What I'm trying to tell people is that police brutality in the 'hood is nothing new. And the thing is that whether this guy, the cop killer in my song, is real or not, believe it, there are people at that point.
[S]tatism is a system of institutionalized violence and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or be robbed, to kill or be killed. ... Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production.
Beating children has been a depressingly familiar habit in Black families since our arrival in the new world.
Committing genocide on behalf of an institution generates greater loyalty to it than merely getting people fired from their jobs on its behalf.
Black parents beat their children to keep them from misbehaving in the eyes of whites who had the power to send Black youth to their deaths [in slavery days] for the slightest offense. Today, many Black parents fear that a loose tongue or flash of temper can get their child killed by a trigger happy cop. They would rather beat their offspring than bury them.
The occupation is really terrible on a variety of levels. It's terrible on the "shooting people and torturing people in prison" level. But I think the thing that is very hard to convey is that it's also this bureaucratic grinding-down and daily humiliation that I think would probably be as horrible as the spectacular violence.
What subsists to-day by violence continues to-morrow by acquiescence and is perpetuated by tradition; till at last the hoary abuse shakes the gray hairs of antiquity at us, and gives it-self out as the wisdom of ages.
There is an unbroken line of police violence in the United States that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery, the aftermath of slavery, the development of the Ku Klux Klan. There is so much history of this racist violence that simply to bring one person to justice is not going to disturb the whole racist edifice.
I think if you grow up in a culture where the army is out on the street sighting you with rifles, it has to have some kind of psychological impact.
When a system of oppression has become institutionalized it is unnecessary for individuals to be oppressive.
The State is a professional apparatus that sets itself apart from the people and apart from the institutions that the people themselves create. It's a monopoly on violence that manages and institutionalizes social activities. The people are perfectly capable of managing themselves and creating their own institutions.
Although police terrorism plays a specific role on behalf of the state, it is not the totality of what state violence looks like or feels like in our communities.
There's nothing so improves the mood of the Party as the imminent execution of a senior colleague.
