{"id":21491,"date":"2018-02-19T08:36:06","date_gmt":"2018-02-19T15:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=21491"},"modified":"2018-02-19T08:36:06","modified_gmt":"2018-02-19T15:36:06","slug":"black-lives-matter-co-founder-says-its-time-to-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2018\/02\/black-lives-matter-co-founder-says-its-time-to-act\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Lives Matter co-founder says it’s time to act"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"King\"<\/a>

ShaunKing.org<\/p>

\u201cWe don\u2019t have a broken justice system,\u201d Shaun King said Sunday night in Missoula. \u201cWe have a justice system intended to criminalize an entire race.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

If you see what\u2019s happening today in America and do nothing, then you also likely would have done nothing during the Civil Rights Movement, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter told the University of Montana\u2019s Black Solidarity Summit Sunday night.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere we are right now requires us to act,\u201d said Shaun King, a columnist for The Intercept and writer-in-residence at Harvard Law School\u2019s Fair Punishment Project. \u201cIf we are waiting for a hero figure to get us out of here, that\u2019s not how this works.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in a dip in the quality of humanity right now,\u201d he said. \u201cWhere we are is deeply problematic, historically problematic. In your gut, you know something is wrong with where we are as a country right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it won\u2019t be easy to climb out of the abyss.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

History shows that, \u201cfirst and foremost,\u201d it takes \u201ca lot of effort to get out of these dips,\u201d the former high school history teacher said. It can take years, or decades, even centuries. The toll can be overwhelming.<\/p>\n

The Civil War took a million lives, King told more than 500 people gathered at the University Center, about equally divided among UM students and local citizens. The Civil Rights Movement took the lives of key American leaders.<\/p>\n

And now? The United States has the world\u2019s highest rate of imprisonment. Last year, 102 fully unarmed black American men, women and children were killed by police officers \u2014 a year in which the nation elected a white man president despite his verbal assaults on people of color, his verbal and alleged sexual assaults on women, his hostile treatment of immigrants and refugees, and his disrespect for a highly decorated and much-revered former prisoner of war.<\/p>\n

King led his audience through the chain of events that led to what he sees as the current \u201cdip,\u201d warning that it could be decades, even centuries, before humans regain their compassion and decency.<\/p>\n

His theory dates to 2014, when King realized that he and others \u201cwere up against something very different\u201d in their campaign for justice for the 1,000 people killed that year by police.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot one officer was held accountable\u201d for the deaths, he said. \u201c0.0 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not the officer who choked an unarmed Eric Garner to death. Not the officer who shot and killed John Crawford on an unfounded report of an active shooter in a Walmart toy aisle. Not the Ferguson, Missouri, officer who shot and killed an unarmed Michael Brown.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had three, four, five people a day being killed by police,\u201d King said. \u201cWe began organizing and protesting, and I looked these families in the eye and said they would have justice. Because I believed that if I gave something everything and surrounded myself with people who gave it everything, that we would succeed. I could not imagine that in every one of the cases there would be no justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>That same year, King took a mandatory class in historiography as part of his master\u2019s degree requirements. That\u2019s where he learned about the German professor Leopold Von Ranke, the father of the study of history. Others wrote about the past or talked about the past, but Von Ranke made it an academic discipline.<\/p>\n

But what was most important about Von Ranke\u2019s work was his assembling of the world\u2019s first detailed timeline of history, and the unexpected trend he discovered.<\/p>\n

Von Ranke created the timeline by collecting the stories of people from throughout history. Every hero. Every villain. His assumption was that human beings were getting better and better and better.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not what he found.<\/p>\n

\u201cVon Ranke had confused the steady improvement of technology with the steady improvement of humanity,\u201d King said. \u201cThe gadgets were getting better \u2014 technology, systems of transportation, systems of medicine, systems of communication. But the people weren\u2019t getting better.\u201d<\/p>\n

While a generation might live in peace in a world where people respected boundaries and their fellow human beings, subsequent generations would fall into a decline.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was always up and down,\u201d King said. \u201cHuman beings never seemed to learn the lessons of previous generations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Von Ranke\u2019s greatest fear was for the day when \u201ctechnology was stellar and the people were horrible.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that, in King\u2019s estimation, is where humanity finds itself today.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow else do we explain 300 years of the slave trade? Or the Holocaust \u2014 millions of people snatched from their homes and killed? How else do we explain the Rwandan genocide \u2014 a million people hacked to death? Entire cities where nothing was left but bones?<\/p>\n

\u201cHow else do we explain what happened last week in Florida? Is that our best? I\u2019m not buying it, and you know who else isn\u2019t buying it? The kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA man kicked out a window of a hotel in Las Vegas and shot 541 people, and what did we do about it?\u201d he asked. \u201cNothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s election is a symptom of the \u201cdip,\u201d King said, not the cause. The country was already in the decline.<\/p>\n

King\u2019s expansion on Von Ranke\u2019s theory holds that whenever a nation or a society introduces an innovation that disturbs the status quo, there is always a backlash.<\/p>\n

The Civil War ended slavery as we knew it \u2014 the innovation, then came the backlash. Lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow.<\/p>\n

Then came the Civil Rights Act \u2014 the innovation, and the backlash, devised by Richard Nixon\u2019s henchmen, who feared Republicans would never win another election after the Civil Rights Movement succeeded.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat can we do to criminalize blackness?\u201d they asked. \u201cWhat laws currently exist that we could apply only to African-Americans? And what new laws can we create, only to apply to blacks?\u201d<\/p>\n

Their answer, King said. \u201cThe War on Drugs, a campaign designed to criminalize an entire race of people, black people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before 1974, the U.S. prison population never exceeded 200,000. With the War on Drugs came an explosion of selective arrests, prosecutions and imprisonments, until that population hit 1.5 million in 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have a broken justice system,\u201d King said. \u201cWe have a justice system intended to criminalize an entire race.\u201d No other country incarcerates so many people.<\/p>\n

King recently initiated a new effort to elect progressives to the nation\u2019s 2,400 county prosecutor posts, an attempt to reduce the targeted prosecution of blacks and the overall U.S. prison population<\/p>\n

The most recent innovation in America that sparked a backlash? The election of President Barack Obama.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have 43 white male presidents, and then we get real innovative,\u201d King said. \u201cWe elect a black man, one of the most unique men in the history of America, a black man whose story is like no other. And the backlash begins.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s election \u201cirritated a lot of people,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it irritated one man in particular \u2014 Donald Trump.\u201d And thus began Trump\u2019s attempt to discredit Obama by claiming he was not an American.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe whole thing was a farce,\u201d King said. \u201cBut for eight years in a row, hate crimes in American increased, and they continued to increase last year. All because after 43 white men, we elected a black man as our president.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus King\u2019s call to action as he travels the country \u2014 to 35 states so far and 100 college campuses \u2014 and his frequent criticism of the Democratic Party for what he sees as inaction and incompetence. Progressives have fared no better \u2014 \u201cwe\u2019re just a bunch of broke, hopeful people.\u201d<\/p>\n

To make change happen, King said, you must organize a group of people, energize those people, devise a comprehensive plan, and raise a significant amount of money.<\/p>\n

The National Rifle Association understands and achieves those four elements, he said. \u201cThey are amazingly successful at what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The needed change must start locally, King said, and it\u2019s in America\u2019s towns and on college campuses that he sees the most reason for hope.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not going to happen on the national level, and maybe not even on the state level,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has to start right here.\u201d<\/p>\n

King\u2019s talk was the culmination of a weekend-long summit celebrating the 50th anniversary of UM\u2019s Black Studies program and Black Student Union, the third-oldest in the United States.<\/i><\/p>\n

Sherry Devlin is a longtime Missoula journalist who writes\u00a0occasional stories for\u00a0Missoula Current<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0where this story originally appeared.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you see what\u2019s happening today in America and do nothing, then you also likely would have done nothing during the Civil Rights Movement, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter told the University of Montana\u2019s Black Solidarity Summit Sunday night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":21492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[6772,6771,63],"class_list":["post-21491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-montana","category-news","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-shaun-king","tag-university-of-montana","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21491"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21493,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21491\/revisions\/21493"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}