LOS ANGELES RIOTS
CHICANO SOLIDARITY WITH THE OCTOBER 22ND COALITION TO STOP POLICE BRUTALITY, REPRESSION AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF A GENERATION, THIS NATIONAL DAY AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY,
Much has been said about the history of policing in America, but the scourge of police brutality has its origins in nascent colonialism and in the Antebellum South, where formal policing had its earliest form in “slave patrols” to keep slaves on the plantations.
The primary function of these slave patrols was
“(1) to chase down, apprehend, and return to their owners, runaway slaves:
(2) to provide a form of organized terror to deter slave revolts, and;
(3) to provide a form of discipline for slave workers who were subject to plantation justice, outside of the law, if they violated plantation rules.”
Paraphrasing Alsaalin v. City of Col. 536 F. Supp 3d 216 (.S.D. Ohio 2022)(citing Gary Porter, The History of Policing in the U.S. (2013).
Although chattel slavery supposedly ended formally with the end of the Civil War, and enactment of the 13th Amendment in 1865, the continued legal, economic subjugation of Black Americans endured, by society considering Blacks, less than human, in the eyes of white racist America, as slave codes gave way to Black codes, and former Confederate states, such as Texas, institutionalized “convict lease systems” as the synonymization of blackness, youth, poverty, unemployment status, and was CRIMINALIZED.
Prison slavery replaced chattel slavery. See Angela Davis, Policing The Black Man (Pantheon Book, 1st ed. 2012).
In Texas, law officers such as the Texas Rangers committed horrific genocidal crimes against indigenous persons, Mexicans, Chicanos, and “vigilante committees;” terrorized immigrants, and people of color under authority of law. [1.]
“Law” has historically been used as a favorite weapon of tyranny of the Yankee colonization, plantation slavery, and Jim Crow segregation of the races in America.
The police murders of 12 year old Santos Rodriguez, Jose Campos,Torres, Ricardo Morales, Danny Vasquez, Ervay Ramos, Larry Lozano, Ruben Salazar, and many more, is a sordid history of systemic police terror that continues today, despite study after study, report after report, such as the 1970 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights titled “Mexican American and The Administration of Justice in the Southwest,…” Library of Congress.
This beast will never be defeated as long as our oppressors’ knee remains on our necks, and we realize that it derives from the ingrained colonial mentality of the police, and the socioeconomic values of capitalism, its principles, conditioning, alienation and the design of class and race divisions, that are hallmarks of such a racist system and social production forces.
To slay the beast, capitalism must be dismantled and society reorganized under a new ethic of community care, anti-racism, brotherly love, and collective human liberation.
The police murder of George Floyd and the world outrage it sparked, shows such oppressive societies are pregnant with social revolution.
Political power must be wrestled away from the current barbarians responsible for feeding the beast while destroying Planet Earth with their imperialist greed.
Polluting the air, rivers, oceans, wildlife and threatening civilization.
It is not so much as the freeing of Labor from the chains of capital, but also freeing the Earth from the self-destructive policies of a ruling capitalist and imperialist oligarchy that rules over us.
MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD THIS NATIONAL DAY
AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY !!!
XINÃCHTLI
CHICANO POLITICAL PRISONER
