The sound of rage and fury in the U.S.A.

Racism in the United States is as American as apple pie. And now American cities, like Dallas, reverberate with rage and fury, reflecting the alienation of blacks.

Social order can only be maintained where there is legitimacy, or a perception of it. White police forces across the U.S., have lost their legitimacy, if they ever had any, within the black community given last summer’s killing spree directed against young black men, and more recent events.

They are an occupying army like the French in the Casbah, or the Israeli’s in the West Bank. Rather than serving and protecting the community they act like some Latin American death squad. The dangers of their job hardly justify their self-evident racism, or their unwarranted and indiscriminate use of lethal force.

During 2015 in the U.S., 990 blacks were killed by the police. The militarization of American police forces compounds this situation. Statistics clearly show that European police rarely, if ever, draw or use their weapons.

Does any one seriously doubt a casual link between Minnesota and Louisiana, and what happened in Dallas?

Some might say that what happened in Dallas was retaliation or payback, or “an eye for an eye”; others might call it selfdefense.

The black community In the mid-late 1960s organized itself into various organizations to promote their civil rights and civil liberties, ranging from the moderate NAACP, CORE (I was an organizer), Martin Luther King’s SCLC, to the more militant tendencies in the Black Nationalist or Black Power movements.

What separated these groups was the difference in tactics, ranging from King’s non-violent civil disobedience to the more militant Black Panther’s emphasis on self-help and selfdefense. Starting in 1968 the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, unilaterally initiated a “dirty war” against the leadership of the Black Panther Party resulting in the police killings of many of their leaders. With the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the black community lost their most incisive and eloquent leaders. As the ghettos burned, the crowds chanted, “Burn, baby, burn.”

The people in the black community are tired of turning the other cheek. They are tired of being outside the American Dream; and they are tired of their political leaders and young men being gunned down. They are tired of being pacified. They have had enough. A new generation of militant and articulate black youths is coming to the fore, such as those in the Black Lives Matter movement, and they will not be intimidated.

The major issues plaguing American black communities are not new. In 1968, nearly 50 years ago, the U.S. Riot Commission Report concluded that the central problems that had to be over come were: America’s history of systemic racism, community-police relations, and job creation for black youth. The fact that the Confederate flag still has legitimacy in some parts of the U.S., suggests how little has really changed. The failure to come to terms with and resolve these issues is real.

The race issue will not go away. It is integral to American history and still haunts it. Real progress for the majority of blacks has at best been marginal. The ghettos are a time bomb. A careless or inflammatory remark by a political candidate during this election year, or another wanton police killing of a black youth, re-enforced by a red-neck gun culture, may well ignite a race war.

As Malcolm X once said, “The chickens are coming home to roost.” And Dallas is just the beginning.