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Riders for a cause

Sculptures in Oakland, CA in an abandon warehouse yardIndigo Washington

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Table of Contents

Foreword...............................................................................................................4

Introduction......................................................................................................... 6

Chapter I: The Black Panthers and Racism.................................................... 9

Chapter II: The Media and Racism................................................................. 11

Chapter III: The Black Riders and Racism.................................................... 14

Chapter IV: Drugs............................................................................................. 20

Chapter V: Conclusion..................................................................................... 25

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Dedication

I dedicate this book to my Grand-father, Kamal Ali

The Black PanthersThe Black Riders for Liberation

Parties everywhereand

All the people who do not believe that racism still exixts.

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Foreword

My freshman year of highschool, I was a victim of racism. A fellow freshman called me a “Fu*king N*gger”. I got into a fight because of that and we both got suspended, me for a lesser time. This was the first real experience I had with racism. I had read about it in books and I knew that it hap-pened, but I never thought it could happen to me. I also never knew that it would, and could make me violent. I don’t know quite why it did, but it made me want to

learn more about why things like this happen at that age or why it even started to happen in the first place. Then when I learned about the Black Riders for Liberation this year, I knew that I wasn’t the only one who has had experiences like this and wanted to fight this type, and other types of racism. When anyone tells me that racism doesn’t exist anymore, I want them to experience what I’ve experienced. Another time, also

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freshmen year of highschool, I was walking down the street when an elderly white man was walk-ing behind me. I thought nothing of it until I heard him muttering under his breath, so I turned around. “Hey, N*gger.” he said. I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept walking. The fact that rac-ism transcends so many generations astonishes me. And the fact that people can lie to them-selves, and to my face and say it doesn’t exist is exactly why I am doing this project.

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines racism as “the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.” The most common thought of racism is that it is the same thing as being prejudice. Many people get the terms “racism” and “prejudice” confused, prejudice is “dislike, hostility, or unjust behavior deriving from unfounded opinions”. The difference between the two is your skin color making you feel like you are better than people and not liking them for theirs. In the 1950’s through the 1960’s, the black power movement was spearheaded by the Black Pan-ther Party for Self Defense. The Black Panther Party was started in Oakland, California by Huey Newton. In 2010 the city violent crime rate in Oakland was higher than the violent crime rate in California by 247.17% (Oakland Crime Rate Report (California)).

Introduction

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The high crime rate is one of the reasons that The Black Panther Party was needed. The Black Panthers fed people, clothed them, and also started a sickle-cell anemia research clinic. In my history classes, nobody ever talked about those good things that they did; they are only remembered as a militant group who carried guns and scared people.

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This brings me to wonder, did the racism associated with the black power movement die out with it? Or does the media want you to think that it did and isn’t a big deal anymore? Racism also is not just a “black and white” issue. The classic stereotype of racism is that it is the black man who hates the white man or vice versa, but racism is associated with people of all races. Which makes me think, in the so-called progressive era we’re in, why is race still an issue?In the United States, a country of immigrants, racism should cer-tainly not be an issue anymore; considering none of us were even invited here in the first place. The United States is seen worldwide as a safe haven for immigrants when they come here just to get discrimi-nated against. So this brings me to question, are we better than all the other countries that people come here to escape or does America just hide its racism that well?

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The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was actually a progres-sive political organization that stood up for almost all minority groups that the United States government turned a blind eye to. They were founded during the Civil Rights Movement by Huey Newton and a few friends. The party did various commu-nity outreach programs that included feeding the needy and educating people. They also believed in fighting rac-ist groups such as the ku klux klan. They even installed stop lights in Oakland, California be-cause children were getting hit by speeding cars. The fact that they believed in arming them-selves is the only thing that is taught to us. They had as much right to arm themselves as anyone else, but even FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover regarded their ideals and practices as “the greatest threat to the internal

CHAPTER I : THE BLACK PANTHERS AND RACISM

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security of the United States.” Since when is feeding people and abiding by the con-stitutional right to bear arms so wrong? This got me thinking about if this were a race issue. Because now, in this progres-sive society, we are constantly told that racism doesn’t exist and hasn’t since the Civil Rights Movement. Times have changed and we are ahead of that now. If this were the case, the prison systems wouldn’t have more than sixty percent African-American inmates. But when you look at the facts about who commits that crime, the data doesn’t match up. Whites commit at least seventy percent of all crime in the United States, but only make up about eight percent of prison inmates ( Wagner, Peter). But, according to the Jus-tice Department Statistics, almost eighty-four percent of white people killed, are in fact, killed by other whites. This also got me thinking about the media’s role in rac-ism.

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Chapter ii : The media and racism

I think that the media has a particularly large role in molding our minds. I do not think that the intention of it is to be racist, but if you bombard the masses with images of African-Americans and Latinos do-ing bad things all the time, people are going to subconsciously start to believe it.

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From the time of slavery, media has existed and told people to be afraid or to talk down to African- Ameri-cans, be it through newspapers or bar-signs saying, “whites only.” In the news, you see African-Amer-icans robbing people or shooting people. That is the purpose of me-dia, to pump fear into the minds of the masses. You may ask yourself “isn’t there a better way to do that?” Well, my retort would be, “why fix what’s broken?” That has been the system in the United states for centuries. It’s not just going to stop now.Let’s shift our attention from news media and move it to sports and popular media. For example, Jackie Joyner-Kersee was an African-American woman who was also a six-time Olympic medalist in the late 1900’s. She was even named ‘Greatest Female Athlete of the 20th Century’ by Sports Illustrated during her time as an Olympian.

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This all changed when she was suspected of using steroids to help her run track. Though she denied all charges and no proof was found, all four tests she took came up negative, she was still temporarily stripped of all of her medals which in total was eleven. Now, Lance Armstrong, a white man, openly admitted to using performance enhancing drugs and was only stripped of one bronze medal he won at the Olympics in 2000, not even the year he admitted to using the drugs. And if you don’t see this as blatant, I don’t know what is.

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They also try and do various community out-reach programs to help their own community. They were founded in the 1990’s in prison. They started when gang members of the Crips and the Bloods started learning about their roots and how they actually came out of the Black Panther party to better educate the other gangs about their roots.

The Black Panthers were alive and well dur-ing the Civil Rights Movement, now there is the Black Riders for Liberation. They consid-er themselves the new Black Panther Party.

Chapter iii: The Black riders for liberation

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When they got out of prison, they started spreading the word and creat-ing truces between different gangs. The Oakland chap-ter of the Black Riders for Libera-tion was started shortly after the shooting of Oscar Grant. He was shot and killed by a Bart police officer on New Years day. They also traveled to the court hear-ing of the officer who shot and killed him in Los Angeles. The officer who shot him was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. They are now meeting every Thursday at Laney College

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in Oakland, California. When they meet, they talk about various things from racism to helping incarcerated prisoners understand that they can change and that society has not given up on them. They also un-derstand that some of the African-Americans in prison have been wrongly convicted of their crimes and given unreasonable sen-tences. They have also started a sort of pen-pal system with some in-mates. The Black Riders for Liberation are similar to the Black Panthers in that they focus on their community in changing it for the better. They try to step up to help their communities in times when the government would turn their backs and they also urge other communities to form a similar group.

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The Black Riders tend to focus on the imbalance in power in the community: with the police being above the law and everyone else below it. There have been several incidences of police brutality since the beginning of the year. In 2012, there were Occupy Oakland protests going on, and the police violently attacked the crowd leaving several civilians injured (Williams, Fred).

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There has recently been a request for federal oversight of the Oakland Police Depart-ment. Point J of The Black Rid-ers for Liberation: Black Com-mune Program says, “ We ride for an immediate end to po-lice brutality. We ride because we believe we can end police brutality by organizing black self-defense groups dedicated to defending our black com-munity... The 2nd ammend-ment to the U.S. constitution gives a right to bear arms, we therefore believe that all black people should arm them-selves for self-defense.” These ideals are almost identical to the Black Panthers. Don’t get me wrong, the Black Panthers did start out as having a Black nationalist ideology, and thats what we remember them for. But it started out of the im-mense need to end police brutality against the black community.

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After the Black Panthers saw that the African-Americans weren’t the only group of people being harshly discriminated against, so they changed and were the first group to work openly with ho-mosexuals and women. The Black Riders also experience the same problem, they attended a City Hall meeting about police brutality and no one wanted them to speak. The leader of the meeting turned off their microphones and urged them out. They protested and stayed and called to action the Black Riders for Liberation.

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Point H of the BRL’s Black Com-mune Program talks about the Drug problem in black America. It states, “...We ride because we demand all the files of the Iran/Contra hearings, and information regarding aid to the contras in Ni-caragua, be released to the black community. This should be done to determine the connection between the government and the influx of drugs into the black communities during the 70’s and 80’s. Black people neither own plans or manu-facturing plants needed to produce and distribute drugs.” They then go on to state that the best way that we can solve the drug problem in the community is to find out how it got here in the first place so that we can stop it.

chapter IV: Drugs

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Our government aided the government in Nica-ragua in the 80’s even though it was prohibited by congress and some believe they did it to releasing drugs into the black community. Seeing as the black community had absolutely no way to manufacture or distribute these drugs in any way. The influx of drugs helped turn the black communi-ties into nothing.

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The release of these files would help us to better understand where the drug problem specifically came from and if our government was and is really against the black community.My grandfather, a for-mer member of the Fruit of Islam, tells me that joblessness is also a factor. The job market is extremely hard and it is proven that if you have a distinguishably “black” name as opposed to a “white” name, you are less likely to get a job. Surprisingly, out of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, many African-Americans got back to their roots and changed their names, and childrens names to be distinctively Afrocen-tric.

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It makes sense that almost ten years after we see an amazing African-American em-powerment movement going on, the govern-ment floods the streets with heroin, cocaine, and meth. My grandfather said that it makes sense that people who can’t get jobs sell drugs, if you can’t support your family with a stable job, you’re going to find a way to feed yourself and your family. Simply because those are the people you love the most and feel obligated to provide for.

24 The Black Riders at “Oscar Grant” Plaza on New Years Eve

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The Black Panthers and The Black Riders for Liberation have many things in com-mon, but the factor that caused both parties to form was and still is: racism. There are so many factors that con-tribute to the racism in mod-ern day society including, stereotypes and the media. The media tells us one thing but the facts are completely sprawled across the board. The Black Riders and The Black Panthers try their best to make sure that stereo-types and the media don’t make the black community suffer. They have both started various programs to help bet-ter society in a non militant way but if you listen to the media, you would see that they are only black militant groups who want to make non-blacks suffer.That is not the case. If you look at the statistics, African-Americans make up more than 70% of the prison system, yet,

white people commit almost 80% of the crime. This is a problem when you think about the legitimacy of the police force. Kalifa, a mem-ber in the Black Riders for Liberation, told me about one time she JAYWalked and the police stopped her and told her that she was JAYWalking, they then pro-ceeded to go through her purse and handcuff her, be-cause she was JAYWalking. They then thought they could cite her for having an illegal knife on her, even though the blade was smaller than her palm and fit the legal size for a pocket knife. Shango, a leader of the Black Riders for Liberation says that he has been stopped several times by the LAPD and the OPD, even the SFPD, with the cops saying that he “fit a descrip-tion” of someone they were looking for.

Chapter V: Conclusion

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The feeling that the people who get paid to protect you, are against you, is one of the very reasons that the black community needs to have groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Riders. The media paints them as homegrown terror-ists organizations.

Based on the foundation that the police force was founded on, catching es-caped escaped slaves and returning them to their masters, they can’t be looking out for the black communities best inter-est. The police are seen as an enemy force in some neighborhoods because of the police brutality going on and nobody stopping it.

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If you believe that, you will never see what they are here for. The media only focuses on the fact that they are here and they do believe in arming themselves, but the media never asks why organi-zations like that are needed. They are needed be-cause things like racism still exist and they refuse to ignore it. Silence, in this case, is not key.

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Works Cited

Ali, Kamal. “Interview with Kamal Ali.” Personal interview. 3 Mar. 2013.

Baggins, Brian. “Black Panther Party.” Black Panther Party. Marxists Internet Archive (marx.org), 2002. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

“BlackPanther | Legacy.” BlackPanther | Legacy. The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

“Jackie Joyner-Kersee.” Jackie Joyner-Kersee Olympic Legend and Gold Medalist. 2010 Chicago Sports & Entertain-ment Partners, Inc., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

Kalifa. “Interview with Kalifa.” Personal interview. 28 Mar. 2013.

“Oakland Crime Rate Report (California).” Oakland Crime Statistics: California (CA). © 2013 CityRating.com, n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

Shango. “Interview with Shango.” Personal interview. 28 Mar. 2013.

Wagner, Peter. “U.S. Incarceration Rates by Race | Prison Policy Initiative.” U.S. Incarceration Rates by Race | Prison Policy Initiative. Prisonersofthecensus.org, n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

Williams, Fred, and Joseph Kishore. “World Socialist Web Site.” Violent Crackdown on Occupy Protesters in Oak-land, California -. International Committee of the Fourth International, 26 Oct. 2011. Web. 25 Mar. 2013.

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