As said by the late member of the Black Liberation Army and a Black revolutionist, Assata Shakur, “We need to be weapons of mass construction, weapons of mass love. It’s not enough just to change the system. We need to change ourselves.” She believed we must create a world community, built on a system of socialist ideals and understanding.
To those who have never heard of her and wonder why the name might sound familiar, she was the aunt and godmother of rapper Tupac Shakur. Tupac and Assata were two members of the most influential family in the Black Panther Movement: the Shakur family.
Although a controversial figure to some, Assata was a tool of knowledge, progress and humanitarianism that is still needed today. Despite the fact she and many other revolutionaries are still demonized in the public eye, the retrospective that comes from the death of figures like her brings to light how the roots of our nation have not truly changed.
There is a familiarity in the current treatment of immigrants in this country. Slave patrols, first introduced in 1704 in South Carolina, lasted for 150 years. They technically ended after the abolishment of slavery; however, the modern-day police force is a direct descendant of slave patrols.
Slave patrols were charged with capturing Black people off the street and tracking down runaway enslaved people and forcefully bringing them back to their masters. This would often be a violent process and result in harsh punishments, detailed in the Fugitive Slave Acts of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. These punishments included lashings, brandings, mutilation and limb amputation to prevent escape. States such as South Carolina had very severe and strict punishments.
Freed Black citizens were too afraid of traveling around the country or voicing their opinions, especially in the South, due to the fear of retaliation or being kidnapped and forced into enslavement.
The constant fear of being snatched from your home or on your walk to work or school has been part of American culture for centuries. The creation of concentration camps to hold those deemed a threat or “foreign” is not new to the U.S., and wasn’t a new concept during World War II.
According to History.com, the Nazis were inspired by the cruelty of Jim Crow laws when committing atrocities in America. Despite media outlets comparing Immigration and Customs Enforcement camps to Nazi Germany, America has its own unique history with concentration camps that predates that particularly evil era. We have to stop comparing the current state of America to Nazi Germany and othering it when the Nazis were energized by segregation and Jim Crow.
In Natchez, Mississippi, The Devil’s Punchbowl, the encampment for newly freed Black citizens, resulted in the rumored forced labor of Black men. The enclosing of the camp in a cement wall also caused the starvation of thousands of women and children. In one year, an estimated 20,000 Black citizens died at the camp, according to the African American Registry.
Many have gone to say the Devil’s Punchbowl was a refugee camp, and the rumors of it being a concentration camp are misguided. Misguided or not, the details involved in the story were commonplace in the Jim Crow South, which inspired popular art including Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.”
Americans have seen numerous massacres by the government and the systematic mistreatment of numerous ethnic groups, including Japanese people, especially Okinawans. U.S. troops seized control of the Okinawa islands in 1945, and later again in John F. Kennedy’s Strategic Hamlet Program, which forcibly put millions of Vietnamese people in reinforced villages with the intention of preventing them from helping their government.
We are seeing Imiigration and Customs Enforcement use the same tactics America historically used to terrorize its own people, and the ridiculously demonized, during heightened periods of its history. The kidnapping of legal citizens into forced encampments, to be subjected to inhuman and harsh conditions, violence, sexual assault and death, is only as shocking as the sky is blue.
We have witnessed centuries of revolts and revolutions, yet we continue to march for the same progress. Most frustratingly, no one wants to take accountability for the centuries of violence the people in power in this country have propagated, and convinced us to do to each other.
Americans, particularly middle and lower-class white Americans, have been puppeteered to continue being oppressors by people in power. Turning these people against their own needs, brainwashing them with the hope of a new American dream, turning their sons into their personally designed militias to distract from the economic greed of the top 1%; a tale as old as time, in this case, as America itself.
Sending military forces to stop uprisings turns peaceful demonstrations into massacres; we’ve seen this with “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama, and now with the protests in Minneapolis.
There is an irritation that comes from the constant distancing of our own actions from the current state of America. The U.S. government has always brutalized its citizens. It has always kidnapped and snatched innocent people from their homes. It has always been the perpetrator of egregious violence and trauma.
ICE is the newest form of what has always been. We are faced with the decision to either continue to demonize the homegrown radicals, like Assata, who put fear in the hearts of these systems, or finally decide to follow in their footsteps.
As a nation, we have to diagnose what in our foundation is allowing us to perpetuate such pain on our own people, and decide what version of America we want to collect.
ICE is bigger than its individual cruelty. ICE melts, systems crash and institutions burn.
We have to decide if we want to be the flame in the fire that births a new, better nation.
Nyla Gilbert is a junior studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note the opinions expressed in this column do not represent those of The Post. Want to talk to Nyla Gilbert about her column? Email her at ng972522@ohio.edu.
