Roughly two months after Williams was kidnapped and tortured, African-American NFL quarterback Michael Vick (who is Black) was sentenced to 23 months in jail for killing and torturing dogs.  Guess which case generated more media coverage and public outrage?

Think of everything else we have seen in the past three years.  In August 2005, thousands of Black Americans are left to drown or starve in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, their desperate rooftop screams for help ignored for days. Thousands of residents who try to cross the Mississippi River Bridge to the mostly-white town of Gretna—in order to escape the flood-ravaged city— are turned away at gunpoint by law enforcement. Those who break into stores to acquire the food and water the government will not provide them—or who have been driven to temporary insanity by the horror of what surrounds them—are identified as “looters,” and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco gives the National Guard “shoot to kill” orders.   Blackwater —yes that Blackwater—patrols the streets of New Orleans with machine guns. To add further insult to incredible injury, Barbara Bush assesses the masses of evacuees at Houston’s Astrodome by saying: “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”   Representative Richard H. Baker sizes up the hurricane by saying: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."   Last winter, the city of New Orleans begins demolishing four public housing units that provide roughly 4500 affordable housing units, predominantly for people of color.

One year later, in the fall of 2006 and in this same state of Louisiana, a Black student at Jena High School dares to sit underneath a “whites-only tree”; yes, “whites only.”   The next day, nooses are hung from the tree.  Yes, nooses.  A group of Black students then sit underneath the tree in protest.  Instead of commending their bravery in the face of a hate crime, District Attorney Reed Walters threatens the students in a school assembly, warning them, “I can take away your lives with the stroke of a pen.”    White students ambush a Black student at a party, but the stiffest penalty meted out is that one of the students is placed on probation. Then, white students pull a gun on a Black student in a parking lot. Charges are filed—against the Black students, for snatching the gun away.  Ultimately, a fistfight breaks out during which a white student is briefly hospitalized.  Six Black students are charged with attempted murder. As of May 2008, the Jena 6 are still in jail.

Soon, nooses begin appearing in cities and towns throughout the country, including on the door of Black professor Constantine Madonna’s office at Teachers College in New York City, in October of 2007.  Action has been taken—against Madonna; she is currently under investigation for plagiarism.  No one has been arrested for hanging the noose outside her door.

In January of this year, on Martin Luther King Day, white supremacists marched in Jena. With guns. Enough said.

During the last past three years, we have also seen “comedian” Michael Richards repeatedly scream “nigger” at a Black heckler, while telling him: “Fifty years ago, we’d have had you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.”

And we have heard beloved radio personality Don Imus refer to the predominantly-Black Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos”; yep, he’s back on the air.

A “Culture of Greed, Bigotry, Intolerance, and Ignorance”

I could go on and on, but the point is this:  It is often pointed out that if fascism comes to America, it will not appear in the literal form of swastika-sporting, goose-stepping brownshirts.  Similarly, if the gains of the Black Power movement are undone and the United States again becomes the openly white-supremacist state that it was during the days of slavery and Jim Crow, this will not take the form of the plantation, the whip, the colored water fountain, or the hanging tree. 

No, violent racism against Black Americans did not begin with the regime of George W. Bush;  this phenomenon was a part of American life for centuries before Bush was even born, right up to the moment of his first inauguration.  And yes, even following the gains of the 1960s, America has lived in a state of “de-facto segregation”; i.e. , severe institutionalized discrimination in the realms of housing, employment,  education, and all facets of society.  In addition, during the past few decades the Black prison population has mushroomed, with millions of African-Americans forced to rot in confinement, very often for non-violent crimes of poverty.

However, a passage in the Call—the mission statement of The World Can’t Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime—does point to the very significant connection between the Bush Regime and instances of blatantly murderous racism such as the shooting of Sean Bell: “Your government is enforcing a culture of greed, bigotry, intolerance, and ignorance.”

The result of the Bush Regime’s program of systematic murder, torture, and dehumanization, and of the lack of massive societal resistance thus far to this program, has been that forces wishing to take the United States back to the days of lynching and the Ku Klux Klan have felt an emboldened sense of initiative.

Is the success of these white supremacist forces inevitable?  Absolutely not. The tens of thousands who traveled to Jena last winter to demand the freedom of the Jena 6, and the thousands who have bravely and defiantly stepped out to condemn the acquittal of the officers who killed Sean Bell, are examples of real “hope” for real “change.”

But resistance to the Re-Klanification of America—as with resistance to the Bush agenda in general—must sustain and expand relentlessly. Because the forces on other side will do anything but relent.

It seems appropriate to close with words spoken twelve years ago by the rapper NAS:

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