Savant's Response to a Critique.

No, your comment was not relevant to the discussion either of the general topic of thread, nor of the discussion at hand at the point you made the comment. NO ONE said that Obama himself unleashed police or military forces against the Black Community. At least I (to whom your post was directed) certainly didn't. I would have challenged that claim myself if I noticed someone making it. Hence it seems that you somehow misinterpreted something I did say and committed the Straw Man fallacy, or changed the subject and treated us to an annoying Red Herring. I'm not in the habit of agreeing or disagreeing on a non-issue. As for my being an activist, that's a fact which contradicts your claim that I'm out of touch with the masses of Blacks from whom I actually spring. As for the 1960s, I was a child and not old enough to be an activist. If you need a clue, Obama and I were in college and then grad school (maybe Law school for Obama) around about the same time, at least within a very few years. Small kids---at least in Baltimore (Birmingham being a different situation) rarely became activists. And if my activism is the fact from which you deem me (in classic right wing rhetoric) as a "throwback " to the 1960s, well that reveals your own limited understanding both about contemporary social conditions and the continuing struggle for social justice. Also, "s__" doesn't remain the same. Racism evolves, largely shedding older forms and taking on new forms. This partly what Michelle Alexander is talking about in THE NEW JIM CROW. Economic and class inequalities have actually GROWN since the time Dr. King wanted to form a Poor Peoples Campaign to correct this. And I'm not so sure that worsening of economic conditions in this society isn't connected to the intensifying of police violence in the Black community--perhaps "warning shots" for what may be in store for the rest of America if Americans do not rise up against the police terror in Black and Brown communities. Furthermore, civil rights even in the traditional sense is under attack: the Supreme Court's 2013 striking down of the ENFORCEMENT provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and lo and behold even the Fair Housing Act of 1968, signed by Johnson roughly a week of King's death, is not being challenged at the Supreme Court level. Both racial and class inequalities have widened, and an increasingly militarized police (which not even the 1963 Birmingham & Selma campaign had to face) confronted NONVIOLENT protestors in Ferguson. There's the massive national security and surveillance state apparatus which grows under both Republican and Democratic administrations, and growing corporate domination of American political and cultural life. And you suggest to me that the time of social protest is passed, that protest and social struggles are a thing of the past, a "throwback to the 60s"? What planet are you from?

 -Savant