Both Trayvon and Mumia will be represented by scores of activists
converging on Washington, D.C., on April 24, in an “Occupy the Justice
Department” event, which joins the “Occupy” movement to the resistance
movement against the criminalization of youth of color.
Trayvon and Mumia have been respective catalysts for national consciousness about police violence, prosecutorial misconduct, and also the dramatic seven-fold increase, since the 1970s, of the U.S. prison population to over 2.4 million people, more than than sixty percent of whom are people of color.
The accelerated criminalization of people of color and the poor not only feeds the prisons, it fattens a government and corporate apparatus that grows top-heavy with the wealth concentrated in the economic portfolios of the top “one percent.” As University of California sociologist, Loïc Wacquant, observes in his book, Punishing the Poor, the rise of the prisons marks a new penal state, where an ethos of surveillance and practices by police and courts “replaces the social state; . . . undermining its educational and assistance missions by devouring their budgets and stealing their staff.”
Trayvon and Mumia are just two Americans among many others, particularly youth of color, and many dissenters, who have been under surveillance and face its deadly effects. We Are All Suspects Now is the title of a book by ColorLines executive editor, Tram Nguyen, writing of immigrant communities after 9/11 and the problems faced by ever larger numbers of us in today’s surveillance state. Just in the last two months, a litany of names of dead youth now haunt us, all slain in conflict with police: Ramarley Graham, Justin Sipp, Kendrec McDade, Dante Price, Rekia Boyd, Kenneth Smith, Shaima Alawadi, Ervin Jefferson. Still fresh are the memories of other people of color similarly lost: Amadou Diallo, Vincent Chin, Michael Cho, Sean Bell, Anthony Biaz, Oscar Grant, Fong Lee, Tyisha Miller, Matthew Shepard, James Byrd, Mark Duggan, Eleanor Bumpurs, and more...
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Trayvon and Mumia have been respective catalysts for national consciousness about police violence, prosecutorial misconduct, and also the dramatic seven-fold increase, since the 1970s, of the U.S. prison population to over 2.4 million people, more than than sixty percent of whom are people of color.
The accelerated criminalization of people of color and the poor not only feeds the prisons, it fattens a government and corporate apparatus that grows top-heavy with the wealth concentrated in the economic portfolios of the top “one percent.” As University of California sociologist, Loïc Wacquant, observes in his book, Punishing the Poor, the rise of the prisons marks a new penal state, where an ethos of surveillance and practices by police and courts “replaces the social state; . . . undermining its educational and assistance missions by devouring their budgets and stealing their staff.”
Trayvon and Mumia are just two Americans among many others, particularly youth of color, and many dissenters, who have been under surveillance and face its deadly effects. We Are All Suspects Now is the title of a book by ColorLines executive editor, Tram Nguyen, writing of immigrant communities after 9/11 and the problems faced by ever larger numbers of us in today’s surveillance state. Just in the last two months, a litany of names of dead youth now haunt us, all slain in conflict with police: Ramarley Graham, Justin Sipp, Kendrec McDade, Dante Price, Rekia Boyd, Kenneth Smith, Shaima Alawadi, Ervin Jefferson. Still fresh are the memories of other people of color similarly lost: Amadou Diallo, Vincent Chin, Michael Cho, Sean Bell, Anthony Biaz, Oscar Grant, Fong Lee, Tyisha Miller, Matthew Shepard, James Byrd, Mark Duggan, Eleanor Bumpurs, and more...
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