Statement by Carl Dix

Justice For Jamar Clark!
CONDEMN THE RACIST ASSAULT ON PROTESTERS IN MINNEAPOLIS!

November 25, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

The masked white supremacists who shot 5 people who were protesting the police murder of Jamar Clark on November 23 in Minneapolis were carrying out a long standing American tradition – gunning down people standing up against the oppression of Black people. All those who were shot survived, but this vicious and cowardly assault brings to mind the assassins who gunned down Black freedom fighters in the 1960's and the KKK and Nazi gunmen who murdered radical activists in Greensboro in 1979.

This cowardly and vicious shooting by white vigilantes must be firmly opposed. And the challenge it puts before everyone who hates injustice must be understood for what it is and acted on.

First, the protesters who have been out there for over a week, going outside the established channels to demand justice for Jamar Clark and defying racist vigilantes who had threatened them several times must be saluted and supported. Witnesses to the police killing of Clark say the 24-year-old Black man was handcuffed when the cops shot him. People were right to take to the streets in protest of this police murder and courageous to defy the white vigilantes who were trying to intimidate them, and it is important and inspiring that more people have joined and stood with the protests after this attack.

Second, we must learn well from this about the nature of this system: the whites who have been accused of the shooting seemed to have been given a free hand to harass and intimidate the demonstrators by the pigs in Minneapolis. Even after the shooting, the cops seemed to direct their attention more against the demonstrators than the shooters.

What does this tell us? That cops work hand-in-glove with racist vigilantes like these; that police are modern-day equivalents of the slave-catchers back in slavery days and the lynch mobs during the days of Jim Crow segregation. Their nickname - the “Blue Klux Klan” - is well deserved.

As Bob Avakian says in BAsics:

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.

The power, the force and the violence they bring down is UTTERLY ILLEGITIMATE.

Third, since these pigs and the powers that back them have proven time and again, right down to today, that we cannot rely on them to “protect” the people’s rights then we MUST RELY ON OURSELVES. People have a legitimate right to do this, and we all have a responsibility to move to exercise that right.

And fourth, unless and until there is a revolution which dismantles the repressive apparatus of this system and brings in a whole new society with new ways for people to relate to each other, this kind of shit will happen again and again, generation after generation. This revolution is possible. Bob Avakian has forged the path to make it happen, and the party he leads, the Revolutionary Communist Party, is actively working on this. Everyone who desires justice and wants to see these horrors stopped needs to check out this revolutionary leader as they fight the power.

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