For the party, everything, for the people, nothing.
It is, to say the least, somewhat disturbing to see how impassioned are the president and the first lady in bringing out the black vote for democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. One wonders where that passion was during the eight years of a blue riot against black life.
Barack Obama rarely summoned the energies we’ve just seen to speak out against the vicious repression of black people often at the hands of white cops. Nor Michelle been heard on this score.
They have been largely quiet, controlled, sedate even, and given the white madness and hatreds bubbling in millions of American hearts, we can understand that sedateness, that quiet reserve. It smells like fear.
But those latent energies have been unleashed, and they are now rushing like rivers to Republican candidate Donald J. Trump.
For many black millennials, the prospect of voting for a Clinton is about as attractive as cuddling up with a rattlesnake. They know of the Clinton sponsoring of mass incarceration, their ferocity regarding juvenile so-called “super predators,” and the Clinton embrace of the anti-habeas corpus law, the AEDPA—a law, by the way, that even some Republican jurists like 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kazinsky, who, in a recent law review article, called for its repeal, writing, “It is cruel, unjust, and unnecessary law that effectively removes federal judges as safeguards against miscarriages of justice.”
For the millennials, they don’t hear the entreaties, the pleas, or the promises of Obama. They’ve lived through eight years.
From imprison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
