(read the book free online – get a copy for your Kindle – read the Reddit AMA)

Things had been looking up for black families, back in 1963 as MLK gave his “I Have A Dream” speech about 70% of black families were headed by a married couple. But that percentage steadily began to drop, between 1970 and 2001 it declined by 34%, double the white decline, and by 2002 it had bottomed out at just 48%.

But if the War on Drugs didn’t directly precipitate the destruction of the African-American family, why did the decline in married black women triple during the first decade of the War?

In fact, the impact of the War on Drugs has been so racially biased that although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up about half of those in prison for drug offenses.  (When you adjust for the fact that the Department of Justice simply throws prisoners who identify as mixed race half-black and half-white out of their data, the proportion is well over half.)  A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. And by 2006 America had, proportionally, almost six-times as many blacks locked up as South Africa did at the height of Apartheid.

Our penal system has grown so massive that the U.S. criminal justice system now employs more people than America’s two largest private employers, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, combined.

Continue reading »

The Washington Post reported in a poll in May of 2007 that African-American Muslims were three-times as likely as immigrant Muslims to have a favorable view of al-Qaeda, and are only about half as likely to dislike the group.  On top of that, African-Americans are much more likely to feel like they have nothing to lose, the average black family has eight-cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites, and a black child is nine-times more likely than a white child to have a parent in prison.  In many cities the foreclosure rate for black families is three times as high as the white rate, and nationwide unemployment is about twice as high.

An almost unfathomable number of African-Americans have passed through our penal system, coming out on the other side much more racist and disposed to violence than they were when they went in.

Although only about 12% of the American population is black, over a third of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. And although although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up over half of those in prison for drug offenses. A black man is three-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of “correctional supervision” – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.²³

And when the shootings begin, it won’t take much for the establishment to begin reprisals. The level of trust between the police presence in innercity America and it’s African-American inhabitants typically falls somewhere between laughable and nonexistent.

Widespread arrests will be made to try and find the terrorists responsible for the violence, and when some of the men – most of them innocent – getting arrested resist and the police respond with force, the flames will be stoked further still.  Based on past precedent, the police probably won’t be the initial targets – Jewish community centers and American military installations likely will be – but once law enforcement officers begin their investigations and raids, inner-city ire will be shifted against their presence.

Especially when such incidents are recorded on camera, as Rodney King and others have already demonstrated.

Rodney King was just one man being smacked around by a few cops, and yet his arrest set inner-city Los Angeles ablaze. Imagine what will happen when dozens of such arrests are recorded and played back not only on the Evening News, but available for free download on YouTube and other internet sites. Another preview of the unrest this will stir was provided when the unarmed Oscar J. Grant III was shot in the back on New Years Day 2009, and the entire incident was recorded on a camera phone and downloaded online.

It’s not hard to imagine what the response will be when some of them inevitably result in the suspects’ deaths – an inevitable result when the police fear for their own lives because they think they’re arresting a devious and sinister terrorist who has already tasted blood.

It won’t take much.  In every major modern insurgency, only about 10% of the fighters have been hardcore ideologues who believe in whatever cause is being championed, while the other 90% of the fighting is done by locals who are simply protecting their own turf against an invasive outside power.  Utilizing martial language like “insurgency” may seem like a bit of a stretch when describing our inner-cities, but it shouldn’t:

The militarized nature of law enforcement in ghetto communities has inspired rap artists and black youth to refer to police presence in black communities as “The Occupation.”  In these occupied territories, many black youth automatically “assume the position” when a patrol car pulls up, knowing full well that they will be detained and frisked no matter what.

And yet when you dig deeper you’ll find that the D.C. Sniper’s blueprint in and of itself wasn’t really novel, as the attacks it was modeled off go back further still – to the first time an imperial Western power attempted what was perceived as colonization of the Middle East…

 – learn more about Tremble the Devil –