Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels

Martin Luther King's menace: Homegrown violence
     U.S. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin spoke before students, faculty, and staff at the UW-Madison on March 24 about the importance of
reaching out to others around the world. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who advocates for human rights in foreign lands,
Feingold encouraged students to consider volunteer work overseas. All good and well — but Feingold also sits on the Judiciary Committee.
    Someone in the audience asked him about the high percentage of Black and Latino/a Americans incarcerated in Milwaukee and in Dane County.
Wisconsin leads the nation in the incarceration of Black youth, and the U.S. incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation.
    There’s a story. Feingold’s in another country. At a meeting, he confronts a diplomat or head of state about the high detention of journalists. The
other person reminds Feingold about the high incarceration of Blacks back home in the U.S. Imagine this jolt of reality!
    Feingold points out how this problem of incarceration will come up while you go about the business of warning others that they should clean up
their human rights violations!
    But to my ears, I hear that someone outside the country had to point to home where the issue of racial disparity in the incarceration of U.S.
citizens is atrocious.  It should be an issue, something to constantly act upon, to protest, to work to change — because it is the right thing to do — the
human thing to do!
    Why is it so difficult to consider the plight of these fellow citizens and recognize the human rights violation in connection to domestic policies
that, much like the foreign policies of the U.S., benefit the wellbeing of the White Americans, particularly the ruling corporate class? It is a form of
homegrown violence (and it is a violence to remain silent or indifferent) that continues to erode any idea of freedom for anyone or any group!
    What would Martin Luther King, Jr, think now about the outrageous incarceration rate of Black and Latino/a citizens here and the rendition
program and Abu Graib and Gitmo there? What would he think about the one million Iraqis “liberated” from their lives or the 4000 U.S. soldiers who
died for oil and corporate profits? “The false and tragic notion that one particular group, one particular race is responsible for all the progress, all of
the insights in the total flow of history … and another is totally depraved, innately impure, and innately inferior,” as King pointed out in 1967 (“The
Other America”), is still very relevant today. It is this attitude of racial superiority that fuels domestic relations as well as foreign relations. It is this
attitude gone wild that we see coming back to consume even those it was established to protect. What would King think of all this homegrown
violence, this persistent drive to conquer all and all the time?
    At the time of his death, Roland Sheppard writes, King “was embarking on a course in opposition to the capitalist system.” (“The Assassination of
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.”).  This inequality creates despair for some but economic and social privileges for the beneficiary race and
class. It is this group, King noted, who are trained to be concerned “about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and human
rights.”  
    In the years since King’s death, Sheppard observes that “the nation’s schools have become re-segregated along Black, Latino, and economic lines.
Throughout this country, the inner cities are being gentrified as Blacks and poor are forced out and scattered throughout the land.”
    “The greatest purveyor of violence,” as King called the U.S., continues its engagement in war and occupation that will not end with a Democrat or
a “new” Republican face in the White House, for this violence serves to garner more goodies for the corporate capitalists who are profiting quite well.
Jeremy Scahill reports that there are some 630 corporations in Iraq — drawn there for the oil, the comfortable Green Zone, and coming of the world’s
largest luxury embassy. Empire first!
    The corporate media, historians of this mega-narrative of superiority, teach the general public to ignore “the man behind the curtain” but fear your
neighbors, fellow citizens, and foreign terrorists. Accept signs of gratefulness but denounce and reject signs of anger from the “conquered” here.
    And so the killing goes on over there and the “emerging pattern of suppression” that King witnessed in the late sixties is in play now.
    We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. “When machines and computers, profit motives and
property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being
conquered.” (“Beyond Vietnam”)
    King was right then — and he is right now.
    Join the Color of Change campaign calling on the Senate Judiciary Committee to correct unjust sentencing laws: http://colorofchange.
org/crackpowder/?id=2384-56893