Akoben -- Adinkra Symbol meaning a call to action. Credit: W. Bruce Willis, Adinkra Dictionary	Rogue Cops or Rogue System? By Grisso During the April 3 March on Washington to protest widespread police brutality, speaker after speaker called on President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno to address the problem. As I reflect on the issue, it seems to me that the solution to the problem must rest, ultimately, with ourselves. To find the cause of a problem, is to find its solution. If you don't know the cause, or if you are mistaken as to what you think is the cause, your attempts at solution will disappoint. Yes, there may be stop-gap relief, as when a doctor gives you medicine to ease the pain, or relieve the symptoms. But if the doctor does not know the underlying cause of your illness, or chooses to ignore it in favor of symptom suppression, the illness will continue to run its course. So what is the cause of police brutality? Is it rogue cops here and there, or is it something rooted in the very system? In his address to the marchers from the steps of the US Capitol, Rev. Al Sharpton told us, "we have to connect the dots." So that is what I try to do in this column. When we connect the dots, we find that the line runs through not only Diallo and Louima in New York, Rodney King in Los Angeles, Gammage in Pittsburgh, Archie Elliott III in Prince Georges County MD, Tyesha Miller in Riverside CA, and countless other victims of police brutality in local jurisdictions throughout this country, but also the federal law enforcement agencies, namely the FBI, the CIA, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), the DEA and the INS. All of the latter Federal agencies have been implicated at one time or another in racially-based abuses, from the COINTELPRO program of the FBI, to the CIA's connections to the introduction of crack cocaine to American African communities, to the BATF and DEA "Round-up" barbeque parties where a poster of Martin Luther King was used for target practice, to the INS which treats Haitian refugees very differently from Cuban ones. In the light of this, why should we expect the federal law enforcement agencies to save us from the depredations of local ones? In fact, truly connecting the dots would take us beyond policing and law enforcement. These are merely, to use another medical metaphor, the immune system of the beast that most of us dare not confront. And if the police and law enforcement consitute part of the beast's immune system, the unwelcome "invaders" which the immune system reflexively attacks are us, the non-white, mostly African, "other," which the immune system of that beast feels a compulsion to suppress. It is an almost biological phenomenon, because, as with biological organisms, although its survival modalities may change, the main program of survival remains constant. History teaches us that oppression and enslavement take many forms. What they share in common is that those enslaved must be dispossessed of the means to make an independent living. The serfs in Europe found themselves in this position. One day they woke up to find that the land belonged to the local feudal lord, who had laid claim to enough of their output that there was no way out of the bondage to which they had been reduced. Those who did that to them came to be known as "landed gentry", "the nobility" and the like. Of course, the truth was that they were neither noble nor gentle, having deployed the same tactic as the mafioso, with their "protection" rackets, continue to do today. After "slavery" supposedly ended in 1865, the same tactic was adopted to keep the supposedly freed Africans in bondage under the exploitation scheme known as "sharecropping". The program remained -- land and labor theft -- only the modality changed. It was the same when the British first went to Zululand. They tried mightily to get the Zulus to labor for them working in the mines. They did not succeed until they instituted the notorious "head tax," payable only in English currency. The Zulus could acquire the shillings needed to pay the head tax only by, guess what?, working in the mines for a wage paid in, guess what?... shillings. Pretty soon, the Zulu economy, self-reliant and abundant as it was, was wrecked, labor having been withdrawn from it, and replaced by a shilling-mediated dependency. This extortion was enforced by the gun. In India, the British used the salt tax to the same effect. The European immigrants to America fled landlessness in Europe hoping to turn tables in America, ie. to dispossess somebody else, and to establish themselves as "landed gentry". That is the story of "how the West was won" (sic), also the story of the "peculiar institution" of the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, also the story of European colonial conquest. Capitalism is the system which has latterly emerged from these beginnings. The program is constant, only the modalities have changed. Now we are wage-slaves who, best of all worlds from the enslavers' viewpoint, actually have been brainwashed into believing that we are "free". Our physical shackles have been removed, replaced by even sturdier mental ones. We "voluntarily" give up our labor in return for a wage, and "voluntarily" quit whenever the conditions are not to our liking. Meantime, as individuals we do not have independent means of survival, and as a subjugated people -- the condition of American Africans in particular -- the one thing that the overlords would not permit is for us to get too independent, ie. free ourselves: Witness the fate of Rosewood, the Black Wall Street, the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, etc. What we are free to do is to find a j-o-b, to exist in "welfare" dependency, or to be warehoused in jails, where, guess what, the law specifically provides for the legality of slavery. The program is constant, only the modalities change. In such a set-up, there will always be an enforcement function. For even after the serfs have been conditioned to accept their lot as a matter of the "natural order" of things, there will always be agitators here and there who beg to disagree. Some will merely be criminal, seeking dishonest means of relieving the relative deprivation to which the Social Order consigns them. (This, by the way, is the premise to Hugo's Les Miserables, also of various of Charles Dickens' novels.) Others will be conscious agitators, ones who seek to overthrow the Established Order. In either case, such a Social Order will evolve an "immune system" to protect itself, just as would a living organism. Police and law enforcement, in carrying out this immune system function will invariably end up cracking heads from time to time. From the standpoint of a defender of the Established Order, the only question is how sensitive the immune system is going to be. Too sensitive, and too many "innocents" will wrongly be tagged for destruction by the immune system; too lax, and too many "criminals" will survive undetected to go about their work of subverting, either as criminals, or as dissidents, the Established Order. If that is the heart of the matter -- what emerges from following Rev. Sharpton's admonition to "connect the dots" -- what then is the solution? There are but two possibilities. One is to accept the Established Order, agitating only for the limited purpose of tinkering with ... adjusting the immune system response of ... this beast in whose belly for the time being we reside. The other is to seek to slay the beast and the unjust Order -- based on the twin theft of land and labor, unreparated and as yet unatoned -- which it represents. If we choose the former, yes, we turn to President Clinton and Attorney General Reno, to tinker with the system, change the modalities once again, while leaving the fundamental program unchanged. If we choose the latter, if we seek truly fundamental reform, we will have to start by changing us, and impliedly our terms of engagement with this beast that for the time being constitutes the Establishd Order. We have to free ourselves. Lincoln, Roosevelt, Johnson ... and now, Clinton ... cannot do that for us. Grisso (Grisso is a 48 year old African of the diaspora. He has an engineering PhD, and is the author of a mathematical treatise on decision analysis under uncertainty. His email address is grisso@TheAfrican.Com).