Revolution Books at the Harlem Book Fair:

BLACK LIVES STOLEN: A Conversation

July 20, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The Harlem Book Fair in New York City took place on Saturday, July 18. As part of this, Revolution Books organized one of the panel discussions for the day-long event.

The panel, which took place at the Schomburg Center, was titled “BLACK LIVES STOLEN: A Conversation” and featured: Carl Dix (moderator and presenter), co-founder of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party; Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder of African American Policy Forum, professor at Columbia University, author of  numerous books and articles on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality; Herb Boyd, journalist, author of numerous books including Baldwin's Harlem, Brotherman and Black Panthers for Beginners, and professor at City College of New York; and Robyn Spencer, author of forthcoming book on the Black Panther Party titled Repression Breeds Resistance and professor at Lehman College.

The event was standing room only, with about 80 people in the audience. Carl Dix gave opening comments and then introduced each speaker who gave a presentation. The speakers were followed by a lively Q&A, and some comments from Andy Zee from Revolution Books, New York City, closed the program.

The following are excerpts from the presentations:

Carl Dix

We're going to have a very important conversation today about the biggest question facing this society—Black lives stolen, stolen through the operation of the criminal injustice system in this country. This panel is sponsored by Revolution Books, New York City. And it is the kind of conversation that Revolution Books exists to promote and to engage. And just let me tell you something about Revolution Books because people should get to know Revolution Books and they will have the opportunity to do that because Revolution Books is opening up right here in Harlem on September 1, just three blocks down Malcolm X Blvd on the corner of 132nd Street, and it’s the place to go if you want to dig into the outrages being perpetrated on people here and all over the world. But it’s also the place to get into why those outrages are happening and what can and must be done to deal with them. This is all brought forward in the books that will be available at Revolution Books but also in the discussions and talks that are held there and in cultural events that the bookstore promotes. 

It's a place where you can connect with the work of Bob Avakian, BA, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a leader who's spent decades digging into everything that stands between humanity and its ultimate emancipation. Through this work he's developed a new approach to revolution and communism, to sweeping away this system and the horrors it enforces on humanity and to bringing into being a society and a world that people would love to live in. You need to get to know this bookstore—and to make this September 1 opening happen, you need to volunteer to work on it, to help raise the money, to help get the store together.

Now, to set the stage for today's conversation.

Are the killings of Black and Latino people by the police a concentration of an overall program of suppression that has a genocidal thrust? Does the combination of police terror, the criminalization and demonization of the youth, warehousing people in prison and then treating formerly incarcerated people as less than full human beings—does this amount to genocide? Is this the truth? And if it’s true, why does it happen and what can be done to end these horrors?

Yesterday marked one year since the police murder of Eric Garner. I mean we all saw him all choked to death by the NYPD. Soon we will mark August 9, one year since Michael Brown was murdered by a cop in Ferguson, Missouri. In both cases the murderers have walked free. The police have killed more than 550 people in the first 6 months of 2015. In more than one out of five of those they kill, they have admitted they [the people killed by cops] were unarmed. And I have to say they have admitted, because as you know in the case of Trayvon Martin the story that got spun was that he was "armed" because there was a cement sidewalk. That’s how the police approach whether Black people are unarmed or not. We have to take that into account and figure out what that means.

But almost no killer cops have been put on trial or punished in any way for these horrors. And let me just tell you this, because yesterday I heard about Sandra Bland—a Black woman, who was pulled over in a small town in Texas for improper lane change, beat down by the police, arrested and then a couple of days later she turned up hanged in the cell and they are calling it suicide. I wanted to get the story on this so I Googled “Black woman killed in police custody.” I got the story on Sandra Bland. I also got the story on Shenecque Proctor in Alabama, Natasha McKenna in Fairfax County in Virginia, Kyam Livingston in Brooklyn, Alecia Thomas in LA, and Taneshia Anderson in Cleveland. And this was just the first page of the search. There were 10 more pages. And this is just for Black women killed in police custody. That’s just a taste of how widespread this problem is, but also about whom it happens to. And we have to talk about that, think about that. But then once you think about it you have to act in relationship to it.

We gotta add to this the massacre in Charleston and the reluctance of the mouthpieces of this system to call it what it was—an expression of the white supremacy that has coursed through the veins of America from its very beginning.

All of this is what we’re dealing with, and the backdrop for this is this capitalist system and the way that it works that has stripped the ghettos and barrios in this country of legitimate ways to survive and raise families; leaving millions and millions of people, whole generations of youth growing up facing futures of hopelessness. And the only solutions that the authorities have put forward to these problems is their cops swaggering through our neighborhoods like occupying armies, courts and prison to warehouse people in.

This is the reality we're facing. Police have been unleashed to spread terror across the country, and they are almost always backed up when their murderous deeds are brought out into the light of day. In the last year, these outrages have been met by outpourings of resistance on a level that we haven't seen in decades. And that’s good, that’s very good. But at the same time, the killings have continued, the exonerations of the killer cops have continued and the authorities continually work to change the discussion away from police killing and brutalizing people to cops being heroes who have a dangerous job and do it well and to the need for oppressed people to forgive those who attack them and to come together with them.

Well, none of that is what's needed. We don’t need to come together with our oppressors. We don’t need to forgive them. We need to end this oppression. We also don't need policies that are aimed at lessening the horrors being perpetrated—because this just amounts to nothing more than smoothing out the rough edges on a genocide. We have to look at history to get a sense of what's needed. People in Germany stood aside while millions of people were hauled off to the concentration camps and put to death—Jews, communists, Gypsies, lesbians and gays. This was inhumanity on display here and I’m not just talking about the inhumanity of the Nazi regime. It was inhumane for the so-called “Good Germans” to stand aside while this genocide was perpetrated.

I bring that up because that was wrong then and it’s just as wrong today to stand aside. Because we are facing a genocide. It hasn’t gotten to the point of death camps yet, but genocide is still in the process—they go through processes and we are going through a genocidal process. And when you're facing a genocide, it is unacceptable to stand aside. It's unacceptable to counsel people to continue to suffer the horrors being perpetrated. And it's unacceptable to stand aside and act like as if it's not your problem. Don't tell me—this is to white people out there—that it ain't your problem because you're pretty sure this won’t happen to you. Because I’ll tell you, it’s already happened to you. Your humanity is being stripped away from you by these injustices being brought down on people because of the color of their skin. And you should not want to be the kind of person who could stand aside hoping that you don’t get hit by these. There is no middle ground here, there is no neutrality. You are either on the side of people who are standing up to stop these horrors or it’s ok with you that they go down and that means you are on the side of it being perpetrated on people as the genocide moves forward, breaking the bodies and crushing the spirits of millions and millions of people.

I’m the co-founder, along with Dr. Cornel West, of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. I’m also a representative of the Revolutionary Communist Party. And I’m somebody who has been involved in this fight against these injustices for 40 years now and counting. And I want to tell you how I’m coming at this and I want to do that by reading to you a quote from Bob Avakian from something he wrote in the wake of the Charleston massacre:

There is the potential for something of unprecedented beauty to arise out of unspeakable ugliness: Black people playing a crucial role in putting an end, at long last, to this system which has, for so long, not just exploited but dehumanized, terrorized and tormented them in a thousand ways—putting an end to this in the only way it can be done—by fighting to emancipate humanity, to put an end to the long night in which human society has been divided into masters and slaves, and the masses of humanity have been lashed, beaten, raped, slaughtered, shackled and shrouded in ignorance and misery.

Because I come from this perspective, I am doing all I can to end all of the horrors that come down and on this front, in particular to mobilizing people to come to New York City on October 24 to deliver a message: “Stop Police Terror—Which Side Are You On?”

We can come back to that later, but I do want to say right now, everybody who sees these horrors needs to enlist in this effort and be working to bring people to New York City. This has to happen because we cannot let this genocide proceed apace, and we cannot limit our resistance to responding to each attack as it comes down one by one. We gotta take our resistance to a higher level. We gotta bring the religious community, students and youth, labor organizations, people of different races and nationalities and from many different backgrounds into New York City, and people here in the city.

****

Kimberlé Crenshaw

What we have done at the Policy Forum is we have tried to pull together not an entirely inclusive list, because there isn’t an entirely inclusive list of all those who have lost their lives to the police. But looking at information that we do have of women who have lost their lives to the police, we wanted to frame the loss of lives in a way that they could both fit within some of the existing frames and create new frames that are particular to the way women are vulnerable to police violence.

So I’m going to share with you just some stories of Say Her Name report and encourage you to go to the website to get more information about some of these cases.

I want to suggest why I think that it’s important that some of these frames get lifted up. Number one, it’s important because the reality is that until you understand the entire way that Black communities are subject to police violence, the tendency to see these as a case-by-case situation in which we look and sift through the facts: did he have his hands up, were the police properly trained, was there some other evidence to suggest that it didn’t go down the way the police said. These are all individualized framings of the problem. When we broaden the frame and include all of the ways that people of color, Black people, Brown people particularly are vulnerable to this, we have a broader sense that this is a structural problem. Not simply a problem of some bad cops, not simply a problem of political officials who aren’t responsive. But in fact a problem that affects us as people, sometimes in ways that are gendered and distinct, but nonetheless that affects us all.

And the second reason that it’s important for us to have frames that are capacious enough to include all the ways that our bodies are made vulnerable to police violence is that we consider this to be a space where all lives matter—that’s the whole point of Black Lives Matter. If all lives matter and Black lives matter, then we have to pay attention to the ways that women are losing their lives as well. If all families who are grieving the loss of their loved ones matter, then their losses ought to be on our list well, they need to be invited to the protests as well, they need to have a seat at the table as well, they need to tell us what they need in order to survive and be healthy. So these are frames that help us deal and be responsive to what it is that we’re saying that we’re about.

So what are some of the frames that are most familiar to us? Driving While Black—we know how many people have been pulled over who have been pulled over and abused and some killed while driving while Black. Turns out Black women experience the same thing while driving while Black. That’s what happened to Sandra Bland, driving while Black. But she’s not the only person who has lost her life while driving while Black—many women end up losing their freedom and their lives being in a car, accused of either doing something wrong or is part of a big police chase. We all know what happened to Malissa Williams in Cleveland. She was in a car that was being driven by her male partner—the police chase ended with both of them being killed by a police officer who jumped on the hood of the car claiming that he was in fear of his life. People don’t tend to jump on the hoods of cars, when the people in the cars are assumed to have some kind of a gun. There are others who have been killed in Driving-While-Black circumstances. 

Kendra James was killed when she was in a car, also a passenger, and the police officer tried to pull her out of the car. She resisted being pulled out of the car, and he ended her life with one shot to the head. Maya Hall, a Black transgender woman, killed by the National Security Agency just weeks before the Freddie Gray case. Apparently they had gotten lost and it appears they drove onto national security grounds—no effort was made to use non-lethal force before she was killed.

So Driving While Black is of course something that happens to Black women. But then there are things that happen to Black women that are not as familiar. Mental health crisis. Tanisha Anderson, 37 years old. Her parents reached out to police to accompany her to a mental health evaluation. When they came they tried to cordon her off—that’s the last thing you do with someone who’s had a mental health crisis. She resisted, didn’t want to go. They performed a take-down move on her, compressed her, crashed her head to the sidewalk where apparently she died. Most tragically she died in front of her family, in front of her children. She died scantily clothed—in fact, the reason her parents tried to intervene was because she was outside in the Cleveland winter. The police refused to allow any of her family to provide any comfort to her as she lay dying. And no charges yet have been filed.

Kayla Moore was a Black transgender woman who was also having a mental health crisis. The police came and assaulted her not only in her home, not only in her bedroom, but in her own bed, where she was suffocated to death.

Shereese Francis, another case, was a woman who was assaulted by several officers trying to constrain her.

So many women end up being killed when the police are called to help them. They are killed in their homes, they are killed in front of their families and they are killed in their own bedrooms. Michelle Cusseaux was a Black woman who was also killed when her family called to have her escorted to a family appointment. And then she didn’t want to go. The door was locked. The police decided that they were going to break down the door. The police who entered found her standing there holding a hammer. He said she didn’t say anything but said she had that angry look on her face, like she was going to hurt someone with the hammer, so he shot her through the heart. Because of a look on her face.

So what are some of the things that we are learning from this? Some of the things that we are learning is that much of what we know happens to Black man, what came to be revealed with the Michael Brown case, how the officer referred to him as an animal, viewed him with superhuman characteristics, the same thing happens with Black women.

Natasha McKenna was killed within the last six months. She was tased to death, four times. Natasha is 5 foot 2, less than 135 pounds. Yet the officials claimed that they needed to have that degree of excessive force to subdue her. What does that tell you about how police officers interpret and see Black women? So there are any number of cases like this that we can talk about. The basic point is that Black women get killed in many of the same ways that Black men do, and they get killed in ways that are sometimes different. And they also experience forms of police abuse that aren’t necessarily lethal but also lead to long-term trauma. Black women are disproportionately experiencing sexual violence from police. Sexual violence is the second most common complaint against police, and Black women are among the most likely to be subject to that

So overall what we know is that if we really want to understand the entirety of police violence against Black people, we have to have a gender analysis as well, we have to care about the fact that Black women’s live are vulnerable and their families are vulnerable. And we have to have interventions that are responsive to the full way that Black people are subject to police violence.

****

Herb Boyd

In 1963, Cynthia Scott was killed in Detroit. I grew up in Black Bottom and on the North End of Detroit. Cynthia Scott lived in the same apartment building with me. Her nickname was Bay-Bay. She stood 6’ 3”, weighed 240 pounds. I was in Germany when I heard she had been shot and killed by the Detroit police. That, in effect, since I knew her, it started my whole interest and involvement in what was happening to our community and then later on, all of the intimacy and the personality of these kind of things got me to the generalities. And so then I got involved with a number of organizations and institutions. I mean it was nothing to talk about police brutality and the fatalities. I remember when Carl and I hooked up meaningfully the first time here in New York with the Stolen Lives Project and we had all of those photos. I mean it was nothing for us to be out there with Amadou Diallo back in the 1990s all the way down to Sean Bell to Ramarley Graham.

So from Stolen Lives right down to Black Lives Matter you have a continuum, a continuum of this. I covered a rally last week and people were saying, how do you spell domestic terrorism, and people were saying, NYPD. That individual survived but it was so similar to what happened to Eric Garner in terms of the kind of general harassment, the whole quality of life, the broken windows policy of Commissioner Bratton. Spitting on the sidewalk, jaywalking, urinating, and what have you—all of these things become like issues for the police to move against you. Oh, they don’t really need any provocation. We understood what stop, question and frisk was all about. And the astronomical numbers they build up without even any miniscule convictions. So it didn’t mean anything but the quota they were satisfying.

So now after hearing Commissioner Bratton last week, we were asking him a number of questions, the whole impact zone, what does that mean, and rookie cops coming out of the academy, the whole issue of diversification—now they’re up to 11 percent in terms of the NYPD, and they talk about getting it up to 16 percent, one of these days they’ll get it up to parity, where we’ll have some kind of equality, representation in the size of the communities. And also how these cops choose to serve. Because sometimes they come right out of the academy and they throw them right into the impact zone, no preparation whatsoever.  So okay, Bratton said, we’re going to do away with that. So okay, while you’re talking about doing away with things, can we give you a list, and we begin to kind of tick off things. And of course the police always have a rationale and a justification for everything they do. They’re completely exonerated, you can’t blame us for this that or another for what occurs. But notice there are at least 20 law enforcement agencies with consent decree against police departments in this country. The previous Attorney General set it into motion—we’re hoping that Loretta Lynch will follow up on that in terms of bringing these consent decrees against these law enforcement agencies across the country, the whole misconduct, the police excessive aggressive behavior, and say look, you have to bring about some kind of change, I mean in a very concrete and substantial way, at least law suits will come down on you coming down from the federal government, coming from the Department of Justice, saying something about your misbehavior there. From Fort Lauderdale where you heard all those vicious innuendos about African Americans, all the way out to Riverside, California. I mean it’s a coastal thing and it’s a global thing too…

Just the other day, down the street here, on 132nd and Malcolm X Blvd., Revolution Books has launched its store here in Harlem. That’s going to go a long way in several ways in terms of the information that can be dispensed in this community. We haven’t had a decent bookstore here for several years…. You can go upstairs and Schomberg’s got a nice collection of theirs. But it can’t compare to what you’re going to see at Revolution Books very soon, the kind of collection, particularly radical literature out there, literature that begins to tell us about police brutality and police reform, that begins to tell us about mass incarceration…

Look at the correction officers at Rikers Island, something had to be said about that brutality and the violation of the 8th Amendment, cruel and unusual punishment. Look at what’s happening with the sheriffs departments, look at what happens with the so-called parole officers and probation officers. And all of this is part of what Michelle Alexander talked about in her book, The New Jim Crow, that the number of African American people who are under correctional control are more than who were in bondage back in 1850. That’s a very staggering statistic right there. But even more staggering is the number of us who are being shot down, unarmed in that society. We stand on the ramparts of that, unwaveringly, uncompromisingly. So the beat goes on. Boats against the current. So we stand there on guard, engaged.

****

Robyn Spencer

I want to talk a little about the Black Panther Party in the 1960s because they were of course the organized political response to state violence, based on potential Black self-determination and they wanted to move towards freedom, towards justice, not just for people of African descent, but for all oppressed peoples and not just in the context of the United States but in the global sense. They had an international impact, which is oftentimes not discussed. So they came out of this very real police brutality. One of the things that is often less known about the Panthers is that when they began in the Oakland context police brutality against Black women was one of the motivating factors for the creation of the organization. If you were a Black woman in Oakland, California in the 1960s and you were in a car with a white male you were oftentimes pulled over and accused of prostitution simply for your presence, being present there in the car. There were many such incidents before the formation of the Black Panther Party.

So the story of the violence that Black women have faced at the hands of the state is continually erased. We chose not to remember that, we choose not to see it. Those stories are there, they have always been there. So we think about the Panthers, police brutality was one of their founding streams. They were also very much impacted by the Vietnam War, or the invasion of the Dominican Republic, at that time the Cuban Revolution. They saw themselves connected to other political formations that were occurring at the time…

With the Panthers it’s important to recover their history, their history of organized resistance; not just a history of a particular stance, because of what they were known for as an uncompromising stance, and their language and their rhetoric. They were not just a symbol; they were an organization. It’s important to recover that organizational history. When you were a member of the Black Panther Party that was your job. The Party tried to create a self sustaining organization where people could get their health care needs met, get their childcare needs met as they went out fighting against police brutality and working within the community, to educate children, to feed them breakfast before school started. And in all of their community programs, the organization tried to sustain them. And I think that’s important as well, to think about organization as a radical political vehicle, because that’s what we need to be thinking about today. Organization is so important. Many people don’t belong to organizations. You may feel more atomized, you may feel like you’re disconnected, you may be doing things online; you may not have that time. But the times call for organization and support of organizations that are already there.

Also important to learn about the Panthers is they were anti-capitalist. People don’t like to say that, but it was what it was, they were anti-capitalist. So in other words they understood that the economic system of the United States was in fact designed to reproduce poverty. It wasn’t an accident; it wasn’t the result of individual people’s bad choices or anything like that. It was the systematic reality. So that anti-capitalism is how we should understand their breakfast programs. Because the other thing that people know about the Panthers is that they promoted armed self-defense, and then they had these breakfast program. But those breakfast programs were the embodiment of socialism in their eyes. It was about a collective ethos, it was about community sustaining itself. It was about each according to their ability and giving to people according to their needs. That was the reality.

The Panthers were also about the internal revolution. In other words you were supposed to be challenging also sexism, ageism, homophobia, those things within yourself as you participated in the movement. That is not to say everyone was successful in that. But it was an articulated goal. But this was very important because many movements today flounder on the shoals of sexism. Many people want to build a movement on the backs of other people—homophobia, sexism, trans-phobia. These are all dividing lines. And oftentimes our movements can’t absorb the tensions and fractions that happen when people struggle around those issues. But that has to be part of the movement. It’s not a separate thing, like I’m down for Black people, but not the gays. No, it’s all one movement and people have to see it like that….

Also important to recognize is…the various ways in which the state moves to kill organizations. We’re still in that moment, we still have our political prisoners who are still incarcerated today. And yet that incarceration is the direct connection to the mass incarceration that is going on now. So how do we make that political connection, how do we understand that? I think that is very important in how we think about what Carl talked about as the vortex of terror. Because at the moment it’s not just violence—it many seem like violence is happening to a select groups of people but violence is everywhere. We have our iPhone, iPads, our flat screens and we go on our vacations and we read about credit card debt. But at any given moment we know that we could be the victims of violence, and we also can be the participants of violence because of the colonial history of the United States—the dispossession and murder of Native Americans, the continuing occupation of Puerto Rico, Hawaii. Colonialism is an ongoing project. So we have to actively work to disassociate ourselves from that and to struggle against that. Because if we don’t do that we get swept along, like we get swept along possibly in support of that.

So when we think about the Panthers legacy the other thing I want to highlight is how they made that connection with what was happening in Black communities and what was happening around the world. So they said pigs out of our community and then U.S. military operating out of all the places in the world where it was operating as an occupying power. We see this today, like when the media and attention was trained on Ferguson, Missouri. We also saw the Israel attack on Gaza, and activists at that time made those very real connections that the bombs being dropped there were being made here. So we have to think about making those connections between the foreign policies that seems perhaps very far away and removed and the policies that are happening in our community, the policing that is not just represented by police forces but also represented by the military in very real way. In a lot of ways I think the Panthers' history represents the past and the present. The response to that is organization, it’s resistance, it’s organizations that attempt to create awareness about policy to shed light on what’s happening to African American women in particular. That’s very important.

Also important to move on all fronts because we’re kinda of on a wave of mass rebellion from the highways that get shut down to the banners that get unfurled to the protests that happen where we don’t expect them to be, to the marches that happened all across the country by organizations like the Dream Defenders and Black Lives Matter and Black Youth Project and things like that. This is a moment of real rebellion and I think that the question is how to support that, how to organize that, how to bring all those forces together and how to be very deliberate in creating a movement that is not only trying to create an egalitarian society but is itself egalitarian. So that’s very, very important.

So I just want to highlight, one of the things to work toward is the march on October 24 to stop police terror, and understand that police terror is not an isolated incident but is something that is systematic, something that is global and we have to understand it like that.

****

Andy Zee

I just want to thank all of you for your presentations and thank all of you for coming. And I want to say to all of you that we do all have to understand how the world actually works, what is actually going on in the world, what is the relationships between these different struggles, between these different forms of oppression—so that we can find and discover the pathways out of this. And I just want to say, following up on something Kimberlé said in which she was quoting that racist Dylann Roof when he said "you rape our women." That chump, Donald Chump said the same thing about our brothers and sisters from Mexico—they’re coming over the border to take and rape our women. Where’s the link between this? The link between this is in the nature of this system.

Now the oppression of women precedes capitalism, that’s something that you’ll learn about at Revolution Books and maybe in a few, a very few college courses. But you can learn about that. But it’s completely intertwined with the system we live under. Completely intertwined. In fact it was said in the 1960s, and some of us who were revolutionary communists at the time didn’t pay enough attention at the time, that the final revolution will be the emancipation of women because when you liberate women, you can only do this through the emancipation of all of humanity. And the same thing is actually true of Black people, but there is difference here in America because—no, Obama, it is not the original sin—it’s the foundation of the country.

And because of the history of Black people resisting slavery, resisting in the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Liberation Movement, because that struggle of Black people has played a certain role—that’s actually one reason why we do have this genocide against Black people. But the other side of that contradiction is that when Black people rise up, even in a beginning way which we haven’t seen in decades, and I gotta tell you I’ve been waiting for decades, as we did in Ferguson—that gives permission for the whole society to actually rise up too. And that kind of what you’re kind of beginning to see. But I have to say we’re only at the beginning of that.

Herb said, and I’m going to finish up with this, some of us go back and have been to funeral after funeral after funeral for 30, 40 years. And really we have to say, Basta Ya! Enough. This has to end. But I want to come back to this complicity. iPhone or not, we saw the murder of Eric Garner. But there were not enough goddamn people out yesterday in this city. Shame on everybody who hasn’t been out in the streets on this. Shame on you. That’s on everybody here. It’s on Black people, it’s on Latino people, it’s on white people. We can’t let this go on anymore. And the good news is that we don’t actually have to. Because of the work these scholars are doing, because of your commitment, because we can actually understand this, we can actually pull together the kind of movements and unite and struggle over what is the cause of this, what’s the solution and how we can fight it. But if we don’t stand up, we won’t be any better than those Good Germans. That’s really what’s before us right now.

 

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