[col. writ. 4/27/14] © ’14 Mumia Abu-Jamal
In every capital, in city halls, in the offices of police chiefs, in courts common and supreme, dark faces sit, bearing titles of apparent power.
Their presence suggests the rise of an abandoned class, the bright and shining avatars of progress.
Any yet, as this image unfolds, how can it coexist amidst the dire and desperate straits of millions in Black America, who, despite this era of colorful ‘progress’, their lives are marked by seeming helplessness?
Schools are disappearing like morning dew; cops are a maddened pestilence which dogs Black life and Black movement; and the courts of the land seem conditioned to damn and condemn every Black accused who dares enter their icy realm.
If this is progress, what can failure look like?
Black faces, in high places, puppets of a power not their own.
They add to the miseries of Black life; not its relief.
Like African despots of the post-colonial era, ‘trained’ in Europe, they serve other masters, for their people are but another form of prey.
-© ‘14maj