Who denies that New Afrikans (Blacks colonized in Amerika) have been
viewed and treated as a “Security Threat Group”, and consequently
subjected to varied forms of repression by a myriad of state and
non-state reactionary pigs since our enslavement here? Who denies that
this country’s “laws” or judicial system (e.g., police, prosecutors,
judges, prison guards, etc.) has been and continues to be used as a
weapon of oppressive domination of our people? I assert that the actual
function of “law enforcement” - as particularly applied to our
neo-colonial context - is to beat, harass, humiliate and kill, i.e., to
contain and control. On an ultimate level, this is the actual purpose of
those who operate in law enforcement.
We can see this evidenced in the 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of New
Afrikans in the Greenwood district, the 1920 Ocoee, Florida, the 1923
Rosewood, Florida massacres, and the list goes on. The historical
pattern is that those who embody the Amerikan judicial system/law
enforcement functioned with the primary aim of our domination in
exploitation as remains the case in 2014, even under Eric Holder as the
Attorney General.
What’s most important to grasp and take to heart is that as a
group/nationality New Afrikans are in fact a “validated” population as a
result of being calculated to represent a serious political threat
against the white male power structure. Naturally, as we constitute a
diversity in terms of political tendencies and hence threat assessments,
the validation process is pursued and applied in varying forms. Even as
all forms of the validation process (e.g. disciplinary techniques in the
military, corporations, universities, law enforcement, industries, NBA,
NFL, Wall Street, etc.) are ever geared towards our containment and
domination.
“Classifications which are frequently encountered in social science
literature of the European American variety frequently reduce people to
categories like the ‘aged,’ ‘the schizophrenic subjects,’ ‘the
culturally deprived,’ etc. Such categories, which are initially nominal
are invariably treated in some qualitative fashion resulting in an
ordinal classification based on superordinate-subordinate arrangement.
The necessity to refer to people involved in psychological studies as
‘subjects’ is clearly instructive about the goal of such studies which
is to subject. This is the value of the ‘valueless’ European American
experimental methodology.” - Dr. Naim Akbar
Here in California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCr),
prisoners are designated via terms such as “contaminate,” “subject,”
“disruptive groups,” “security threat groups,” “E.O.P.,” “CCCMS,” etc.
In the larger society, New Afrikan gang members and even political
organizations are designated as “domestic terrorists,” “security threat
groups,” etc. In each instance what those individuals/groups whom are
designated by one-or-the-other terms have in common is the status of
being classified, i.e. a procedural identification for purposes of
categorization and monitoring techniques for state repression.
This is the essence and actual political function and primary objective
of what is referred to and defined as “validated.” In penological terms
to be “validated” means that a prisoner has been found or confirmed via
investigation to be an affiliate of either a prison gang or disruptive
group. The “stamp of approval” (rubber stamp) is exacted without sincere
consideration and nor recognition of a prisoner’s supposedly accorded
“due process rights.” In the final analysis, the validation process is
fraught with legal indifference and profound official bias since it is
CDCr’s penological interests which are ever paramount.
Although a prisoner has a right to appeal, the end result of such futile
pursuit is most predictable since this amounts to “appealing” to another
part of the monster which is dead-set on punitive measures immersed in
authoritarian arrogance. I stress political function, since from the
beginning, in the case of New Afrikans, ours is a relationship based
upon institutional domination in terms of the racist prison system. As
is often said “war is an expression of politics by other means,” so too,
“prison is an expression of politics by other means.” The prison system
is an element of protracted war against our people ever with the aim of
subjection.
Indeed just as the U.S. government employs covers (e.g. “humanitarian
aid,” “fighting terrorism,” “spreading democracy”) to legitimize its
politics and practices in Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Congo, Mali,
Sudan, Ukraine, etc., the same is true on a domestic level as regards
the covers employed to legitimize the state’s repressive policies and
measures (i.e. stop and frisk, ten-twenty-life, three strikes, mandatory
minimum sentencing, anti-terrorism act, war on drugs, war on gangs)
directed against the New Afrikan and Latino(a) communities and oppressed
nation people in general. In the case of the New Afrikan and Latino(a)
communities the pretext used is “working to make the streets safe” via
targeting our youth/warrior-oriented groups with “Gang injunctions,”
“Prison Gang Validation,” “Behavioral Modification Units,” etc.
As in the case of their recently conceived repressive tactic referred to
as the “Step Down Program,” merely one element of an ever-adaptive
strategic program rooted in our control, the paramount aim of the
state’s obvious subterfuge is our subjection to forms of
reorientation/indoctrination which operates in total conformity with
their dictates, i.e. socio-economic, cultural, security and political
imperatives.
“(I)t is the government which gets to define what a ‘security threat
group’ is. According to a national survey conducted by the Department of
Justice in 1997, the Department of Corrections of Minnesota and Oregon
named all Asians as gangs, which Minnesota further compounds by adding
all Native Americans. The State of New Jersey DOC lists the Black Cat
Collective as a gang. The Black Cat Collective is my free foster son
along with two friends who put on Afro-Centric cultural programs in
libraries.”(Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, Vol.39)
The above komrad goes on to point out that “the government considered
the Black Panther Party a ‘street gang’ under their loose meaning they
employed.” As we’re aware, it is the convenient policy of oppressive and
exploitive governments to define and designate especially oppositional
radical political forces/individuals (e.g. Mau Mau, RNA, Hamas, IRA,
BLA, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Marcus Garvey, Yaa Asantewaa, Winnie
Mandela, Steve Biko, Patrice Lumumba, Amilcar Cabral, Martin L. King,
Malcolm X, etc.) by an array of self-serving propagandistic pejorative
terms including thugs, hoodlums, savages, terrorists, and mass murders,
so as to demonize them and discredit their socio-political causes. This
common tactic of attack via de-legitimization measures is currently
being employed against our Black Riders Liberation Party based in Los
Angeles.
In California prisons, on the classification Chrono we’re referred to or
identified as “subject.” As a validated prisoner/captive I am treated as
and considered to be what they call a “contaminate.” I’ve already listed
other official terms in which the state employs to conveniently
designate those from the ghettoes. Thus, we discern that the necessity
to refer to people as mere “subjects” is also a penological methodology
in society and prison. Why not the “oppressed,” “colonized,” or
“exploited”? Because the appropriate and applicable designations would
not only operate to accurately identify and classify First Nation
peoples, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, New Afrikans, etc., but they’d also
work to indict the white male supremacist capitalist-imperialist system.
Yes, to a large degree the saying: “He whom defines reality…has the
power,” is accurate and this is the reason the labeling process is so
important to our political adversaries. Classification procedures
function as a method of identification with the intended aim of
targeting/profiling individuals/groups who are perceived to constitute a
“threat to the security” of institutional operations as they’re not in
conformity with the dictated program.
Once labeled via the classification process the individual/group is made
subject to all sorts of political repressive tactics. This even applies
to those individuals/groups defined as “gangs” and engaged in criminal
activities whether confined to prisons or that of society since it is
the “power relation” which is the ultimate crux of the matter.
As is well known, Pelican Bay State Prison as a “model” of repressive
control was built along the lines of Marion, Florence, and other maximum
security prisons and its authoritarian methods are being implemented
across the country in other tombs of gloom. As the “subjects” of these
punitively-geared penological settings we are experimented upon
(e.g. sterilization, SHUs, suppressive measures such as tear gas, pepper
spray, tasers, block guns, E.O.P., CCCMS) As a method of instruction I
often explain to brothers that our relationship to the prison system
(classification committees, disciplinary hearings, SSU, ISU, IGI, parole
supervision) is rooted in and motivated by politics in the sense of
alien authority being exercised over us and against our interests.
The fact that one can penalize via some prison official ought to inform
us of our subordinate status since it is obviously others who are making
the final decisions which negatively impact our lives since they are in
a superior position of power. So, for those who have a naive tendency to
think in terms that somehow politics is limited to the political process
(e.g. voting, referendums, policies, etc.) it must be grasped that the
very nature of our relationship with CDCr is actually one based upon
politics. Logically, this especially applies to the larger macrocosm or
society in terms of our peculiar neo-colonial relationship with the U.S.
Empire.
In CDCr, the terms used to define and classify the nexus between prison
gangs and disruptive groups (now redefined and reclassified as “Security
Threat Groups”), are “subservient” and “subordinate” since the
disruptive groups/street gangs are said to be “inferior” to, and thus
under the dictation of, a prison gang whom prison officials perceive as
the “worst of the worst.” The “dictation” goes to program expectations -
i.e., rules to abide by on pain of punishment - and general agendas as
well as ideological patterns. This attitude and perception, of the nexus
between prison gangs and disruptive groups, presumes that those of the
latter groups cannot or are not given the latitude to think for
themselves nor to govern their lives in their own interests.
