• Home
  • Archive
  • Media Kit
  • Contact Us
  • May 9, 2025

The Madison Times

The Paper That's More Than Black and White

  • News
    • Local News
    • National News
    • International News
    • Sports News
    • Education News
  • Columns
    • Columnists
    • Editorials
    • Letters to the Editor
    • Life Lessons with Alex Gee
  • Events
  • Health
  • Finance
  • Lifestyle
  • Classifieds
  • Community
    • Middle Spread
  • Milwaukee
EXCEPT WHERE INDICATED, THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED ON THIS PAGE ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE MADISON TIMES

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print

Criminalizing Black Protest – and Black People

September 18, 2015

By Lee A. Daniels
NNPA Columnist

lee-a-danielsIs #BlackLivesMatter a criminal organization that advocates attacks on and murder of White police officers?

That’s the snake-oil pitch the conservative echo chamber is making these days – even as news accounts every week bring new proof that neither Black law-abiding citizens nor, frankly, Black criminals, nor anyone else are preying upon the police. Washington Post columnist, Radley Balko’s September 10 column offers a must-read examination of the data that shows that assaults on and murders of police officers have fallen to dramatic lows in recent years, and there’s no indication they’re about to increase. Balko emphasizes, The so-called war on cops,“just isn’t true.”

Instead, what continues to be true is that a significant number of individual cops and prison guards continually seek the slightest excuse – or no excuse at all – to brutalize Blacks and other people of color.

Look at the video released last week by the Fairfax County (Va.) sheriff’s office of five officers wearing biohazard suits, gas masks and rubber gloves taking Natasha McKenna, a 5’4’’ mentally unstable Black woman, from her cell – apparently completely nude – last February and shooting her with a stun gun four times while she lay face down on the floor outside her cell. She died days later.

Read the September 10 New York Times account of the death in April of a Black mentally ill inmate at New York’s Fishkill state prison, Samuel Harrell, allegedly at the hands of a so-called “Beat Up Squad” of prison guards, and their subsequent efforts to intimidate inmates who witnessed the killing into silence.

Watch the video of a bully-boy New York City undercover cop jumping retired Black tennis star James Blake in front of a Manhattan hotel September 10, and read of this dirty cop’s record of assaulting innocent people.

These three terrifying examples don’t begin to indicate the scope of the reality so many Black and Hispanic Americans face from the front-line “troops” of America’s criminal justice system. But they are enough to show up the “criminalization gambit” as just another rotting plank of the structure of American racism.

Criminalizing Americans of color, especially Black Americans, has long been a constant of American society. Racists have often tried to diminish black protest movements, and Black achievement itself, by characterizing them that way — be it the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement, the post-Civil War achievements Blacks forged during the Reconstruction Era, or the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. Revealingly, it was after the massive March on Washington of 1963 that arch-racist F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover called Martin Luther King, Jr.—not Malcolm X— “the most dangerous Negro in America.”

Today, the striking success of Blacks in marshaling their voting power has provoked the Republican Party’s national campaign to block Blacks’ access to the ballot under the smokescreen of preventing voter fraud. And conservatives have constantly attacked President Obama himself as “lawless.” For example, in October 2008, when his victory over the McCain/Palin ticket seemed assured, conservative pundit Michael Barone wrote a column bemoaning the “coming liberal thugocracy” his administration would be. Naturally, his phrasing was rapidly picked up by the conservative confederacy.

That framework helps illuminate three specific reasons conservatives are pushing the criminalization gambit against #BlackLivesMatter now.

One is their fear of its success in giving blacks and many progressive- leaning Whites a means of direct-action protest against the many injustices of the criminal justice system that, thanks to videos, e-mail, tweets and text messages, have become more and more visible to more and more people. Further, #BlackLivesMatter has added a compelling, straight-from-the-streets energy and urgency to the high-level efforts of Obama administration and elected officials and public-policy scholars to reform the criminal justice system.

Another reason for the conservative movement’s attack against today’s Black protest movement stems from its own abject failure in several of the “theaters” of the war it’s been waging against the Obama administration and American democracy.

Its miserable record of failure— from not defeating Obama electorally, to not blocking Obamacare either in the Congress or the courts, to neither halting nor slowing the expansion of rights for gay and lesbian Americans, to its humiliating inability to undermine the landmark treaty Obama and the leaders of six European nations forged with Iran to prevent the latter from developing nuclear weapons—underscores why chaos continues to rule the Republicans’ presidential sweepstakes process.

In other words, two of the pillars of the anti-#BlackLivesMatter campaign suggest the third desperate motive for it, and exemplify what conservatives often do when they find themselves stuck in a political quagmire: They play the dirty game of “blame the Black people.”

Lee A. Daniels is a longtime journalist based in New York City. His essay, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Great Provocateur,” appears in Africa’s Peacemakers: Nobel Peace Laureates of African Descent (2014), published by Zed Books. His new collection of columns, Race Forward: Facing America’s Racial Divide in 2014, is available at www.amazon.com

Share this:

  • Tweet
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print

Popular Interests In This Article: Lee A. Daniels

Read More - Related Articles

  • Black History Month and the Search for Planet X
  • White Anger is the New Black
  • Trump’s Trump Card: The Conservative Mob
    Trump’s Trump Card: The Conservative Mob
  • GOP’s Raging Intra-Party War
  • Emanuel AME and the Buoyancy of Hope
    Emanuel AME and the Buoyancy of Hope


Connect With Us

Become Our Fan On Facebook
Find Us On Facebook


Follow Us On Twitter
Follow Us On Twitter

Editorials

Karma Chavez
Amanda Zhang
Julianne Malveaux
Benjamin Chavis
George Curry

Journalists

Jacklin Bolduan
Brianna Rae
Aarushi Agni
Rob Franklin
Claire Miller

Topics

Brown Girl Green $
Young Gifted & Black
Universally Speaking
Ask Progress
Civil Rights

Topics

Police Shooting
Police Brutality
Black Lives Matter
NAACP
Racism

Politicians

Barack Obama
Hillary Clinton
Gwen Moore
Paul Soglin
Scott Walker

Contact Us

Phone:
414-449-4860

Copyright © 2025 Courier Communications. All Rights Reserved.
We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices about not having this information used by these companies, click here.