness in high places.

“This is not personal,” West said. “This was true for [George W.] Bush. It was true for [Bill] Clinton. We are talking about an imperial system, manifest in Obama’s robust effort to bomb Syria [in 2013]. War crimes against Syrian children do not justify US war crimes. We are talking about a corporate state and a massive surveillance and national security state. It operates according to its own logic. Profit, on the one hand, and secrecy to hide imperial policy, on the other. Jesse [Jackson] was the head house Negro on the Clinton plantation, just as Sharpton is the head house Negro on the Obama plantation. But there is a difference. Jesse was willing to oppose Clinton on a variety of issues. He marched, for example, against the welfare bill. But Sharpton loves the plantation. He will not say a critical word. It is sad and pathetic. We are living in the age of the sellout.

“Garvey used to say that as long as black people were in America the masses of black people, the poor and the working class, would never be treated with respect, decency, or fairness,” West noted. “That has always been a skeleton in the closet, the fundamental challenge to the black prophetic tradition. It may very well be that black people will never be free in America. But I believe, and the black prophetic tradition believes, that we proceed because black people are worthy of being free, just as poor people of all colors are worthy of being free, even if they never will be free. That is the existential leap of faith. There is no doubt
that with a black president the black masses are still treated unfairly, from stop-and-frisk to high unemployment, indecent housing, and decrepit education.

“It is a spiritual issue,” West said. “What kind of person do you choose to be? People say, ‘Well, Brother West, since the mass of black folk will never be free, then let me just get mine.’ That is the dominant response. ‘I am wasting my time fighting a battle that can’t be won.’ But that is not what the black prophetic tradition is about. History is a mystery. Yes, it doesn’t look good. But the masses of black folk
must
be respected. Malcolm X used to say, as long as they are not respected, you could show me all the individual respect you want, but I know it’s empty. That is the fundamental divide between the prophetic tradition and the sellouts.”