The struggle for black dignity continues

(CNN)The Department of Justice's explosive report on institutional racism in the Baltimore Police Department represents a devastating indictment of the criminal justice system. Over half a century after the modern civil rights movement, this system continues to denigrate black lives and deny African-American citizenship.

It further proves, through documentary evidence, what Charm City's black residents have always known: that the police department serves as more of an occupying army designed to arbitrarily punish, humiliate and even kill than as a protective forced designed to defend and honor.

The report specifically chronicles the systemic abuse of black residents that culminated in the death of Freddie Gray in a police van and the subsequent urban rebellion that rocked the nation last year. African-Americans were -- and continue to be -- disproportionately stopped, searched and approached by city police, often without being charged with any crime. One heartbreaking example depicts a black man, well into middle age, who police stopped a staggering 30 times in a span of fewer than four years without ever formally charging him.
But the report doesn't stop there. It notes that racial profiling in Baltimore has reached tragic-comic levels, with prosecutors declining to pursue more than 11,000 arrests made by their own local officers. One police supervisor even created a new template, "A BLACK MALE," to make filing police reports easier since black men were disproportionately detained and arrested.

Worse yet, much of Baltimore's black community found itself targeted by the largest surveillance net in the city's history, one that focused on harassing black people for so called "quality of life" crimes, minor violations that are designed to net bigger criminal fish. Over 90% of people arrested with "failure to obey" police orders were black -- and this in a city that is only 63% black.
In addition to documenting a pattern of unjustified stops based on racial profiling, the report illustrates how Baltimore police consistently used "excessive force" and "retaliation for activities protected by the First Amendment." In other words, not only did police routinely brutalize African-Americans, they frequently arrested innocent bystanders for "talking back," in direct violation of their constitutional right to voice dissent.

Taken together, the investigation reveals a widespread pattern of racial discrimination that has resulted in thousands of illegal arrests, searches and seizures, vehicle stops and use of excessive force against black citizens, mentally unstable individuals and juveniles. To add insult to injury, the police arrested, harassed and detained innocent citizens who spoke up in defense of their own rights or the rights of others being illegally detained.
Over the past two years, Black Lives Matter activists have highlighted many of these issues, including a recent extensive policy agenda calling for massive criminal justice reform. The DOJ report follows partial suit, advocating the reform of the Baltimore Police Department practices in the hopes of eliminating the operational processes that led to and justified institutional racism against African-Americans.
Issued in the 51st anniversary week of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the DOJ's report helps explain how and why America's growing racial divide continues to widen. Not only are black American's systemically dehumanized by a criminal justice system that is ostensibly there to serve and protect them, the perpetrators of racial injustice are never held accountable -- as Baltimore residents know all too well with the recent acquittal and dropped charges against the six officers involved in Freddie Gray's death.



Recommendations of better police training, while laudable, merely scratch the surface of our national criminal justice nightmare. The issues plaguing the justice system are rooted in larger social problems around poverty, segregation, mental health, public schools, unemployment, broken infrastructure and community decay. This decay is borne not just from a loss of hope but racist public policy that denies opportunity to generations of African-Americans. Indeed, the fact that 44% of cops in Baltimore are black exemplifies the fact that merely diversifying police departments has not eliminated institutional racism and biases related to law enforcement's treatment of African American communities.
Anti-black racism and its evolution remain central to understanding not only this specific report, but the systemic patterns of unequal justice plaguing the entire nation. Baltimore is just the tip of the iceberg. The DOJ is conducting investigations into dozens of cities -- including Ferguson, Missourie, and Cleveland -- triggered in part by spectacular acts of police violence against black people, including juveniles in the case of Cleveland's Tamir Rice.


The criminal justice system's denigration and dehumanization of black life represents the great moral crisis of our times. The report's unspoken context is the nation's painful history of slavery, Jim Crow and racial violence that contours contemporary American social, political and civic life. Black life in America continues to be subject to racist, institutional forces that deny access to citizenship and the rule of law and then, in an outrageous rhetorical sleight of hand, criminalize African-Americans as being undeserving of citizenship or legal protection.
The report's larger implications represent a sobering new reality for all Americans. Structural racism still serves as the central spoke in the wheel of injustice that systematically marginalizes and devalues the hopes, dreams, freedoms, constitutional protections and yes, the very lives of black people in America. Decades after the civil rights movement's heroic period, the struggle for black dignity and citizenship continues.

I have maintained my positionon this forum that white people are :

inherently racist !

Mapoui refuses to believe me.

you this post man.  who is professor..another clone ::confused::

Black lives matter, sure, but why, when hundreds to thousands in Nigeria are killed in one week, a small fraction of white lives get a week’s worth of attention? The image of King reminds us of a time when bombastic bigots were the primary problem. Today, the problem is a status quo that accepts the disproportionate placement of value on white lives as business as usual.

nice opinion but I go further than that:

I see 'Black Lives Matter' as a creation of the CIA.  I see all current black organizations in the USA as created by the same source.  as far as I know the programs or these groups they all support the status quo and call for reforms that really do not mean a dam thing in the end

they are all paid for by George Soros and his Open Society crime syndicate.  Recent leaks expose him to be behind all kinds of things working to promote business as usual under a guise of progressivism

what it looks like to me is that Soros is just a front man for a huge organization called George Soros who is actually CIA and the western intelligence agencies

the system creates social problems that it knows will produce violent,even revolutionary social responses..then creates the social organization to lead the very social revolt they create..taking charge of the very response to the issues they made and leading it astray.

they have always done that.  and if they cant control an organization because they did not create it they get extremely violent wth it, killing them all if they can..smashing it tiobits like they did with the original Black Panther party

so when one sees a so-called progressive organization and the leadership is not harassed, killed/assassinated, shut down socially..it surely means that it is an organization create, and set up by the intelligence agencies to control the people. 

hence Black Lives Matter..to whom nothing happens, who get all the want,  their leaders everywhere, without fear of assassination or hurt.

black lives matter is an elitist creation to control the black rebellion.  ultimately it is not a real organization in the interest of the people

Native Americans treatment by the White man :

disproves your analysis, Mapoui.

dont believe there were CIA and Soros et al back then.

Just bare naked DNA white supremacist thinking.

that is alive and well today and practiced on Black people.

well..going back 2 posts of mine I wasn't talking about racism in those.

but if you want to talk about racism..those that really stand out are Hindu, Pakistani, Chinese, Philipino and coloured racism towards Black African people the world over.

there are no reasons for those racisms.  none at all but there there are.

but there is reason for white racism..a totally contrived racism.  that is what real history proves.

there is also reason for black antipathy to white people for our negative treatment at their  hands for so long.

but you know history well enough ketchim to know dat when people got together how it happened.  rare if ever there was occasion  2 culturally different groups got together and cohabited in peaceful ways..even when skin colour was the same .

in time after conquest different groups coalesced and became one.  but we kbnow it has hardly ever been an easy process.  on that basis we do not do we expect that in the best of circumstances life to this point permitted peoples fo get together peacefull and we can how it it has worked.

now when conquest as in slavery was involved the conquered outnumbers the conquerors especially the class of conquest that enlisted its own ordinary people in the slavery project...often enslaving its own people as well.

that is precisely the case between blacks and whites.  the white class of conquest had white slaves and black slaves side by side.  they got to know each other, appreciated the sameness of their condition and combined to fight and defeat the white class of conquest...at least partially, in a few areas.

the the white class of conquest put their heads together to find a solution and came up with modern racism which has worked splendidly for them for 316* years now {*not certain of my time frames give or take 20-40 years in the past.

my point is ultimately all peoples coalesce regardless of how they came together.  it was and is no different between black people and any people at all even the most resistant like Subcontinental Hindus, Pakistani and Chinese

in the west it is constantly stoked racism that has kept people at racial loggerheads for so long.  the system developed and  input white racism and has worked assiduously since to keep it alive, keep the people focused on racism, divided by its practice. 

yet if we look the time to look we see the very racism they stoke breaking down all around us .  that break down is a social law about the relationship of peoples in close proximity. that is the way it goes..there is nothing to stop it ultimately unless you kill the people, lobotomized them and input only simple behavior they can process like hate nig nogs and do nothing with them.

that is the gist of my argument ketchim.  the system divides and rules to stay in place, exploiting EVERYONE regardless.  that is why they created racism..the major tool of divide and rule..why they keep it going always.

you look at white racism and call it endemic.  it sure is.  but what is endemic relative to biological life...what is permanent regardless of how it looks ::confused:: 

NOTHING AT ALL!  THOSE SAME PEOPLE CAN AND WILL CHANGE VERY FAST TOO IF REALITY REQUIRED THAT THEY DO IN ORDER TO LIVE.

then again people die and generations change..and the requirements of survival change as well..changing all with them.  its called evolution which inclusive takes place on all levels of life at the same time...

I men if I had to,,and had the time I wud do the work necessary to flesh all this out .  but for here and now what I have said is good enuff.  you know what I mean.  nutten is written in stone

Lets not put Cart before Horse !

the horse is in white people  DNA :

Racism is a disease thru GENETICS

Hereditary and will continue to be passed down to its descendants.

patience is virtue says who ::confused::

anyhow here goes:

how did racism come into the white DNA ::confused::
take england fuh ex:  how early did they come to know black people..much earlier than admitted historically.  what was the nature of the early relationship between english whites and black people ::confused::

and it follows that iof there was a time when the engish did not know black people period how is it that anti-back racism entered their DNA ::confused::

the racism that is practiced by white people currently dates back to the 18 century.  it is a well known construction by those who constructed it.  Such DNA as you ascribed to white people as embed racism cannot possibly be older than that.  so it must have entered English DNA then and grow as it has to this current day...by learned, practiced and now habitual behavior.

and as DNA, like everything else is now written in stone, one of the hardest and most durable materials we know it can be changed in many ways including the way it came into the DNA..by change of belief and relevant behavioral habits.

that is all it is..very simple indeed