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by Joe (A’Jene) Valentine
Please support the just call for the Strategic Release of our New African political prisoners, prisoners of war and Elder prisoners held in prison under genocidal conditions for their political beliefs and political activities, since institutional restitution is due the special class of genuine Warriors of the People.
“Almost 93 percent of people sent to prison from Los Angeles County are Black people and people of color. Black people are approximately 9 percent of Los Angeles’ population. They constitute 38 percent of Los Angeles’ state prison population. We can no longer deny that our system of hyper-criminalization and incarceration is anything other than racist.” – George Gascon, Los Angeles district attorney, Dec. 7, 2020
“The vast majority of people who are locked up are poor, are Black, are Latino.” – former governor Jerry Brown, 2017
On Dec. 21, 2021, I suffered a very serious political attack via CDCr’s thought police, otherwise known as the Goon Squad, i.e., IGI (Institutional Gang Investigators) who hit my cell due to supposedly receiving or possessing information that I’m an affiliate of the magnanimous Black Panther Party. That’s absolutely correct – I am currently under investigation for purposes of ascertaining whether I am a member of a purely politically-motivated organization, an organization which actually provided food, medicine, healthcare, education, cultural nourishment, protection against racist pigs – those of the badge and otherwise – legal aid, shelter etc., etc., to the systematically impoverished and oppressed, i.e., the New Afrikan have-nots!
Yep, a political group which took a principled and correct stance against white male institutional racism, i.e., white supremacy – “still alive and kicking it!” here in America’s penal colonies, white-motivated racist violence, imperialism, colonialism, unjust foreign wars, illiteracy, hunger, police brutality and murders, slumlords, thugz pushin’ poisonous narcotics delivered to the Black communities via the CIA, just like in the case of crack cocaine injected via the CIA etc.
“Racism is a systemic, societal, institutional, omnipresent and epistemological embedded phenomenon that pervades every vestige of our reality. For most whites, however, racism is like murder: the concept exists, but someone has to commit it in order for it to happen. This limited view of such a multi-layered syndrome cultivates the sinister nature of racism and in fact perpetuates racist phenomena rather than eradicates it.” – Omowale Akintunde, “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, pg. 72
“California prison intelligence took a page out of J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence playbook. They allowed heroin to flow under the radar of prison security during all of the 1970s. It was a trade-off for reactionaries’ non-participation in the prison movement.” – Louis C. Powell Jr.
“The heroin epidemic that ravaged our cities during the ‘50s and ‘60s basically originated with the CIA out of Southeast Asia. Almost from the moment of their founding in 1947, the CIA was giving covert support to organized drug traffickers in Europe and the Far East and eventually the Middle East and Latin America.” – former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, “American Conspiracies,” pg. 114
“California prison intelligence took a page out of J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence playbook. They allowed heroin to flow under the radar of prison security during all of the 1970s. It was a trade-off for reactionaries’ non-participation in the prison movement.” – Louis C. Powell Jr., “Chronicles of a Prison Dirty War: California Prison Politics,” pg. 43
Indeed! In the 1970s, as I’m very sure happened during our 2011 to 2013 peaceful hunger strikes, the Department of Corrections here in California, set out to recruit thorough opportunists and reactionaries, many of whom were of “Black face white masks,” to not only refuse to participate in a very progressive and civil and human rights movement, one struggling against white supremacy and fascist methods of institutional repression, especially and particularly targeting Black prisoners, but also to aid our oppressors, such as the SSU (California Department of Corrections Special Services Unit) and FBI, in violently purging those folks who dared to demand fair and just treatment, as well as, of course, due respect.
Evidently, these “reactionaries” in “Black face, white masks” were in total favor of Amerika’s racist political and social order and/or the policies of white men immersed in a white supremacist orientation. Nothing has really changed, since those opportunists were the willing and ready cannon fodder for the FBI, SSU, etc. towards undermining and destroying the 1970s Prison Movement, a Prison Movement which was tactfully misnomered the Black Prison Movement. Reactionary forces used it to drive a wedge between Black prisoners and other prisoners for the aim of having these convicts, most of whom were committed to gangsterism equaling criminality, turn against those elements who were in favor of substantial transformation and defending their human dignity, just as was the principal and dutiful aim of those who bled and died during the 1971 Attica massacre by the racist-fascist hands of beasts!
Always remember, the fact that there are more people of color and white women able to now work in prisons across the country, just like in the case of those working in law enforcement generally, is ultimately and largely due to Black people fighting for the civil rights of all people in and out of prisons. Yet many Blacks, Mexicans, Asians, Native Americans, as well as white women now working for prisons and law enforcement in general are doing to us the same type of inhumane and repressive crimes that racist white men were doing to us in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. Thus, the crucial and intelligent question that we must ask is: What has really changed?
“While no one can deny the role force plays in the movement’s history, it should be very clear that the political police representing the CDC introduced force to break up the movement’s resistance to repression and racism.” – Louis C. Powell Jr., “Chronicles of a Prison Dirty War: California Prison Politics,” pg. 28
“California’s prison system was known for its racial riots and wars. At least one-third of the racial riots between the years of 1962 and 1980 were orchestrated by white prison guards. It was economics in command that drove prison guards into inciting riots, always against Black prisoners. Racial riots, wars, assault and murder led to overtime work, all of which served the essential needs of prison guards and their families under the fraud of prison security and Law and Order.” – Louis C. Powell Jr., “Chronicles of a Prison Dirty War: California Prison Politics,” pg. xiv
So, I ask the logical and human question: What were/are Black people in prisons, who were/are under systemic racist attack via their rights and humanity being denied them really supposed to do, other than the natural thing, which is to resist white male – anyone’s – repression? Yet, when this course of action is taken via filing before the courts and administrative bodies, Black people are classified and designated, i.e., validated, as prison gang (aka Security Threat Group) members or affiliates and, by the very prison entities responsible for white institutional racism.
In any event, this was the actual motive behind the serious conflict among Black groups here in California during the 1970s. There were those of a supposedly Black nationalist capitalist ideology who favored criminality – money – over the Black communities’ political, social and economic interests on the one hand and those of a revolutionary nationalist socialist ideology who place the Black communities’ political, social and economic interests dead center in their commitments and programs.
To a large degree, this sharp conflict remains afoot since there are too many brothers and sisters, from Behind Enemy Lines to general society, who prefer to and indeed in effect have allied themselves with the very racist and oppressive systems to which they profess to be in political opposition, even as their practice and ideology is certain proof that this is really far from reality.
Beware of the snakes and fakes
Isn’t it consistently and invariably the pattern of pigs across the globe in state-based entities – i.e. ruling-class flunkies – to introduce force to be directed at folks resisting systematic repression and racism or ethnic discrimination? From South Africa, India, Brazil, Colombia, China, Russia, Germany, Mexico, Australia, Japan, France, Britain, Canada, etc., etc., it is and has been a crime, i.e., an illegal act, for those groups and individuals resisting racist and colonial oppression who are classified, identified, designated and validated via various forms of repressive measures by the state to stand up against institutional racism and repression, just as remains the reality “Behind Enemy Lines!”
Yes, from IGI, SSU, ISU (Investigative Services Unit) and the total array of fascist-based or authoritarian motivated forces of the state, any group or individual resisting, no matter how non-violently, CDCr’s – the Prison Industrial Racist Slave Complex, period! – institutional racism and repression, in the past and today, are the sure targets for draconian measures, if not violence and death via prison guards’ hands or from those reactionaries whom they recruit to do their damn dirty work.
Who doubts that the Black Lives Matter movement isn’t now under extensive and focused monitoring and infiltration? Yes, for simply daring to say that humanely natural correct thing, demanding that Black lives matter in this country. They’ve never actually mattered in this country, and, just as W.E.B. Du Bois finally came to realize, Black life shall never truly matter in Amerika, those affiliated with and supportive of this positive and desperately needed movement are – unless you be dangerously naive – being surveilled for purposes of sabotaging and undermining their progressive and just efforts.
As far as the white male power structure and its compliant and conformist subordinates are concerned, this movement, just like all of our people’s movements of the past, represents a threat to their security in terms of their group interests. That’s why they call us Security Threat Groups (STGs), the racist and fascist-oriented white men’s designation arbitrarily applied to Black or New Afrikan organizations and politically active and socially conscious Black or New Afrikan men and women who are engaged in disruptive activities.
What a damn topsy-turvy world – one where pigs back gangsters and fascist, racist groups against people who are simply struggling for their civil and human rights, just as Blacks did and do in prisons across the United States.
Activities the state arbitrarily – and expediently, of course – define as “gang activity” are precisely why they’ve resorted to the strategy of classifying and designating our organizations and individuals as STGs, so as to criminalize our political commitments and behaviors that they perceive as a definite challenge to their job security.
What a damn topsy-turvy world – one where pigs back gangsters and fascist, racist groups against people who are simply struggling for their civil and human rights, just as Blacks did and do in prisons across the United States.
“Born Black in a white man’s world” – 2pac; “I was given this world; I didn’t make it!” – 2pac
The reality be told, the political enemy is so damn sophisticated, i.e., shrewdly debaucherous, in terms of their extremely effective colonization methods, especially that of the colonized and racially oppressed hearts and minds and programs. They got folks who look like us lining up by the f’ing droves to eagerly do their dirty war! Yep, I’ve learned the hard lesson that, ultimately, “It ain’t about where you’re from; it’s about where you’re at!” Sincere commitment to ideology and worldview, not to one’s or a people’s skin color, is and must be the definite order of the day!
Pro-Black, my azz!
“Black, in fact, do crack.” Cowards and snakes break every day and have since our people’s forced imprisonment on this stolen land. The treachery even visits the colonial oppressed and racially dehumanized vermin our brother, Kunta Kinte, resisted being transformed into – Broken Spirits.
It is a fact that when one’s colonial and racist enemies no longer even have to be directly present to execute their program of institutional racism and state-based oppression and, of course, economic exploitation, but can and do realize this by way of Black, Red, Yellow and Brown bodies, the white male power structure has managed to truly “work wonders,” has it not? To my mind, the civil rights movement and the white women’s movement, even as each of these movements did achieve substantial progress, ultimately resulted in and operated to simply further entangle us into the white supremacist social matrix.
Overall, those Black, Brown, Red and Yellow bodies, i.e., the colonized and racially or ethically oppressed who’ve managed to successfully elevate or to cross over into the masters’ reality, are in tactical and strategic positions which serve to secure and advance the paramount and peculiar interests of the white male ruling class. This is so with their financial bank entities, corporations, military, universities, industries, scientific realms, intelligence agencies, law enforcement, political systems, departments of corrections, injustice system, etc.
Hence, “It ain’t where you’re from; it’s where you’re at!” is and must be the appropriate understanding in which WE are sanely obliged and ever wise to accept. As my boy, 2pac, also provocatively and perceptively informed the Have Nots: “They don’t give a f*** about us!” I observe the deep sense of materialism, indifference, individualism and alienation from us, the lower class or poor working class folks, by people of color here and CDCr each and every day. Their minds are no longer their own; they’re not hardly of our world, but instead, their affirmative action extends them approval by the white world, i.e., they’ve “proven” they’re reliable and trustworthy tools.
To be continued …
Peace to Russell Maroon Shoatz and Sista bell hooks!
Send our brother some love and light: Joe A’Jene Valentine, C47779, Centinela State Prison A4-225, P.O. Box 921, Imperial, CA 92251.
