Download the report at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/218033925/Operation-Ghetto-Storm-Updated-October-2013
Preface: Context for
Operation Ghetto Storm
The facts presented in Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report
on the Extrajudicial Killing of Black People present us with a deeper
understanding of the utter disregard held for Black life within the United
States. Operation Ghetto Storm is a
window offering a cold, hard, and fact-based view into the thinking and
practice of a government and a society that will spare no cost to control the
lives of Black people. What Operation
Ghetto Storm reveals is that the practice of executing Black people without
pretense of a trial, jury, or judge is an integral part of the government’s
current overall strategy of containing the Black community in a state of
perpetual colonial subjugation and exploitation
In July 2012, in the tradition of “On Lynching” by Ida B. Wells-Burnet and “We Charge Genocide” by William L. Patterson, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement released
a critical report that exposed the fact that in the first six months of the
year a Black man, woman, or child was summarily executed by the police, and a
smaller number of security guards and self-appointed vigilantes, Every 36 Hours! But, the July 2012
report did not tell the whole story. Further investigation revealed a more
accurate and gruesome number of extrajudicial killings during the first six
months of the year. And true to form, the assault on Black life stayed
consistent for the last six months of the year, resulting in the extrajudicial
killing of at least 313 Black people in 2012, or one Every 28 Hours!
Setting the Record Straight
If not for our investigation, this gruesome reality would
largely be ignored. The United States government has no interest in revealing
these facts and police unions actively suppress them. The corporate media is so
permeated with white supremacist and capitalist assumptions and
rationalizations that reporters and editors deem these killings unworthy of
note. With one important exception: They use the stories of “officer-involved
killings” to reinforce a stereotypical, but strategic depiction of the most
dispossessed sectors of the Black working class as criminal commodities, fit
for disposal.
This demonization of Black “targets” reinforces the
insidious propaganda of the United States government and its supporters, that
the United States is the most democratic and socially liberated country on
Earth. But, any critical observer and thinker must ask, how can the supposedly
“most democratic” country on Earth be the largest jailer on the planet? What
types of “legitimate” democratic processes result in nearly half of the
countries prison population being Black, while Black people only comprise 13%
of the total population of the United States? What types of resources,
planning, coordination and programmatic implementation go into arresting,
convicting, imprisoning or deporting over 10 million people annually? And what
can possibly justify the extrajudicial killing of at least 313 Black people in
one year?
Genuine and healthy democracies do not spend more than 50%
of their budgetary resources on their militaries, domestic “law enforcement”
agencies, and prisons. The fact that the United States government spends this
amount demonstrates that the United States is neither a genuine democracy nor a
“healthy” society in any form or fashion. The United States is a European
settler-colonial project that has erected a racial state to enforce and
maintain a rigid order of white supremacy, colonial occupation, and capitalist
exploitation. As the facts presented herein attest, the United States is one of
the most repressive and brutal societies in the world, particularly to
oppressed peoples like Blacks, Native Americans, and Latinos. The rates of extrajudicial
killings on the US rival only those perpetrated against the Indigenous people
of Palestine, Mexico, Guatemala and the Amazonian region, and
African-descendants in Brazil and Colombia.
The War Against Black People
In order to contain the oppressed peoples within its
colonial possessions, the United States settler-colonial government has built
the most full-spectrum network of repressive enforcement structures in human
history. They include the Police, Sheriff’s, Rangers, Customs, FBI, Homeland
Security (including INS), CIA, Secret Service, prison guards, as well as the
numerous private security and other protective services. It has also created
the largest and most invasive surveillance system in human history. This system
includes everything from satellites, police, FBI, and DHS operated surveillance
drones, and electronic tracking and monitoring via our cellphones, computers,
tablets, email, Facebook, Twitter, and chip-filled passports, driver’s
licenses, and identification cards.
These forces of occupation and repression have been
strategically deployed over the last 70 years to wage a grand strategy of
“domestic” pacification to sustain the colonial occupation of North America via
a never ending series of containment campaigns that amount to nothing less than
a “perpetual war”. This “perpetual war” has been known by many names over the
last seven decades such as the “Cold War”, COINTELPRO”, the” War on Drugs”, the
“War on Gangs”, the “War on Crime”, and most recently, the “War on Terrorism”.
This pacification strategy is designed to contain the various peoples’, social,
and religious movements that resist the colonial order of white supremacy inside
the United States, the post World War II imperialist world-system, and the
vicious strategy of neo-liberal accumulation by dispossession that it has been aggressively
imposing on its citizens, colonial subjects, and the rest of the world. The most
visible component of this pacification campaign inside the US, has been the
astronomical increase in the incarceration of Black people over the last 40
years.
This “perpetual war” intensified both quantitatively and
qualitatively after the events of September 11, 2001. Exploiting those events
as justification, the United States government launched a new series of
imperialist conquests and occupations and further expanded its overall military
operations and spending. It has also justified the creation of the Department
of Homeland Security, which integrates domestic and international intelligence,
surveillance, and repressive institutions of the United States government. Even
further it has provided a rational for the implementation of extensive
“constitution free zones”, the expansion and deepening of the militarization of
the police, and the passage of some of the most repressive legislation in
United States history, such as the Patriot, Homeland Security, and National Defense
Authorization Acts to name a few.
And the United States government’s grand strategy of
domestic containment and pacification via perpetual war shows no signs of
either slowing down or coming to an end on its own accord any time soon.
Extrajudicial killings are clearly an indispensible tool in the United States
government’s pacification pursuits.
Confronting the Crisis
Despite being virtually ignored by the corporate media, our
July 2012 report did receive considerable coverage in various Black and
progressive media outlets. It’s dissemination via these channels insured that
the Every 36 Hours report reached
thousands of people throughout the United
States and the world. It’s reception helped to stimulate righteous indignation
and outrage in many isolated quarters. However, unchanneled and unorganized
indignation and outrage are not enough. We must turn this indignation and
outrage into organized, sustained, and determined mass action to stop this
crisis.
As we noted in the July 2012 report, the first critical step
is organizing the Black community to proactively defend itself. We must end our
reliance on the model of protest mobilizations that occur after the police have executed one of our loved ones. This must
cease being our primary means of securing justice. We have to see the war on
Black people for what it is and proactively organize ourselves to resist it. To
aid in launching and promoting these necessary organizing initiatives, we have
authored and released “Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on
Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense”. It
can be found at http://mxgm.org/let-your-motto-be-resistance-a-handbook-on-organizing-new-afrikan-and-oppressed-communities-for-self-defense/.
“Let Your Motto Be
Resistance” draws on the long history of Black peoples’ struggle to realize
self-determination and defend our persons, our rights and our dignity from the
assaults of the oppressive settler-colonial government and the forces of white
supremacy. Building on this history “Let
Your Motto Be Resistance” provides, in summary form, a vision of how we can
(re)organize our communities from the ground up.
Self-defense in and of itself is not enough, however. We
will not turn back “Operation Desert Storm” and the military machine that aims
to keep Black and other oppressed people subordinate and contained, until we
defeat and dismantle the systems of colonialism, national oppression, white
supremacy, capitalism and imperialism. It is imperative that we build a broad
and dynamic mass movement capable of transforming the system and building a new
social order.
More specifically, the Malcolm
X Grassroots Movement is calling for a broad alliance of Blacks, Indigenous peoples,
Latinos, Arabs, Asians, and progressive whites that will challenge the various
forms of state repression, including racial profiling, mass incarceration, mass
deportation, displacement, and of course, extrajudicial killings. It is our
hope that local, regional, and countrywide peoples’ alliances will form and
stand as the core of the Peoples’ Self Defense Networks proposed in “Let Your Motto be Resistance”.
To honor the memory of every Black man, woman, and child summarily
executed at the hands of the police and other agents of the United States
government in 2012, let us organize our communities to end the terror being
waged against us.
For more information about the report or any of the proposals
contained within it, please contact Kali Akuno at
kaliakuno@mxgm.org.
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