Fabian and Liz will speak this Friday in Kingston
The Civil Rights era was not all about the cops. The era was about Black oppression in the South, a particularly ugly form of Jim Crow that had festered since the end of Reconstruction.
When the Civil Rights Movement became more than that, leaders were assassinated before our whole system could be called into question. What about poverty, racial discrimination in the North, or the imperial invasion of Vietnam? Those questions, as non violent as they were, started the bullets flying.
Exposing police racism and brutality may have a similar effect, a huge increase in state supported oppression. The police are the enforcers of a grossly unfair system with a tiny group of obscenely rich at the top and a huge mass of people stuck at the very bottom. The nation's police are as discriminatory as its criminal justice system. It doesn't take too much investigating to reveal the extent of the gross unfairness. Black people get shot by white cops, who invariably get away with murder each time.
But police in the twenty-first century empire are not really there to protect anyone but the corporations, Wall Street, the big banks and that filthy rich who own them. Police feel free to express the racism that the empire is based on, in the conquering of other lands and the exploitation of their peoples. Empires can't exist without "untermensch," what the Third Reich called those targeted for exploitation and extermination. As long as there is an underclass, the empire can survive.
That is why the cops are dangerous, especially if you are Black. But exposing them is dangerous too. Like the apartheid state of Israel, America exists through its complex system of discrimination.
