Abu-Jamal’s collection of essays, Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? is a powerful book of short meditations written from a prison cell about the struggle for Black liberation and the lengths the state has and will go to suppress that struggle. Abu-Jamal continues to fight police, prosecutorial, judicial bigotry and write about the history of resistance of the working-class and oppressed from a prison cell. lThe essays in this book span the late 1990s till the 2010s. The 2010s saw the ruling-class put the burden of budget shortfalls, created by the Great Recession, onto the working-class. State and local governments slashed social services including massive layoffs. Under Obama’s presidency, those who were responsible for the recession-the big banks and corporations-were bailed out and rescued from the worldwide financial crisis. During the “recovery,” most of the growth went to corporate profits and the burden of the recession was placed on the backs of working-people around the world. In response, working-class people launched Occupy Wall Street where activists organized street assemblies, rallies, and occupied spaces across the country. This movement expressed the anger working and young people felt about the serious wealth gap under capitalism and the hardships experienced following the Great Recession. Internationally, revolutionary movements exploded across the Middle East and North Africa in what is referred to as the Arab Spring.
As we are in a downturn in social struggle, it is important to analyze the lessons of “true history” that are delineated in Abu-Jamal’s book. Abu-Jamal asks provocative questions about the history of racist violence in this country to expose the hypocrisy of the institutions of repression that claim to “protect and serve,” and yet trap millions of Black families “in the prison of poverty.” Abu-Jamal demands that his readers refuse to accept the status quo of brutal, racist repression: “When is a hate crime a hate crime?...How many Americans know that more than 37,000 Black men died while serving in the union army?...Cops get paid vacation for their hate speech and bigotry. What do their victims get?” This questioning pulls the reader into a direct confrontation with the state and police murders, racist judges, and politicians who are silent about the grave injustices that they commit and cover up. He forces the reader to grapple with ruling-class beliefs and ideas that provide justification for the exploitation and oppression inherent in the capitalist system. Each question challenges the reader to answer why the system of racial oppression is so pervasive and what types of actions, organization, and demands are necessary to dismantle it.
Abu-Jamal’s rhetorical style demands action and a response-pulling the reader into every murder by a police officer, every effect of gentrification, every Black family that has faced foreclosure:
Oscar Grant is you-and you are him-because you know in the pit of your stomach that it could’ve been you, and the same thing could’ve happened. You know this. And what’s worse is this: you pay for this every time you vote for politicians who sell you out in a heartbeat.
This method of writing reminds me of how Claudia Rankine opens her book, Citizen, “When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty.” Like Claudia Rankine, Abu-Jamal calls on his readers to challenge ignorance and the history taught in schools which often ignores for instance “that many of the men called ‘Founding Fathers’ were enslavers, visceral racists, and, in a word, creeps.”
Education under capitalism will always be determined by the needs of the ruling-class to impart its set of beliefs and train a new group of workers. Capitalism places intrinsic limits on progressive educational reform. As a teacher, I see how even those who have a greater knowledge of the history discussed in this book are often afraid to teach it because of the increasing attacks on educators who teach anything concerning race, gender, class or sexual orientation.
The first eight essays were written in the late 1990s. The 1990s saw the ruling-classes globally go on the offensive. They felt drunk with power as they launched an ideological attack against socialist ideas following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of the Soviet Union. Trade union and social democratic party leaders moved to the right across the world. Abu-Jamal first aims his fire at the media that justifies hate crimes and racist murders as “boys being boys,’ or a mix of liquor and bad company?” Continuing with his challenging of ruling-class ideologies, Abu-Jamal writes, “You can see that the claim that the corporate media are objective is but a cruel illusion.” He describes how the media make a spectacle out of Black suffering while ignoring how these horrific events are part of a larger system that benefits from and justifies this oppression. At the same time, the media disregard the daily perpetuations of racist violence and focus on spectacle, “But news is ‘man bites dog,’ not the status quo, but the unusual.”
Abu-Jamal is correct when he explains that because the media is undemocratic and owned by the ruling-class, it overwhelmingly represents their viewpoints and justifies their system. Yet his analysis in these essays would have been strengthened by naming that system-capitalism and explaining more clearly to his readers how the oppression of black people has been a primary part of capitalism in the US since its establishment. He neglects to mention how racial division is the most essential ideological tool utilized by the ruling class to inhibit the formation of a strong, united working class movement which could challenge its rule. Racism and the exploitation of the black population have also been utilized by the ruling class to amass enormous profits.
Abu-Jamal carefully scrutinizes and explains the role of police in US society and their relationship to the state. Abu-Jamal describes how the Supreme Court and cops defend the interests of the state which is based on the rule of private property:
The cops, who served the interests of a state that declared, as did the U.S. Supreme Court, that unions were ‘criminal conspiracies’ and that the Constitution ‘was based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are interior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.
The police and the national guard are the armed bodies which protect capitalist interests. As Abu-Jamal explains, policing in the US is inseparable from the brutal, racist history of [capitalism] in this country. He describes how “police terrorism” is used to “block movements for freedom and protect a system of racist repression.” State suppression and police have been used against workers trying to unionize, protesters, and any significant struggle that jeopardized the interests of the ruling class.
The appearance of the apparatus of state repression which includes prisons, armies, the police etc as Engels described, reflected the dividing of society into social classes with competing interests. The state is composed of “armed bodies of men '' which ensure that class conflict remains “within the bounds of order” yet also defends the interests of the ruling class who are the capitalists. Two essential components of preserving ruling class wealth in an extremely unequal society are the threat of violence and repression.
Abu-Jamal argues that the policing of poor Latino and black neighborhoods is intended to force people to live in inferior, segregated schools and housing: “And the police are…in our community not to promote our welfare, for our security; they’re there to contain us, to brutalize us and murder us, because their orders are to do so.” There is no way to bring about “non-racist” policing as long as institutional racism and segregation continue. Additionally, the police can not be “abolished” under capitalist society because as long as the capitalists are in power, they need to and will find a way to safeguard property and their interests.
My favorite essay in the collection, which is particularly relevant to the influence of the Black misleadership class in society, is “While Rage Bubbles in Black Hearts.” Abu-Jamal starts with a pressing question, “Why, after over a half century of Black voting, and the election of more Black political leaders than at any time since Reconstruction, are the lives, fortunes, prospects, and hopes of Black people so grim?” As much as it was true in 2011 that “in cities boasting Black mayors and Black police chiefs, police violence against citizens continues unabated, and the prison-industrial complex traps generations in chains,” this is even more true today as we see the highest number of Black politicians in Congress since Reconstruction.
The number of Black politicians has risen substantially following the second iteration of the BLM Movement-the momentous events of the George Floyd rebellion when the capitalist class was faced with the challenge of how to give the impression that anti-racist progress had occurred to millions of working-class and young people fighting for change, without really changing anything. To complete this task, in the aftermath of the George Floyd movement, many Black mayors, rather than addressing police violence and systemic poverty, exploit fears around public safety to increase systemic inequity and justify police brutality. These local politicians typify the most recent iteration of the Black Misleadership Class with Eric Adams in New York and Bruce Harrell in Seattle. Adams has been against the ‘defund the police’ demand and gave raises to NYC police officers last year. These Black political and cultural leaders say the way to overcome systemic racism is via respectability and the growth of the Black middle class, not via getting rid of racist exploitation at its source, the capitalist system.
Although the black misleadership often hold responsible the Black masses for their present predicament, it is really the middle class’ failure and decision not to struggle against the capitalist system that has led to large income inequality, high levels of incarceration, gentrification, displacement, homelessness, unemployment, increasing rates of gun violence, and militarized police occupation and repression. As Abu-Jamal explains, these Black politicians back the business class rather than working-people: “And rather than Black politicians speaking for those who vote for them, they too are muted, more loyal to party than people-more anxious not to rock the boat, even when water rushes through the breached hull.” This essay would have been strengthened by pointing a way forward. If these Black politicians aren’t offering the politics to eliminate racism and exploitation which they are not interested in, then it would be useful for Abu-Jamal’s readers to know what those politics are.
This misleadership class willfully accept their role in the capitalist system that maintains the racist, exploitative state of affairs. Abu-Jamal explains that the black misleadership class accepts representation and a grain of genuine power rather than liberation: “Sadly, electing more Black politicians does not equal more Black political power. For in this surfeit of Black representation, voices of discontent are muted, while rage bubbles in Black hearts and minds.” The Black misleadership class defends the ruling class and as Mumia contends, quell Black people’s valid rage when they can with feeble justifications and false assurances or ruthlessly put it down with the use of state violence when they can’t quell their rage. Lastly, these Black misleaders do not attempt to solve the crises of housing and precarity but instead worsen them.
Abu-Jamal ends this provocative book describing the essence of the state:
...[Knowing how the FBI saw King] teaches young activists and revolutionaries in the making, that this is the real, essential nature of the state: militant opposition to any social force that sees to make it more open, democratic, and accountable, and that threatens to increase public control over public resources, institutions, and affairs.
Any movement demanding the dismantling of the police, prisons, and state repression is intertwined with the process of ending capitalism and creating a genuinely equal, classless, socialist society.