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Racism & it’s Centrality – Excerpt from “The Crime of Impunity – The Crime of Punishment”
ON THE CENTRALITY OF RACISM In a book devoted to crime and punishment, why has racism been so much its centerpiece? First, because racism is this country’s key crime. And second, because racism is at the heart of the criminal justice system. We need not revisit the horrors of the slave past. These are usually…
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Racism & the Criminal Justice System – Excerpt from “The Crime of Impunity – The Crime of Punishment”
CONCLUSION The penal system is but a replica — in more brutal form because hidden from public view — of the larger society outside the walls. Each day, correction officials commit untold numbers of crimes against inmates. And the perpetrators of such crimes are, from a moral standpoint, far inferior to those who are being…
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Race, Class, and Revolution – A Few Amplifying Remarks
Originally written June 3, 1996. CAPITALISM Capitalism breeds and is inseparable from racism, xenophobia, sexism, and a limitless assortment of inequities. Inequitable practices and the bigotry that rationalizes them are profitable! Capitalism is organized on the principle of dog-eat-dog, survival of the most ruthless. It is overwhelmingly competitive in nature. The capitalist sharks are sharp…
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The Centrality of Racism
Racism is not central because it is only central to people of color, which it obviously is, but because it is central to the entire population…
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On the Death Penalty
Why do we oppose the death penalty? Not for purely humanitarian reasons, not, because we are pacifists, not because we do not believe in taking life. We are prepared to fight for our liberation, including waging war. Naturally, we do not believe in taking life unnecessarily. We believe in a penal system that stresses rehabilitation…
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Life or Death: Taking Away Habeas Corpus
A barrage of laws and an avalanche of court rulings are stripping us of one right after another. Over one million people in prison and 3,000 on death row (the numbers mounting at unprecedented speed). No jobs for ghetto youth? “Lock ’em up.” Failing schools? “Lock ’em up.” No real drug prevention or treatment effort?…
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Rising Racism and Jewish-Black Relations
One of the hottest most rancorous issues agitating New York City politics today is the problem of Black-Jewish relations. This is not a new issue but has had a convulsive history going back several decades. There was, for example, the struggle around the building of low-income housing in predominantly Jewish Forest Hills. There was the…
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Are the Peacemakers Always Blessed?
As the tide of racial hatred rises throughout the country, as the incidents of racial violence escalate, as the gulf between the different communities grows ever greater, as elements in the media and various politicians whip up racial antagonism, into the breach steps people of good will, trying to reduce tensions, to build bridges, and…
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Race, Class, and National Struggle
Every society has a class configuration, and it is the interests of those classes and their mutual contention which explains social dynamics. The history of the world is the history of class struggle. The reasons for strife between nations, between ethnic, religious, racial groupings, lies in the material interests of the dominant classes of one…
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Black Youth in Struggle
Originally written as a Letter to organization of revolutionary Black youth – 1980s The time is ripe and the time demands that African-American revolutionary leadership take on the full measure of political responsibility that history is increasingly thrusting upon it. What follows from the idea the centrality of the struggle against racism and the centrality…
