Hurricane - Bob Dylan

 In 1975 Racism was roaring in an era without live video and social medial  We had to count on movements and fund raisers.  The news papers focused on Dylan and his his band and less on the tragic  black man falsely accused.    His fundraiser raised a mere $100,000 for Hurricane's defense.   He never played it again at concerts because it was too long  for his majority white audiences and NOT ENTERTAINING at concerts.  White people were not interested then.  

This year of 2020 saw the George Floyd, not a boxing prize fighter but a common criminal with a dubious past raises over $6M.  He was surely a victim of police brutality.  There is a lot to the story, Today white people cringe to be accused of white privilege.  To all those with lp albums, pull out your Dylan vinyl, dust it off and set down the needle.  Its a great beat in classic Dylan style.  Below are the words, in case they never set in on you then;   what's different?  As yourself a few questions:

1. What is white privilege?

2.  Is it a matter of timing, measured by events not ticks on a clock?

3,  Have we evolved?

4.  Is BLM making a difference?

5.  Are black people at large making a difference?  

6.  Is there a collection of other social injustice movements coming to a peak?

7.  Are black people at large behaving like the citizens they want to be treated like (Rebecca Solnit), Whose Story is This)?

8.  In Solint's book Hope in the Dark about activism, is BLM now on center stage and in the light working for the greater good?

9.  Visit On Being  On Being with Krista Tippett - The On Being Project  Listen to Krista Tippetts' recent interviews ask yourself: is your thinking from the heart changing?

10.  Anything else?

Hurricane

[Verse 1]

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night
Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood
Cries out, “My God, they killed them all!”

[Hook]
Here comes the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For something that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world

[Verse 2]
Three bodies lyin' there
Does Patty see
And another man named Bello
Moving around mysteriously
“I didn’t do it,” he says
And he throws up his hands
“I was only robbin' the register
I hope you understand

[Verse 3]
I saw them leaving,” he says, and he stops
“One of us had better call up the cops”
And so Patty calls the cops
And they arrive on the scene
With their red lights flashin'
In the hot New Jersey night

[Verse 4]
Meanwhile, far away in another part of town
Rubin Carter and a couple of friends are drivin' around
Number one contender for the middleweight crown
Had no idea what kinda shit was about to go down

[Verse 5]
When a cop pulled him over to the side of the road
Just like the time before and the time before that
In Paterson that’s just the way things go
If you’re black
You might as well not show up on the street
Unless you want to draw the heat

[Verse 6]
Alfred Bello had a partner and he had a rap for the cops
Him and Arthur Dexter Bradley were just out prowling around
He said, “I saw two men running out
They looked like middleweights
They jumped into a white car with out-of-state plates”

[Verse 7]
And Miss Patty Valentine just nodded her head
Cop said, “Wait a minute, boys, this one’s not dead”
So they took him to the infirmary
And though this man could hardly see
They told him that he could identify the guilty men

[Verse 8]
Four in the morning and they haul Rubin in
They take him to the hospital and they brought him upstairs
The wounded man looks up through his one dying eye
Says, “Why did you bring him in here for?
He ain't the guy!”

[Hook]
Here’s the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For something that he never done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world

[Verse 9]
Four months later, the ghettos are in flame
Rubin’s in South America, fighting for his name
While Arthur Dexter Bradley’s still in the robbery game
And the cops are putting the screws to him
Lookin' for somebody to blame

[Verse 10]
“Remember that murder that happened in a bar?”
“Remember you said you saw the getaway car?”
“You think you’d like to play ball with the law?”
“Think it might-a been that fighter that you saw
Running that night?”
“Don’t forget that you are white”

[Verse 11]
Arthur Dexter Bradley said, “I’m really not sure”
The cops said, “A poor boy like you could use a break
We got you for the motel job
And we’re talking to your friend Bello
Now you don’t want to have to go back to jail
Be a nice fellow

[Verse 12]
You’ll be doing society a favor
That sonofabitch is brave and gettin' braver
We want to put his ass in stir
We want to pin this triple murder
On him
He ain’t no Gentleman Jim”

[Verse 13]
Rubin could take a man out with just one punch
But he never did like to talk about it all that much
"It’s my work", he’d say, "and I do it for pay
And when it’s over I’d just as soon go on my way"

[Verse 14]
Up to some paradise
Where the trout streams flow and the air is nice
And ride a horse along a trail
But then they took him to the jailhouse
Where they try to turn a man
Into a mouse

[Verse 15]
All of Rubin’s cards were marked in advance
The trial was a pig-circus
He never had a chance
The judge made Rubin’s witnesses
Drunkards from the slums
To the white folks who watched
He was a revolutionary bum

[Verse 16]
And to the black folks he was just a crazy nigger
No one doubted that he pulled the trigger
And though they could not produce the gun
The D.A. said he was the one
Who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed

[Verse 17]
Rubin Carter was falsely tried
The crime was murder “one,”
Guess who testified?
Bello and Bradley and they both baldly lied
And the newspapers, they all went along for the ride

[Verse 18]
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed
To live in a land
Where justice is a game

[Verse 19]
Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties
Are free to drink Martinis
And watch the sun rise
While Rubin sits like Buddha
In a ten-foot cell
An innocent man in a living hell

[Outro]
Yes that’s the story of the Hurricane
But it won’t be over till they clear his name
And give him back the time he’s done
Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been
The champion of the world

The New Jim Crow

By Michelle Alexander

This book is written by an attorney as though she is delivering closing argument.   Michelle Alexander is a black civil rights attorney.  Her case:  Black People-v-The Criminal Justice System.  At issue is the war on drugs.  Her modus operandi, connects the dots, events chronologically near and far, with statistical argument to demonstrate unconscious racial discrimination of black people.  Her central argument is racism defined uniquely by her to make her case.  Her definition is that white privileged males will orchestrate every legal measure to keep the black person in his box.  She starts with slavery and then draws the string of argument through the Civil War, the Jim Crow Laws, through the Civil Rights Movement, to the War on Drugs.  In every key event through history she cites the opposing view whereby the argument, attempts to expose a common strategy of the ‘privileged white man’.  That strategy she alleges exists in all levels of government, of which she extends to all white society as racist.  In the end on page 255 she advocates an all out war; pitting black, brown, yellow, women, any minority against the white man.  That she advocates this dichotomy and considering that Barak Obama endorses it may explain some of the racial divide brought to violent endings over the past eight years.

 

Once again I find a book advocating an ‘Us-v-Them’ situation advocating for the “Us” and taking absolutely no responsibility for where the ‘Us” contributed to the problem.  You can expect this as it was written by a lawyer trained to argue for things in anything but an objective way.  Unfortunately in her argument there are many atrocities inflicted upon the black man in the prosecution of the War on Drugs, of which every President from Nixon to Obama endorses, that only leave the reader angry.  In the course of this one sided story, there exists no viable solution.  All this book does is agitates one side and alienates the other side.  An inspiring investigative reporter could be inspired to write to the jury of the American people the opposing argument with an effort to unite people rather than divide people.

Chapter one is basically an introduction chapter looking to frame the subject.  The author executes on the classic stats strategy by flooding the reader with stats.  So many stats that the average reader won’t fact check and presume she is accurate.  Many stats are marginally related to the points she makes.  Some stats have no relevance.  Her aim is to statistically form a foundation of racism, and the agenda of the ‘white privileged male. ‘If the reader takes the bait, the he/she is easily led through 200 more pages of story to conclude; yep we need to wage that war.

Chapter two, The Lockdown is a chronology of the mindset of our legislative branch of government from the founding fathers to current day.  A continuous theme is that whenever there is opposing argument in favor of civil liberty decisions, those dissenting positions are the seeds to a rebirth of the problem that was decided and voted on.  Jim Crow after the Civil War, in her mind extends right up to the Civil Rights movement which is contrary to Wiki.  She advocates that the seeds from slavery laws find rebirth to refortify a sense of a caste for black people.  This is classic lawyer strategy to argue a case, they are taught this in law school.  The dissenting view is written to fight another day.  The flaw in her strategy is that the dissenting view is not direct extracted from any formal legal case, but rather her own version of what the dissenting views were.   The only person to challenge this is the reader, and I highly recommend the reader do so.  In my paperback version, I speculate that every third page is highlighted in yellow with a margin note challenging something said by the author in to question.

Chapter three called The Color of Justice there is a chronology of the criminal justice system from round up to sentencing and rectification.  This chapter brings some ugly truths about the War on Drugs. The war on drugs starts with the roundup, including random searches, SWAT intrusions, and property seizure to fund the war.  The author writes of stiff sentencing biased toward blacks, and the three strike rule, where the third misdemeanor means a long period of jail time.  Contrarily wars on drugs in countries like Netherlands and Portugal find this whole strategy ineffective.  So rather than simply play the race card and sing the song of poor black me, Michele missed the opportunity to propose a real solution, a solution this does not pit ‘Us-v-Them”  After all no one, black or white should have to deal with  stigma of a felony for social crimes.

Chapter four, The Cruel Hand she provides argument for the closing of the doors by the courts.  In many cases she cites the Supreme Court where rulings are based on technical merit of law.  Michele  Alexander finds not coincident but purposeful agenda that sweeps blacks into prison.  She cites targeting by police that is entangled with the war on crime, any crime.  What she misses out on is this war is producing safe neighborhoods because the criminals are moving to other locations.  Unconscious Racism is one of her tenants.  She is banking she has made a convincing argument in previous chapters.  If she hasn’t then this colored blind chapter looses steam.  It is unfortunate because had she remained objective in her argument, there are many points that stand for a course correction.  She provides a convincing argument on page 124 for the root cause, being social economic plight of black people.  But as a lawyer she sees her fight solely in the legal system.  What can blacks do to help themselves?  She makes convincing argument in some places and then contradicting argument elsewhere, where in the end she concedes defeat in her fight against the criminal justice system.

Chapter five, The New Jim Crow is about the color of justice and again plays the race card in the targeting of black people in the war on drugs.  She sets up the reader with horrible stories about individuals and then uses selective stats to make the stories larger than life.  If you took the bait earlier on, you are her new soldier in the Black Lives Matter Movement.  But then she goes on to cite Black people including Obama who are also blind to the targeting of black people; which totally rebukes her thesis on white privilege racism.  In the end there exists some merit in her argument.  However she misses opportunity to close the deal.  Where she is strong in stats in some places, she misses key stats that hurt her case

Chapter six the Fire This Time speaks to the experience felons’ experience, which in my other reading exists in all races, not just black.  The denial of rights once having served time is indeed a problem.  However, she spends too much time on the exclusion factor and NO time on efforts to recover.  There are books and NPO’s dedicated to this cause, yet nothing along this line from Michele Alexander. She even speaks to family members that won’t take their family felon in for risk of eviction.  One could conclude that perhaps they are the best judge of their family member.  She misses the opportunity to expound on NPOs efforts to help felons on their feet. 

Half way through the book I highlighted a paragraph and wrote a margin note.   

“None of this is to suggest that those who break the law bear no responsibility for their conduct or exist merely as “products of their environment.”  To overcome seemingly impossible odds – would be to deny an essential element of their humanity.  We as human beings, are not simply organism or animals responding to stimuli.  We have a higher self, a capacity for transcendence.”

My margin note:  Good theme – now re-write your book.

In my conclusion I suggest two things.  First when you make a social justice issue about us and them, justice is near impossible to achieve.  Second is the war on drugs has been and continues to be a failure that spans all people.  While black people have carried the lion’s share of the tragedies of the war, Michelle Alexander’s thesis is way off the mark, short sighted and will never bring the social justice entitled to ALL people.  May I suggest watching this movie and rethinking the thinly veiled theme of this book. Breaking -Taboo- Truth About the War on Drugs.

 https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Taboo-Truth-About-Drugs/dp/B014Y1NSN6