August 4, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
This capitalist system in the U.S. has no future for millions of Black and Latino youth—that is, no “viable” way to exploit them. In this situation, a “New Jim Crow” has arisen, featuring a drumbeat of demonization, a relentless school-to-prison pipeline, pervasive police harassment and brutality, and massive systematic incarceration of Black and Latino people. This New Jim Crow has a logic: the logic of genocide, which is the extermination of a whole people. Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, and of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network, has described what we have now as a slow genocide that could turn into a fast genocide. Stigmatization... containment... extermination. This has happened before. And this must be STOPPED. The following is a regular feature showing just some of what goes on week-in, week-out in this offensive by the system.
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Sundown Towns
Zimmerman trial Juror B37 told Anderson Cooper that anyone would think Trayvon Martin suspicious for being out late at night (7 pm!). During jury selection, Juror B76 said Trayvon shouldn't have been out at night. She was seated anyway.
Shouldn't have been out at night? Ain't that the same as the signs posted at the limits of "Sundown Towns"? Signs like these:
"Nigger, Don't Let The Sun Go Down On You In Our Town"
"Nigger, don't let the sun set on your ass in Old Homosassa!"
"Whites only after dark"
James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns, estimates that at their peak in 1970, there were 10,000 Sundown Towns in the United States. As the Zimmerman verdict makes clear, there will be Sundown Towns as long as there is a United States of America.
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