ST PETERSBURG, FL–The hypocritical words "I think we have a tendency sometimes to almost take for granted or think it's normal that so many young people end up in our criminal justice system. It's not normal. It's not what happens in other countries. What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things," were uttered by U.S. president Barack Hussein Obama during his July 17, 2015 visit to the El Reno Correctional Institution in Oklahoma.
Black Agenda Report editor Margaret Kimberley summed up the visit on Twitter as “Obama’s prison reform con job.”
The high numbers of “young people” who are ending up behind bars in this country are Africans and Mexicans, rounded up and warehoused in the colonial U.S. concentration camps specially created for our oppressed people!
African people make up nearly 50 percent of the current U.S. prison population of 2.2 million.
If we count the 7.3 million people on parole or probation that adds up to a total of nearly 10 million people tied to the prison system in the U.S., by far the highest prison population in the entire world.
One in eight of all prisoners on the planet is an African in the U.S.
All told, almost 5 million of our brothers and sisters are tied to the U.S. prison system even though we are only 12.3 percent of the U.S. population.
Obama says we are locked up because of “teenagers doing stupid things”but if that is the case there should be millions of white teenagers among the incarcerated.
African young people are not in prison because of “stupid”mistakes
Contrary to Obama’s words, mass imprisonment is normal if you are colonial subjects as Africans are inside this country.
We have no political or economic power to govern ourselves for our own benefit and no State power to defend ourselves from a hostile and foreign occupying army that besieges our neighborhoods daily.
Our children are in prison because of intensely anti-black colonial laws implemented by Obama’s Democratic Party—laws such as the Omnibus Crime Bill passed in 1994 by then-president William Clinton.
This draconian and repressive bill, which was written by Joe Biden who Obama chose as his vice-president, funded the deployment of 100,000 new cops and coincides with the rise of violent police murders and brutality on our police occupied streets.
The Federal crime bill instated a three strikes clause that mandated a life sentence for anyone convicted of three “violent”felonies.
The states were soon to follow, implementing “three strike laws”that mandated 25 years to life for any three felony convictions. The big prison states like Texas and California immediately begin to fill their prisons with “three strike” burglary and minor drug offenders.
The bill called for (African) children as young as 13 to be tried as adults and allocated $10 billion for the construction of new federal prisons in which to lock us up.
Our children are criminalized in militarized educational institutions with hostile teachers and a meaningless curriculum in the school-to-prison pipeline under this brutal colonial system.
Clearly, Obama’s sudden “concern”about prisons is bogus
We leave school with no jobs with an official unemployment rate under Obama for black high school graduates of 51 percent.
Despite the fact that 96 percent of African voters enthusiastically backed Obama in the 2008 election, Obama has done nothing to improve or even express concern for the conditions facing African people during his two terms in office.
Obama didn’t lift a finger for the more than a quarter million Africans who lost their homes to foreclosure due to the colonial subprime mortgages lenders which targeted African home buyers, with names such as the “Ghetto Loans,”issued by Wells Fargo Bank.
African people have collectively lost 53 percent of our assets and black homeownership has plunged to lowest level in 16 years under Obama.
In 2008 while still a candidate Obama scolded black men at a Chicago African congregation for alleged “absentee fatherhood,”not mentioning the fact that 1 in 3 of all African men in the U.S. are incarcerated under the colonial prison policies.
He returned to this same patronizing theme in his 2013 commencement address to Morehouse University in Atlanta.
Obama stood firm in his opposition to reparations for slavery in this country in a speech in August of 2008.
When George Zimmerman was acquitted of the blatant murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013, his cold response was, “…we are a nation of laws and a jury has spoken…”
During the years of Obama’s presidency he has given the Wall Street bankers about $13 trillion dollars while never addressing the fact that the unemployment rate for the African community remains chronically at more than double that for white people.
We must unite and fight against police, prisons and all forms of colonial domination
Despite the fact that just about weekly we see the videos of hideous cases of police murder of Africans—from Sam DuBose, to Freddie Gray, to Mike Brown, to Sandra Bland, Eric Garner and countless others, Obama has never addressed the question of rampant and endemic police violence against African people.
It could not be clearer that African people are a colonized population inside the borders of the U.S. and that neocolonialist president Obama, representing the interests of white power, has no intention of uplifting conditions for African people.
As the African People’s Socialist Party’s 14-Point Platform states:
“We want the immediate and unconditional release of all black people who are presently locked down in U.S. prisons.
“We believe that all the African men and women who are locked down in the U.S. concentration camps commonly known as prisons are there due to decisions, laws, and circumstances which were created by aliens and foreigners for their own benefit and as a means of genocidal colonialist control.
“We believe that these decisions, laws and circumstances were created and are enforced without our consent and are therefore illegitimate. We believe that the African men and women who are locked down in these concentrations camps are the victims of U.S. colonialist ruling class justice which maintains our enslavement and terrorizes our people, and that they should therefore be released immediately to the just representatives of our struggle for liberation, independence and socialist democracy.”
Our only future is in uniting as one people all around the world to liberate our Africa and all its resources.
