HATE CRIMES
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Column Written 6/14/98
"…Just ‘cause it’s legal, don’t make it right!"
-- Seeds of Wisdom
(MOVE Kids’ Rap Group quoting JOHN AFRICA
The Summertime torturous shackling and murder of Robert Byrd, Jr. in the tiny
Texas town of Jasper (est. population: 32,000) has become the fete du jour
(feast of the day) of a sated American media, a meal that consists largely of
spectacle. The vigor with which the Jasper race murder case is being covered
is strikingly contrasted with the lackluster coverage of a similar case from
over a year ago in Virginia, where a young Black man, in the company of a few
white drinking buddies, was beaten, burned and, as he took too long to die,
decapitated by an ax.
Why is only story a national firestorm, and another a local curiosity? Why is
one an unquestioned hate crime! And the other merely a case of ‘boys being
boys’, or a bad mix of liquor and bad company?
This is so because the media said it was so, reported it thusly, and ignored
what it chose to ignore, and the majoritarian media said it was so because the
local police told them this.
When is a hate crime a hate crime? When it is a crime of hate, or when the
police say it is? And if the cops are to be the arbiters of what is, or
isn’t, a hate crime, who will judge them?
In late April, New Jersey State Troopers pumped over 11 shots into a van
occupied by four Black and Hispanic students on their way to basketball
tryouts at Central University in North Carolina, seriously wounding three of
the four young men. The four, victims of the infamous "racial profiling"
program of the NJ State Police, were guilty of nothing but the unwritten crime
of DWB (Driving While Black). Despite a rain of cop lies (speeding, an
attempt to run cops down etc..) it soon became clear that the boys did nothing
--- except exist. Ain’t this a hate crime?
In Chicago, a man named Carl Hardiman was shot and wounded by a city copy for
refusing to drop his ‘weapon’ – a cell phone. Ain’t this a hate crime?
NY Black Panther Collective Activist Shep McDaniel was brutally beaten by 6
cops in the Bronx as he attempted to peacefully monitor and note an
altercation between cops and two women. Punched, kicked, stomped, and
arrested by cops who shouted "He’s a crazy, fucking, nigger!", McDaniel was
later acquitted by a jury of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. Was not
his beating, brutalization, trumped up arrest and bogus prosecution a hate
crime?
The MOVE massacre of 13 May 1985, where 11 men. women and children were shot,
bombed, incinerated and dismembered by cops in a city that claims to be a site
of ‘Brotherly Love" – and where only the sole adult survivor, Ramona
Africa,
is prosecuted, convicted, sent to prison for 7 years; ain’t that a hate crime?
In many ways, Black America remains captive to its feverish, hateful history
in a land which daily mocks its claim to being a land of the free. We have
become conditioned by bourgeois, sell-out mis-leaders, to focus on the
occasional acts of racial hatred, while ignoring the daily ones.
Why do we pay attention to the retail acts of anti-Black violence, while
ignoring the wholesale? Far more dangerous than the white-robed KKK is the
legalized malice of the black-robed judiciary. Far more destructive to Black
life and freedom than the Aryan Nation is the local, armed, uniformed police
who are legal agents of an ancient, deadly HATRED,
©MAJ
© 1998 Mumia Abu-Jamal
All Rights Reserved
-- End --