26 April 2018

Thoughts on Us, Silence, and the Cosby Verdict

What's disconcerting about the verdict against Bill Cosby and I don't know how many trials that have led up to this, which itself seems unprecedented, is the lack of debate from the Black intelligentsia and so-called Black leadership. Like someone noted in a different vein how all of our international law school theorists from the best, most-renowned Ivy Leagues, have been deaf, dumb and mute about US violations of international law, like the recent US attack against the sovereign state, and UN member, Syria.

The silence of our public Black intellectuals about Cosby in particular, about the illegal wars, about US foreign policy priorities, about the missing Black men from the US economy, etc., in general, signal our dire situation having worsened.

The Black radical tradition is not nurtured by silence or default complicity with white power.And like the Left's current romance with "humanitarian intervention" and salvation at the hands of the Democratic Party, as if imperialism and Wall Street no longer existed, as if capitalism had set aside its mechanism to do, for once, a social good instead of its habitual harm, the Black voices that had joined the mob against Cosby seemed to totally forget the orchestrated and escalating attacks on Black men that have gone on since the first African rebelled against this apartheid system centuries ago.

It was as if COINTELPRO and the sustained assaults on the Black radical leadership by local, state, and federal authorities had never, ever happened.

Some will have read this far and asked: "debate what?" Bill Cosby is guilty. TODAY he was found guilty in a court by a jury, but over the last several years the guilt was determined by the media, those who called attention to this minor fact were said to be diminishing the testimonies of the women, and the only articulate voice on his side seemed to be his stellar lawyer, Monique Pressley. She would not have fallen asleep had she been on the case, as his new lawyer apparently did. I even think the case might have taken a different turn had she been retained. Where was the vigorous debate, where was the suspicion based on an historical record? Why the automatic complicity?

To charge the indicted in one case, the prosecutors kept widening and widening the net of "circumstances" to encompass cases that could never be tried. Was Cosby's new lawyer asleep as this happened, or was he helpless against a justice system that had to produce a specific result?

I do not know what this means for Bill Cosby now, but I know the Black voices within the range of these words must continue to awaken and utilize their consciences, as the best of us have done, regardless what the state deemed appropriate and expeditious. We cannot drift to the right, like so many on the Left have done and are doing.

Summon the spirits of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Paul Robeson, Chris Hani, Walter Rodney, Claudia Jones, Thomas Sankara, Harry Haywood, Audley Moore, Louise Patterson ... ibaye baye tonu