Ripples of Time: Memoir of a Former Black Panther: How Domestic White Terrorism and Policing Has Demonized Dehumanized; Desecrated BLACK BODIES: Domestic White Terrorism; Policing from Slavery to the Rise of Trumpism

Fascism in America

Jon-Jamal Turner

• Publisher: Hotep Book Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781087892962
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías históricas

Ripples of Time is Jon-Jamal Turner's story about life as a Panther activist. It is also an unflinching examination of America's history, including how black bodies have been brutalized and policed tracing an unbroken line between the slave era and the present-day conditions. This book will expose the disinformation campaign waged by the 16 th century European Enlightenment Thinkers against African people in order to justify slavery. This book will show how yesterday's injustices and racist tropes are still with us, albeit in a new form: slaves were economically exploited on plantations that were controlled by slave patrollers. Now we have neo-slavery, in which urban ghettos have replaced the plantations and police officers replaced the slave patrollers. The police still restrict (contain and control) the movements of African Americans and mete out physical abuse (e.g. George Floyd) to prop up an economic system that has white supremacy at its heart.

Little has changed; yesterday is today in Ripples of Time. While Trump's largely white supporters were able to enter the Capitol building with minimal resistance, lawful Black Lives Matter activists were met with the force of National Guard soldiers during protests over the death of George Floyd. Police brutalizing African Americans while white supremacists undermine democracy is nothing new. It's as American as apple pie. It is simply history repeating itself. The current generation of Black Lives Matter activists are facing the same issues we Panthers faced decades earlier, albeit to a lesser degree.

The third part of Ripples of Time demonstrates how slavery hasn't gone away; but instead manifests itself in the form of corporate fascism Trumpian style, which maintains the same old wealth inequalities and is promoted by ultra-right-wing corporationslike Koch Industries and theirpoliticalhacks. It is also a reminder that Trump still has a firm grip on the Republican Party and could come back in 2024. If he does and he is re-elected, AmericanDemocracy will no longer exist. He will finish the job he did not completein his first term. Remember, Hitler lost his political power and credibility and served ten months of a five-year prison sentence for high treason but started his ascent to power in 1927, culminating in his election as Chancellor in 1933. We must remainvigilantand never allow this tyrant and racist named Donald Trump to occupy the White Houseagain. Weonly have history to remind us how catastrophic the outcome was when Hitler was given a secondchance.

PART ONE

Chapter 1

When Trump Called-Americas
Demons Answered

Illustration-by Brian Stauffer

I have had the unique experience of being an agent of history and its advocate. An active participant in the Black Liberation Freedom Struggle in America in the 1960s and ’70s, while working with and in the presence of Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Dr. King, George Jackson and others. It has left an indelible imprint on my life and shaped my world view. This world view motivated me to implement Free Medical Clinics while founding the Black Panther Party in Berkeley, California in order to fight racial injustice and defend our lives and our community against police brutality. It also placed me on the front lines in the fight to implement Africana Studies Departments throughout the country in general and the University of California Berkeley in particular.

I have witnessed the ebb and flow of history. My heartfelt pain is a testimony to those who fell victim to a racialized form of state violence: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Mike Brown are examples of the ongoing police state violence inflicted on black bodies. Today there are few Black Panthers still living, a forgotten treasure in the story of enslaved people of African descent on American soil. We have been shunned by history and rendered as footnotes in the ongoing struggle for freedom. Hopefully, this book will shed light on my experience in the Black Panther Party and how state-sponsored violence was responsible for its demise. Indeed, the book will explore the origins and history of such racialized and police state-sponsored violence perpetrated on the bodies of those of African descent.

Growing up as the child of former sharecroppers in the tobacco fields of Kentucky, I was acutely aware of discrimination based on race and class. This early childhood experience further enlightened me, and led me to become a student at the University of California, Berkeley and launched me into a decade of leftist activism that ranged from anti-Vietnam War protests and the Third World Liberation Front strike on the Berkeley campus, which was instrumental in establishing the Africana Studies Department. There are certain elements in history that are similar, the original BLM movement in the 1960s and the BLM movement of today, both fighting for and protesting racial injustice and police brutality. Today’s Donald Trump was our Richard Nixon, both corrupt and both supporting police state violence against its black citizenry. However, Trump’s racism has been taken to an altogether different level.

When I first embarked on this project, I asked myself, how did someone like Donald Trump, who is so vile, so putrid, so petulant, so obscene and so insensitive to the plight towards people of color, become President of the United States? Impeached for abuse of power, he is an avid supporter of white supremacism and presided over an administration that literally caged asylum-seeking brown children. He told countless lies and ran campaigns of dis-information while engaging, along with his relatives, in blatant self-enrichment. Trump mismanaged a pandemic that claimed more than 500,000 American lives under his leadership in 2020, before inciting an attempted insurrection in 2021, following his presidential election defeat. After much thought, I concluded everything Trump represented is a malignant disease called racism, an affliction that is firmly embedded in the American psyche, its spirit, its culture, and institutions. It is a system which from its inception did not include or benefit people of color.

The present-day exclusion of African Americans is rooted in America's past and its unwillingness to admit to and take responsibility for its crimes committed against people of color. America's soil is drenched with the blood of Native Americans and people of African descent. Its revisionist history does not recognize the slaughter of these people in their millions. Nor does it recognize the countless number of African bodies who were thrown to their watery graves during the Transatlantic Middle Passage as the victims of slavery and white domestic terrorism. America’s unwillingness to accept full responsibility for the atrocities, committed in the name of white supremacy, must be addressed before there is reconciliation and or absolution for these crimes, against humanity.

To be clear, although Trump represents this very sickness he did not invent it. It is as American as apple pie. It is a history replete with such demonic acts of barbarity, and a psyche that has justified atrocities by fabricating aspects of its history and creating illusions of African American inferiority that are woven into the fabric of society. The original white slavers needed a moral justification for their criminality. They did so by categorizing African American souls outside of humanity. They created an illusionary world of concepts, symbols, and myths of African inferiority in their attempts to cover-up their terrorism and criminal activities while seeking an absolution that would never come.

Moreover, slavery as an institution never ended. Like a chameleon, it has morphed and evolved into an extended form of ‘neo-slavery’.

In fact, this brutal, material and referential world created by Europeans cut Africans from their language and culture through a process called ‘seasoning’. Kidnapped, Africans were forcibly removed from their physical, conceptual, and referential world, a world, which described their relationship to themselves, their people, their culture, their land, and their God. More importantly, it cut them off from their ancestors. In its place, they were spoon-fed a foreign language and concepts that were negative about themselves. It stripped them of their humanity, wrote them out of human history, and placed them outside the grace of God.

Western institutes of higher learning from the 16^th to the 20^th century have promoted the same company line, the inferiority of the African race; it was the White Man's Burden to civilize the lowly beastly black race. From Shakespeare’s The Tempest to, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant's On the Nature of the Human Race to Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, they all created the illusion that Africans are on the bottom rung of the ladder of humanity. They justify their sins by denigrating the ‘other’.

David Walker, our esteemed brother who self-published his Appeal to The Coloured Citizens of Theses United States in 1829 and 1830, addressed their sins as enlightened Christians. He said, we will take a view of them as Christians in which capacity we see them as cruel, if not more so than ever. In fact, take them as a body, they are ten times more cruel, more avaricious and unmerciful than ever before. Before they became Christians they were bad enough, but it is positively a fact that they were not quite so audacious as to go and take vessel loads of men, women and children, and in cold blood, and through devilishness, throw them into the sea, and murder them in all kinds of ways. While they were heathen they were too ignorant for such barbarity. But being Christians, enlightened and sensible, they are completely prepared for such hellish cruelty.

Finally, Walker makes the point succinctly. Suppose God were to give them more sense, what would they do? If it were possible, would they not dethrone Jehovah and seat themselves upon his throne. Did our esteemed Brother visualize a Donald Trump? As would be the case, Donald Trump’s actions have proven him to be a heathen, but in his mind’s eye, a God sitting on his throne. He violated all principles of Democracy, Christianity and human decency while summoning the demons of the past into the present: yesterday’s transgressions were summoned into the present. Yesterday is today in ripples of time. Racism is a continuum of the past; it does not die; it mutates into our today.

America’s history of cover-ups and transgressions mirrors former President Donald Trump, who, according to CNN News, has lied more than thirty-two thousand times and still counting as he left office. Trump taps into these centuries-old perversions of truth on racism in America. We need only look to his infamous Charlottesville statement after a white supremacist killed a peaceful protester with his car. On August 12, 2017, a rally organized by the white supremacist group, Unite the Right, protested the proposed removal of the statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Thousands of white supremacists descended on the University of Virginia campus, carrying tiki torches and confederate flags, vowing to take back their country from Jews and Blacks. Trump, in response to the whole episode, said “There are good people on both sides.” Trump’s racist diatribes only exacerbate the burden of being of African descent as he carries the banner of white supremacy.

Moreover, Trump described the George Floyd protesters, who had witnessed a brutal execution by police officers of another black man on American soil, as criminals and thugs. Where and how did white supremacy morph into an institution of white supremacy and state sponsored violence? Moreover, we must understand who answered when Trump called. Who answers? It is the 72 million who voted for his failed re-election. Some are the children of the old South, the old Confederacy, the backbone of white supremacy. In effect, they are the Kyle Rittenhouse’s, Dylan Roofs, and the Derrick Chauvin’s, the modern-day neo-Nazis, the white militias like the Proud Boys and others, and every racist police officer in America, especially those who condoned the siege of Congress on January 6, 2021. Assuredly, they are politicians like Steve Hawley, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Steven King, Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell.

According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff for General Colin Powell, they are a small part of the regular members of the armed forces who would take to the streets when Trump calls. He was correct, as the investigation into the storming of the capitol continues members of the armed forces have been identified. Need we only look at the crowd who stormed the halls of Congress. They are the white militias who own roughly 30 percent of all guns in this country. They are the great-grandchildren and the great-great-grandchildren of those responsible for over 4,000 black bodies that hanged from the poplar trees on American soil after Reconstruction

A blending of white supremacist ideology and African inferiority was the mantra created by Europeans from the 17^th century to the present. White supremacist historians, philosophers, psychologists, geneticists, and religious leaders were the purveyors of such nonsense. A blending of ideologies and spiritual dysfunction, starting with one person, then spreading through the family, then entire towns, cities, states, countries and across several generations, this infestation spreading inter-generationally through their familial DNA.

We must challenge the acceptable canons of knowledge, which have given cover for such negative imagery of African people. We must acknowledge that the European Enlightenment period provided intellectual cover for the rationalization of slavery. We must continue to give voice to slavery and show its evolution into modern-day society. Through these ripples of time, we must continue to recognize and give voice to the truths that have been buried alive. It will be those voices of truth, past, present and future, generations of African American people assessing and absorbing their true history and vowing never to be victims again. Indeed, it must be white America acknowledging its sinful past while taking responsibility for acts of barbarity. Only then will we understand the underlying psychosocial, material, institutional, and political bases of our oppression.

America did not hear our voices of protest in the 1960s. We warned you then, we marched and shut down college campuses while demanding and implementing African American Studies programs. We knew then that in order to challenge institutionalized racism we had to attack the core of Eurocentric thought. We had to challenge the old racist canons of the period of Enlightenment that abounded in those cloistered halls of learning.

To the young African American warriors of today, our voices were heard in the ’60s, but only through direct action, and the result was the implementation of Africana Studies Departments throughout the country. To understand the underlying disease of institutionalized racism in America, we must continue to put this psychosocial dynamic into a historical perspective. When Europeans began to colonize two-thirds of the planet for financial gain, there was a need to justify their exploits. Their rallying cry became the White Man's Burden. Their God ordained them to ‘civilize’ the darker ‘heathens’ of the world. In the process, they committed atrocious and heinous crimes against humanity.

A turning point in the history of the world had occurred. People of color in general, and Africans, in particular, were the victims. Land was expropriated, and black bodies were enslaved. Subsequently, Europeans colonized information and disseminated illusions of African inferiority. They created complimentary imagery of themselves. They were God-sent; whites became the image of goodness, while they created the derogatory images of Africans. Blackness became evil and connected with the Biblical Ham sham. According to some interpretations, when Noah’s son Ham saw the nakedness of his father, Noah cursed Canaan, his brother, even though it was Ham who saw the nakedness. The story’s original purpose may have been to justify the enslavement of the Canaanite people to the Israelites, but the later narrative morphed into Ham being cursed with black skin.

In addition, of course, Hume and Kant deemed Africans uncivilized and beastly creatures incapable of reasoning. Remember Trump’s comment that all African countries are shit hole countries?

For those in the academic community, it is your responsibility, and it is in America’s interest to unravel these falsehoods, these manufactured illusions of African inferiority. If we are to address the mistakes of yesterday, we must do it so that we may continue with the excavation of truth. We must attack the seeds, the demons of racism no matter where they are, even if it means insisting that white America began to recant the lies, the untruths. I challenge everyone to question the canon and show how the non-truths were developed. If we are to truly put the history of slavery in its proper perspective, we must go back to the Enlightenment period and hold all the Enlightenment thinkers accountable, as well as King James and Queen Elizabeth who wanted to rid their realm of all Negards or Blackmores while financing the Virginia Company and laying the foundation for England's involvement with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Chapter 2

The Colonization of Truth

The images below appeared in the The Evolution of Man (1874 edition) as part of an argument that blacks are evolutionarily close to apes.

Along with the zoo exhibits, visitors could purchase an information guides depicting the African bodies in the exhibits in animalistic terms, e.g. their heights, body types and colorings. The writer of the pamphlet describes our African Ancestors in animalistic terms, describing their bodies, and their ‘colorings’ from ‘red brown to dark black,’ as well likened some to apes in cages nearby’. It also describes them as a ‘race’ that is continuously fighting, stealing, looting, murdering with no remorse. They are also referred to as a ‘primitive’ people, who are resistant to progress, living as ‘hunter gatherers. These exhibitions flourished during World’s Fairs in London, Paris and Berlin during the late 1870s well into the early 20^th century.

As we continue traversing the ripples of time, let us not forget Emperor Constantine's edicts in 325AD, at the Council of Nicaea. The emperor began the process of whitening African images in all biblical figures. Europeans claimed to the world that Africans lived in darkness, waiting for the Europeans to bring light and civilization. As the Catholic Church consolidated its power, most libraries of the known world, Alexandria included, were burned, and religious doctrines seized. In history’s greatest forgery, white Europeans embarked on a destructive and censorship drive that silenced millions of black and brown voices. The murder and book burning, the destruction of temples, statues, inscriptions, and other traces of earlier Egyptian, Nubian and Coptic cultures, eventually led to the virtual ignorance of the Western world about the accomplishments of Kemetic Egypt, and the Kushite empires. All traces of Egyptian religion and Kemetic contributions to civilization were sacrificed at the altar of deceit.

This misrepresentation of African humanity and its cognitive abilities were promoted by the Catholic church in Spanish and Portuguese societies. These misrepresentations were facilitated by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who in 1452 passed the Purity of Blood law, concluding that anyone in Iberian society who could not trace the origins of their four grandparents were not pure breeds and therefore not part of a white civil society. This would complete the cycle of ideas referencing informed 15-century Iberian society about race and slavery with their English counterparts in the Atlantic world. From these ripples of time the European model of race and slavery was taking place. Ultimately creating broadly conceived “European “white” supremacist identities. More specifically, one may ask whether racism was a function of more deeply entrenched ideas that were at the core of Western societ...