Getting to know the mean streets and bringing the bigger picture

Out here in these streets, people are traumatized. Some one told a story of a car chase that ends with a car through the side of your house and you spend weeks trying to get the report from the police so you can try and get if fixed and they taunt you and tell you, you need to move out the neighborhood and they never give it to you. Another person told us about the police coming into the neighborhoods brutalizing and harassing their teenage daughters. Another of expecting to see their kids at the end of the night and finding themselves looking at their lifeless bodies because people are killing each other. And then there are the womens' bodies found in the abandoned houses and tall grass, eight women killed in this year in the area, and really where is the official outcry about the violence amongst people there, it's barely audible, because it's just accepted that's what happens to women. A community organization has passed out flyers making people aware of this and telling them ways to be careful and all the police have done is applaud them for cooperating with the police. I tell you, it has not always been this way and it's the conditions people are in, the set up of this system of capitalism that's responsible for that, and what kind of fucking society have we got then?

Too many people live by the outlook of “I gotta look out for me and mine at all costs.” We are fighting for them to see there's a bigger enemy than even those who have actually done terrible things to each other. That enemy is a system and can only be done away with through revolution. A couple people out here in the projects told us, “Don't come around here, this is my mothers house. Don't talk to us about your revolution, and you don't believe in god.” One woman with us, who also lives in a housing project in another city in the U.S. and has seen 17 cop cars pull up to evict a single mother and her children, said she wanted to say to her, “You think that's your momma's house, that's the system's house.”

People are traumatized and angry, and it really breaks your heart, but it doesn't break us. Because we know, that's just the morality of the system that's got people thinking a certain way, the wrong way. And it's not people's fault they're in this situation, they aren't the ones that said some neighborhoods, where yes, mostly white people live, would be built up, and others where people living in Black and brown skins are, would be allowed to rot and filled with police, and deprived of any jobs or education.

And this revolution is not about revenge. I was talking with another young revolutionary here from Detroit, about growing up in the far suburbs of Detroit, and he told me, “You know what we call it? White People Land.” And it's kind of true on the one hand. For example, on my basketball team at a majority white high school, if you used language that was influenced by the lingo and style of Black culture and if you adopted that swagger that a lot of defiant Black youth have,because you aren't a racist and it's cool and you appreciate it, the coach would take you out at practice and tell you to stop talking “like a nigger.” People, that was in the 1990s.

But as I've been emphasizing repeatedly in this blog, individuals are not the cause of this, there's a whole set up. So on the other hand, we decided even though it was kind of funny and got at something, we aren't going to just say that like we don't have issue with it, because we don't want to promote the more narrow revenge people might feel. We want to break down all these divisions this system's created, in people's attitudes and outlook and the real physical divisions where you stand on Gratiot Avenue at the northern border of Detroit and look in the direction of Detroit and it looks like a third world country. You look in the direction of the suburbs and it's comfort and privilege at the expense of others. We want people on both sides of that border to get with this revolution and become emancipators of humanity.

Then there's Aiyana. Every time I think about it, it's hard to wrap my mind around it. This was the State (the government and institutions that maintain this set-up) with its air of legitimacy and all its lies about serving and protecting, coming in and massacring a little girl, putting her father down on the floor in the still-warm blood of his daughter, arresting her grandmother and drug testing her. And they do this kind of thing to our people, our children, again and again and again. What kind of a fucking system have you got then?

And the mayor says, “It's quite demoralizing. I don't know how to stop it.” We know how to stop it. It's not a pipe dream, it's not just a nice idea. We could put an end to this, and we are building a movement for revolution with our sights set on just that. The only reason this goes on is because we have a system that's made to do this, it's like, in the rule book. That's why the cop who killed Aiyana is on administrative leave. That's why they went into a Detroit neighborhood like they are an occupying army and didn't have a second thought that it might look bad on the cameras recording them. That's why there is a conspiracy in the courts and the media to get these cops off, to cover it up and lie when some shit does come out--because they are doing what they are supposed to be doing, and will keep on doing as long as they exist because they serve and protect a system that has as one of it pillars the subjugation of Black people.

So tonight we will be taking revolution out to the Freedom Festival fireworks display in Detroit and I'm reminded of the quote from Frederick Douglas that Bob Avakian reads in his speech:

“What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour. “

And I am thinking about the stories in BA's memoir From Ike to Mao and Beyond, My Journey From Mainstream America To Revolutionary Communist  about hanging out with the Black kids at school and going into their neighborhoods, singing doo wop in “street corner symphonies”, playing sports, going to dances, talking philosophy. A lot of the experience in his life does bring out how people can go against the tide and come together in a different way. That was Berkeley, California in the late '50s and early '60s. And here we are in Detroit in 2010 and people need this revolution, and we're finding the ways to have “street corner symphonies” where people from different backgrounds and different races and life experiences and level of intellectual training “from the marine biologists to the guy on the block” mix it up and take up the cause of emancipating humanity. That's why we're bringing people from these neighborhoods to the U.S. Social Forum, and that's why we are bringing people together from the Social Forum to watch BA's revolution talk at a screening in the neighborhood this week. And that's why we will be out challenging everyone at the Freedom Festival fireworks to demand Justice for Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and to get with the revolution.