This week's entire show is selections from last weekend's conference in St. Louis MO on Community Control of Police.
The crisis means it's time to imagine self determination for our communities. What cops do in our communities will not change unless our communities are in the position to give the police their orders, according to Omali Yeshetila of the African Peoples Socialist Party. It's time to lift our sights beyond this black face and that reform and wrap the black political imagination and political practice around the project of actually controlling what the police do.
Hiring more black cops and “sensitivity training” won't prevent more Fergusons. As long as the core mission of the police include counter-insurgency and being the intake valves for black mass incareration, hiring more black police doesn'will nott change what police do, explains Glen Ford. Neither will so-called “community policing” or sensitivity training for cops. The policing mission will only change when there is authentic community control of the institution of the police.
Nothing in political is ever guaranteed, says Larry Hamm of the Peoples Organization for Progress in Newark NJ.
The only solution to a system out of control is mass organization to confront the powers that be. If power will concede nothing without demands, it's up to the organized people to make real and significant demands to change the way society is ordered, and to put their energies, if need be, their bodies on the line behind those demands.
listen
http://blackagendaradio.podbean.com/mf/web/5krg2z/BAR_042715.mp3
Joy James uses poet Lucille Clifton's image of “new bones” to reflect on a series of revolutionary anniversaries in 2021 and the nature of political leadership.
Dominican racial logic frequently contradicts what US scholars think they know about how race works.
Black History Month strengthened Black German claims of kinship with their nation and the larger diaspora.
The Black political class is wedded to the centrist Democrats for its “fatback and biscuits” patronage.
Judges, prosecutors and sheriffs in many states sent people home instead of to jail last year, but new data suggests the change is not lasting.
