When I mentioned to a white female with the Op-Ed Project that my “burning question” in life had to do with the mass incarceration of Black men and how the prison systems of America, under corporate control, had become another institutionalized slave-holding plantation arena reminiscent of its antiquated predecessors, she said “That may or may not be. But you have no way of proving it.”

I told her that as a journalist and writer, I don’t have anything to prove to anyone; but that I most assuredly had a wealth and a cadre of persons who have acknowledged and proven it, one of them being the current Black President of the United States himself. The other, one of many, being Award-winning filmmaker, Rahiem Shabazz of Rasha Entertainment.

I had an opportunity to interview Shabazz about his recently-released film and follow-up to Elementary Genocide, Elementary Genocide 2: The Board of Education v. The Board of Incarceration.

Of all of the educated and socially proficient Black men who have graced America’s landscape, Shabazz has found himself counted amongst the few and the proud who could have rightly been elected President of the Black United States of America, a job for which only he and a hand full of other Black men like him are thoroughly qualified.

There was not one question I “hit” him with, not even questions about his statement of being unapologetically Black, that he did not have an answer for. But he did pay me a high compliment in the process: “These are the kinds of answers only people who are sitting on Oprah’s couch give out.”

We have so wearied of the phrase “school to prison pipeline” that eyes get rolled and shade is thrown left and right these days if we even bring up the topic in public.

However, Shabazz has worked hard, spending a lot of his own time and resources to commit to the message of driving home the way the pipeline works, including who is involved in it, what is involved, when it began, why they are involved in it, and how it works so well that he can likely recite all the numbers and statistics, and even quite a few individual cases, in his sleep. The recent winner of the Best Documentary Award at the Peachtree Village International Film Festival, Shabazz doesn’t seem to be in it to get an A-ward, but a RE-ward. The just reward of seeing this race-specific re-enslavement of Black and brown lives and its hundreds of thousands of miscarriages of justice and judicial misconduct come to its long-awaited and final eternal resting place.

Now that we can answer that white woman’s question and say that it is absolutely proven that the prison corporations are nothing more than a reinvented form of profit-driven investment in slave capital, the burning question facing Black men like Shabazz is “Who is it hurting, truly” and “Why should we, as Black people who don’t commit crimes, even care?”

A better question we should all ask ourselves is “How the hell did this happen…on OUR watch?”

We’ve all been had, duped, deceived, and BAMBOOZLED, but Shabazz  puts it down in humanly scalable film format like nobody’s business. Shabazz, ever-ready with questions he has likely even asked himself in the quietness of dark, gets smack dead to the heart of who it is hurting and why we should care. AND how it happened, ON OUR WATCH.

1. Says Shabazz, on a hunch that I would be hard-pressed to disagree with: More than 60-percent of Black men and women incarcerated in the prison systems across America are not there because they committed a crime, or even because the ones who admit to having done something wrong have committed a crime worthy of the sentencing they received — they are there because someone had already planned for them to be there when they were still in third grade and then set them up in the school systems and jury pools to make certain it happened. These matters had never been left to chance, because statistically-speaking “chances are…” that the profitability margin for incarcerating and enslaving generations of Black and brown Americans, already ramped up since the Reagan economy of the 1980s, is a guarantee of no less than 90-percent jail occupancy at all times. That said, if the government can’t live up to its contractual obligation to make laws conducive to mass incarceration for ANY reason whatsoever, then lawsuits fly. In a world where crime rates have actually gone down and the police forces across America are at least 50-percent responsible for causing crime, they win either way this goes. But what do they want above all else? Free labor. Free SLAVE labor under the GUISE of teaching alleged offenders usable and transferable “job skills training.” But it never turns out that way because (a) There are no jobs available in these areas in which they have been “trained” once they get out, simply because all or nearly all of those jobs have been removed TO the jails and prisons, which is the only place they are readily available at an average rate of $1.10 PER day — which is ridiculous even if it was PER HOUR; and (b) If those jobs were available “on the outside,” these men and women would not be hired for them simply for the factual reason that they HAVE A RECORD OF INCARCERATION. In other words, certain children and their families in Black and brown America have already been counted down and out as part of this future system of incarcerated slavery before they have taken their very first breath. The way the “powers” determine this is similar to the way actuarial science has already figured out how to make the insurance business profitable by using death statistics. “Chances are…” these Black folks and their parents are going to get in trouble and go to jail anyway, so here is what we are going to do about it so we can continue to get rich using taxpayer money instead of earning a true profit for doing good economic business. The Motto: If you can’t beat them or beat it out of them, steal, kill, and destroy.
2. And speaking of stealing, the corporate prison systems of America have absolutely tuned to a fine science the art of getting rich off the poorest Black and brown people within its reach, and all around the world for that matter. Once the profiteering corporate racket was inside and cashing in on taxpayer dollars with almost ZERO tax consequences to themselves, its owners also decided that there were other ways to get even RICHER THAN that, off the backs of the poorest amongst us who are worth BILLIONS as a concerted whole and don’t seem to be aware of it themselves. Telephone calls, mobile phones, internet access, money and wire transfers, commissary and vending machine holdings, sock sales, cigarette sales … and, get this … inside sales of marijuana and other street drugs. THE SAME DRUGS THEY WERE ARRESTED AND PUT IN JAIL FOR POSSESSING AND SELLING. Say it’s not a set-up if we’ve ever seen one now.

Now back to the question of “why should we non-crime-committing Black Americans care” …

Because, he says matter-of-factly, we are allowing the slow time-released death and destruction of our families, our children, and our future. And I add … when they run out of stat-driven Negroes to steal from, kill and destroy, we’re the only ones left.

But I am the same person who said, back in the 1980s, that if Black people did not look out for themselves, Ronald Reagan and his Wall Street cronies were going to have our pretentious pompous over-bloated behinds back on slave plantations again, and was laughed at … THEN. Now, the sobering truth has become a reality and it is no longer funny.

And here’s a twist — it has now become a hard-hitting reality with the white middle class, as well.

The moment Wall Street USA ran out of Black people to play Trading Places with, even as race-privileged whites who knew of it ignored it and told us we were ‘paranoid’ because it wasn’t happening to them, they went straight to the heart of middle class America … severely impacting and nearly crippling the nation’s economy while they were at it. It was the ad hoc reason that by the late new millennium, “that one” got elected President by a majority of white American middle-class voters.

At no time in America’s racist and darkened socially deviant history was it better known and proven that the “chickens, indeed, come home to roost.”

By the same token, as soon as the almighty white supremacist “they” run out of poverty-stricken and socially maligned and miseducated Negroes and Black folk to steal from, jail, destroy, and kill, they are coming for the rest of us. Notwithstanding all of the media hype and stereotypes about Blacks and crime, perpetuated by none other than white Americans, it has happened before and it is only a matter of time before it happens again. #blackwallstreet Tick tock…

Rahiem Shabazz on Facebook

 

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In Memoriam of an educated, employed, well-dressed and sane Black woman who lost her singular Black life to an abusive police force traffic stop: #sandrabland. Say her name. #kennethwalker. Say his.