No One Would Riot for Less: Ferguson as Jesus' Israel under Roman Occupation

The people of Ferguson live in times comparable to the Palestinians under the Roman Empire where Jesus was born.

A woman's parking ticket in Ferguson, which began as a $151 fine (plus fees), ballooned to more than $1,000 after she failed to appear in court several times. Court records show that she twice attempted to make partial payments of $25 and $50, but the court returned those payments, refusing to accept anything less than payment in full. This woman is now making regular payments on the fine. As of December 2014, over seven years later, despite initially owing a $151 fine and having already paid $550, she still owed $541. She has essentially become an indentured servant.

According to a Department of Justice report, the charge for “Weeds/Tall Grass” is as little as $5 in a neighboring city but, in Ferguson, it ranges from $77 to $102. 21,000 residents have a staggering 16,000 open arrest warrants. That is three out of four of every residents, seventy-six percent. The police brutality is severe. When the small group of rioters began their mayhem during peaceful protests, citizens were met with overwhelming force. The National Guard and police response were criticized, of all people, by the U.S. military.

Tactics of overwhelming force and tricks like the ballooning debt of the first woman, and tall grass citations, are like those of how the Romans used to oppress and trap Palestinians and squeeze their land and resources out of them. Peasants were taxed at extortionate levels (between 30-70% of their income), and people had to borrow money to pay taxes, using their land as collateral. They ended up becoming farmers for absentee landlords, as well as becoming day laborers, beggars, and bandits just to survive. Structural state violence, that is, the exploitation of people within a nation to sustain government, was used to enforce this order of the 95% exploited by the top 5%. As banditry became the only option for many, it also became a crime against the state, treason, punishable by crucifixion. Thus Jesus was posted up on the cross next to two oppressed people who felt forced to become "thugs." Masters expected their slaves and servants to keep their plantations profitable and in good order:
Parables in the Gospel attest to this: "The Wicked Tenants," (Matthew 21:33-41), "the Talents" (Matt 25:14-30) "the Vineyard Workers (Matt 20:1-16)," "the Doorkeepers and the Overseer" (Matt 24:45-51)

What happens when white people become an occupying force, like the Romans?

When white fans of Kentucky State's team lost, they rioted, torching cars. There was no mass outrage, the kind of which we saw post-Ferguson.
When the Black citizens of Ferguson's team lost (a human soul named Michael Brown), despite the fact that Officer Wilson had been a part of a special police force that was so racist and corrupt it had to be disbanded, and has been caught being disrespectful and having disregard for the law in prior interactions with citizens ("put the camera away or I'll put your ass in jail") and exaggerating the police report to make himself look better, they had a greater reason to riot than the Kentucky basketball fans given the systemic racism and extortion by the criminal justice system they were going through.

The Department of Justice showed that the municipal court system of Ferguson was dependent upon the exploitation of Ferguson's citizens for its cash-strapped system. To read e-mails between the police chief and the court system about increasing revenue through tickets, click here for the DOJ report on the Ferguson criminal justice system, and use Ctrl+F to find the key words "revenue" and "safety." The former clearly came at the expense of the latter, the report shows. The municipality literally said out loud to choose money over fair judges:

One 2011 internal report in Ferguson notes that Judge Brockmeyer "does not listen to the testimony, does not review the reports or the criminal history of defendants, and doesn’t let all the pertinent witnesses testify before rendering a verdict.”

The Council member then addressed the concern that “switching judges would/could lead to loss of revenue,” arguing that even if such a switch did “lead to a slight loss, I think it’s more important that cases are being handled properly and fairly.” The City Manager acknowledged mixed reviews of Judge Brockmeyer’s work but urged that the Judge be reappointed, noting that “...it goes without saying the City cannot afford to lose any efficiency in our Courts, nor experience any decrease in our Fines and Forfeitures.”

This is part of a larger epidemic that makes white people into the occupying, exploitative force.  One team of journalists "visited four separate St. Louis-area municipal courts in a span of four nights last week: Pasadena Hills, Jennings, Country Club Hills and St. Ann. Two court sessions took place in municipal buildings, and two took place in residential homes that serve as courtrooms and city hall. In every single court session, the court officials, police officers and lawyers were overwhelmingly white, while the defendants were overwhelmingly black." Blacks have been targeted, and I believe it is because white people believe that they can get away with this extortion if they target people who are Black and/or poor. The whole County of St. Louis is complicit, as I shall explain.

Coliseum on the Basketball Court

An ambitious politician-general named Herod conquered Jewish Palestine in what the historian Josephus called a "butchering" massacre due to the Roman army being so infuriated that they had to fight the Jews for so long. Whole towns were wiped out in this collective punishment akin to Officer Wilson's elite squad of racist police collectively punishing Black people just because a few commit crimes. Herod bribed his way to the top and was crowned King of the Jews by the Romans (he was essentially a Roman puppet) after, Herod went on a spending spree. He build temples and coliseums and dedicated them to Caesar all over Palestine, and they were often made of extravagant white stone and involved humans fighting lions. He also rebuilt the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, but he did not respect it. Like the above courthouses, he chose people to serve important positions (like priests) based on whether or not it served his purposes, not on morality. Many of the priests were just friends of his who were known for their immoral behavior even after becoming a priest.

The Jewish people were not only tithed by the priests to pay for their lifestyle, and taxed by the Romans, but now had a third tax to pay from Herod for all his expensive projects, many of which were not even built in Palestine. Even those that were- such as the Second Temple- were sacrilegious, because Herod had the audacity to place a golden eagle statue above the entrance to the Temple- a symbol of Roman domination and a graven image. Emotions reached a boiling point. Josephus, the historian, states that some of the most revered teacher-lawyer Pharisees encouraged their students to tear down the eagle statue when word got out that Herod was ill. There were mass demonstrations held by Jewish peasants as power transitioned to a new king because, as Josephus states, Herod's taxes had bled the people dry and caused mass poverty. A Roman delegation to Caesar complained that Herod had earned real resentment against the Roman Empire in Palestine.

A 2014 Washington Post expose on St. Louis County's municipal court system shows the insanity: people spending three days in jail for a speeding ticket, courthouses violating the Missouri Constitution, overcrowded courthouses being held instead on basketball court in a school gymnasium, $10 fees being added to every ordinance in order to raise funds to build a new courthouse, fines for giving the middle finger to another driver on the road, and police manually turning yellow blinking lights into red while people were in the middle of the intersection, and then giving them tickets. And it is on the backs of the poor and Black population:

"In 2013, the St. Louis County and City municipal courts acquired more than $61 million in fines and fees. This accounted for almost 50 percent of all fines and fees collected by the municipal courts in the state of Missouri, even though just 22 percent of the state resides in the St. Louis County area. Overall, St. Louis County is 24 percent black and 11 percent of its population lives below the poverty line, but the top 21 municipalities in the area collected one-third of their revenue from court fines and fees. They were 62 percent black on average, with 22 percent of the population living below the poverty line."

Civil rights is just a rumor to them. And the pattern of abuse in enforcing municipal (minor) violations by police has led to an expose by comedian journalist John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight, showing that this is not just happening in Missouri. Most of the time, the targets are living in low-income reservations- er- neighborhoods of minority folk.

Empires change their name, but their tactics stay the same.

What you can do: Support the ArchCity Defenders, who recently filed a lawsuit on behalf of 11 people who claim that they were locked up, sometimes for up to two weeks, for being too poor to pay their fees. Let's fight this debtor's prison system.

Good news: It's worth it to kick and scream and shout. In late August, 2015, Ferguson announced amnesty on arrest warrants for municipal violations.

The Jewish uprising against the Romans, which resulted in the destruction of the Jews' beloved Second Temple.

The new Roman war-horses protect their cherished modern temples, Walmart and McDonalds

From 1st Century Palestine to Ferguson to modern Palestine, an open air prison. Compare the picture of the destruction of the Second Temple to the following; look closely.

Harlem’s “Black Mecca,” and Muhammad’s Heijra

As of Thursday, this year signals nearly 1437 years since Muhammad made his flight from Mecca to Medina, and is the start of the Muslim calendar. In Mecca, Muhammad went from an orphan boy to a Prophet. Why did he feel forced to flee to Medina, the place that would become the Muslim capitol?

Mecca was a grubby trading city in the desert, not an agricultural oasis. Meccans used a “fresh air fund,” where they sent their children to live in the cleaner rural oases. It would be like a Black family in a city like Newark or New York sending their child back to be raised by relatives in a small Southern rural town in states like Georgia or North Carolina, to get a sense of “authentic” Black culture, rather than a fast-paced city upbringing assimilated to Northern white speechways and other cultureways. According to the book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Story of America’s Great Migration, most African-American families in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Oakland can trace their origins back to the South. It is no coincidence that Harlem was called the “Black Mecca” and had all sorts of clubs based off of states they fled from: “the Sons of Georgia/Virginia/South Carolina,” and the like. Though if it were trying to be historically accurate, commentators would have called Harlem “Black Medina.”

Nervousness about becoming “citified” is a common theme here: the ethics and values of Mecca disturbed many of those living there. The rampant capitalism and competitiveness created conditions that tore families apart. The inheritance of widows and orphans was preyed upon constantly. The sense of family and solidarity that had sustained the Bedouin in the rural and desert steppes was being broken down by the ethos of the new wealthy elite. A parallel to this could be the Black landlords who learned from white landlords how to prey upon their own people to extract maximum profits from tenants, to try and make it from Harlem’s 5th and 7th Ave to Edgecomb Ave or “Striver’s Row,” the street of the new Black elite.

- Even though the people of Mecca had left the nomadic Bedouin life behind, they still regarded the Bedouin as the guardians of authentic Arab culture. As a child, Muhammad had been sent to live in the desert with the tribe of his wet nurse in order to be educated in the nomadic Bedouin ethos. It made a profound impression on him.

- Karen Armstrong 

Don’t we, in our own time, still believe that city life, or middle-class life, is counter to our authentic culture? Rough rider President Theodore Roosevelt spent his formative years on what was called a "Dude Ranch," a place out in some Western plains or desert where well-heeled (high class) urban socialites would go to learn how to become a man through rugged individualism and manual labor. The Great Migration to Northern cities from the American South highlighted the dichotomy between "citified" "city slickers" often equated with being effeminate due to not working with their hands, and farmer “real” men. The South was "authentic" Black and white culture that had Southern slang, food, and emotional preaching styles and embodied the American dream of the family on a small farm in Middle America (think Little House on the Prairie). Parallels now exist between ghetto Blacks as "authentic" and middle-class Blacks as "acting white," though in reality the differences are regional (Southerners who moved to Northern cities are now seen as "authentic Blacks," even though Northern Blacks have always been more urbane and compartmentalized- Solomon Northup (from 12 Years a Slave) and w.e.b. DuBois being perfect examples).

The pain of the Jim Crow South is well-known to Americans, but the details are being lost to history. The early 1900's experienced the second coming of the KKK, land grabs that decimated the Black farmer, urban assaults that destroyed Black Wall Streets, and lynchings. Lynching did not simply mean a noose around your neck, but often being stripped, sexually molested, tortured, and burned alive. Blacks could be sent to jail for "crimes" like "insulting gestures," where they would be sold to the highest bidder and sent off to work for a corporation on a chain gang. Through this terror and use of the criminal justice system, whites were trying to force Blacks to see themselves as a servant-class of whites, but a new generation of Blacks who had never been slaves and never knew that mindset were restless. W.E.B. Du Bois observed, "The South laments to-day the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Negro-- the faithful, courteous slave of other days, with his dignified...humility." Here is a letter written to the newspaper, the Chicago Defender, from a Southerner inquiring about jobs in the North "where a man can be a man" and avoid police terror:

"Dear Sir: I am writing you for information to come north [and] to see if there is any way that you can hep me by giving me the names of some of the firms that will send me a transportation as we are down here where we have to be shot down lik rabbits for every little orfence as I seen an orcurince hapen down here this after noon when three depties from the shrief office...come out and found me some of our raice mens in a crap game and it makes me want to leave the south worse than I ever did." Macon, Georgia, April 1, 1917

 Islam initially attracted the outcasts of society: servants and women. Many of these servants were persecuted through "beatings, heat exposure, and deprivation of food and water." Two famous martyrs stand out: Bilal, the African slave, who had a heavy stone placed on his chest and was told, "You will continue this way and die or deny [the God of] Muhammad and worship al-Lat and al-Uzzah [the pagan gods]." He did neither, and became a leading companion of Muhammad. The first Muslim to die as a martyr was a woman, Sumayya bint Khayyat, who was, like Bilal, a slave. She was beaten and then stabbed by the leading antagonist to Islam in Mecca.  

Being a Muslim and being Black are two greatly different things; lynchings were not issues of martyrdom. Even today, as a white Muslim I feel much safer praying in public in America than a brown Muslim, so it's difficult to say Islamophobia today exists apart from racism. However, at the time, the cultural attitudes of Arabia, broken down by urban and rural, and the reasons for becoming refugees, have striking similarities.

The Stigma of the Rural/Southerner/Bedouin: Just as America seems to have a love/hate relationship with its rural folk, simultaneously exalting rugged farmers and foresters while calling them rednecks and hillbillies, a Muslim friend of mine told me that in standard Arabic if you wish to say someone is crude and / or lacks manners, you might say "inna inti bedu!" or "Ya badawi!" or something like this (apparently, there's a zillion of these), "Surely, you are one who lives in the desert!" The rural/urban tension remains in the works artists from the South, such as Mississippi transplant Muddy Waters, who sang, "I'm just a country boy, and I don't know right from wrong." The author of The Warmth of Other Suns discusses why many Blacks today are not aware of their own parent’s origins from the South. Aside from the fact it may have been too painful to discuss, 

Some felt shame or embarrassment over being southern and rural now that they were living in big, sophisticated cities. Like immigrants who change their names or choose not to teach their children the language of the old country, some migrants created new northern identities for themselves and didn't pass along their stories to their children and grandchildren or take their children back to their homeland.

 However, others “surrounded themselves” with people and things which would evoke the spirit of back home, creating a synthesis of rural and urban culture that today is seen in many Black enclaves in urban areas across the country. Cue Lauryn Hill, "you know it's hot, don't forget what you got/ lookin' back, lookin' back, lookin' back, lookin' back."  Zora Neale Hurston, the acclaimed author, was said to be "Striding fashionably late into drawing rooms in her red scarves, shamelessly brandishing her black Southern accent and regaling listeners with electrifying renditions of folktales straight from the mouths of poor Southern blacks." She refused to change the speechways of her characters to make them "proper" (Northern) English, at a time when "many black middle class intellectuals shamefully distanced themselves from their cultural heritage." In an excellent interview that discusses similarities between the Southern white murder ballad and the hardcore rap song, Killer Mike says,

"the people I’m supposed to mistrust, have always been my neighbors. And for most of my life, we’ve been really nice to each other. That’s my honest experience with whites in the South, and I think a lot of times when people say ‘Southerner’ or make those crass jokes, I, as the black guy, am supposed to excuse myself from the joke.

“But we’re all Southerners. We all talk with these drawls and twangs. We all go to the race track on Sunday. We all go fishing. I don’t have a Dixie flag on the back of my pickup, but it still has mud flaps and big tires. So you’re talking about me, too. I am that redneck guy you’re talking about. I’m not him, racially. He’s not me, racially. But culturally, in the geography of where we’re from, our grandfathers did the same things. They did the same shit. I fiercely identify with being a Southerner because I value that culture. Everybody else thinks we’re country as shit, anyway. So why not just be who I am? I am Southern. I rap. I wear cheesy jewelry. I bounce around on stage. But when I take that shit off and go home, I fish. And I’m your neighbor. I do the same things you do.”

A short article I read today, about a Black son's response to his close friend who told him he wanted to fly the Confederate flag on his truck, captures this interracial solidarity among Southerns by highlighting the best qualities of being "country": down to earthness, reliability, hospitality. Ironically, hospitality is the genius of the desert of the Bedouins, the same peoples dismissed as crude with a "Ya badawi!"

In an essay titled Black Rednecks, the author argues that the “authentic” Black persona today is the transplant of the Southern redneck to the city, and painstakingly shows how white rednecks’ culture is exactly what we see as “Black,” just with a different skin color. Though the author seems to ignore structural racism and classism "in an attempt to get Blacks to reject ghetto gangsta culture as not authentically black, but a borrowing from poor white trash" (thus, he can only focus on the negatives of ghetto Blacks, redneck and Appalachian culture, and his own version of Blackness becomes somehow the only worthy one, as if he were Professor Higgins from My Fair Lady), the book works best in showing similarities between BET and 17th-to-20th century rural Southern whites. Even the word “axe" (supposedly the definitive marker between acting white and acting Black is the use of this word) instead of “ask” is a Southern speechway. The South (as well as the Caribbean) copied high-class British speechways (like “dahnce” instead of “dance”); “axe” used to be the language used in high society:

The poet Chaucer used "ax." It's in the first complete English translation of the Bible (the Coverdale Bible): " 'Axe and it shall be given.'” 

picture from Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

All over the world, the city folk and the rural folk discredit each other, as my loved ones with families from Guatemala and Liberia have told me, and as studying the cultural regions of Turkey have taught me. Yet we cannot deny how much we benefit from each other; truly, the Other is in the Self, and the Self is in the Other. While the Amish in Pennsylvania depend on less-orthodox Mennonites to use automobiles to transport their goods to urban markets in New Jersey, as just one example of rural as being sustained by urban in a way which preserves their unique culture from homogeneity, the urban owes a debt to migrations from the South (yes, American rock music was formed in this mass movement):

Among the children of the Migration are: Toni Morrison, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Magic Johnson, Bill Cosby, Nat King Cole, Michael Jackson, Prince, Tupac Shakur, Whitney Houston, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Oprah Winfrey, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, the broadcaster Bryant Gumbel, the astronaut Mae Jemison, the producer Sean "Puffy"Combs, the leading neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson, the artist Romare Bearden, the playwright August Wilson and many others. Each of them grew up to become among the best in their fields...They were among the first generation of blacks in this country to grow up free and unfettered because of the actions of parents or grandparents who knew it was too late for themselves to truly benefit from the advantages of the north but knew it was not too late for their children."

"One such parent, an ambitious sharecropper wife in Alabama, convinced her husband that their family should migrate to Cleveland in the 1920's. The father was so worried that, as they were packing, he had to steady himself on the shoulders of his nine-year-old son. The boy felt the father's hands shaking and only then realized the gravity of their situation. The boy's first day at school in the North, when the teacher asked his name, he told her it was J.C., which was short for James Cleveland. The teacher couldn't understand his southern accent and just called him Jesse instead. From that day forward he was known, not by his birth name, but by the one he had mistakenly acquired - Jesse Owens. He went on to win four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Berlin becoming the first American in the history of track and field to do so in a single Olympics and disproving the Aryan notions of his Nazi hosts."

Though the persecution driving the movements of the Muslims and African-Americans were horrible, these names of people signifying their contributions to civilization entreat me to say: Salam Hijrah

Dispatches from a Muslim at the Pope's Philly Visit, World Meeting of Families 2015

Dispatches from my pilgrimage to see the Pope in Philly on Saturday:
Islam:

There were two artsy videos about the power of love and marriage played on the Jumbotrons for everyone to see; they looked as pretty and expensively made as Superbowl ads. One of the marriage videos actually quoted the Qur'an! It was a video in dozens of languages that, I soon realized, was quoting random sacred verses and poems about love, without showing their sources. I read the subtitles- 
"And among God’s signs, God created mates for you from among yourselves so you may dwell in tranquility with them and find love and mercy between your hearts; these are Signs for those who reflect."
I was like HOLD UP! I had just posted that quote on my Facebook about LGBT love recently.

There were so many women wearing the veil, nuns in Black habits, nuns in blue habits, West African Christians with headwraps. Jordanian Christian refugee family got to address the pope, and greeted him with a "Bismillah." In fact, I felt surrounded by Muslims in spirit- people who want to transcend dunya, who fell in love with God and felt a calling to imitate the life of Jesus.

A few days earlier, for the weeklong festival, there was a Muslim speaker from New Jersey, Suzy Ismail, who gave a talk about the interfaith imperative to aid families. She is a marriage counselor who has authored books on Muslim families and navigating the American workplace as a Muslim. But alas, on Saturday, I was the only Muslim there, and I was the only person out of the hundreds I saw who was visibly praying.

Praying on my prayer mat in front of thousands of Catholics, and at two train stations made me feel self-conscious. Praying indoors at NJ Transit station near midnight for Isha near a security guard's desk in Trenton undoubtedly made me feel awkward at first, but I eventually felt serenity. When I began praying, the homeless man across from me was asleep; when I finished, with a smile on my face, I noticed he was staring at me with an interested expression.

Magrib prayer came at the exact moment the Pope went by on his popemobile, and I was thinking "what timing! Dang it. I waited here for hours and now I will miss my chance to catch a glimpse of the guy. Oh well." I prayed as everyone around me began screaming and running towards the fences, and it felt like a wind stirring the souls of the people around me. With my eyes closed and my mind focused, I could almost feel the uplift in hearts around me, the spirits vibrating at higher frequencies. It felt like God lit a lamp in Jesus, who lit a lamp in St. Francis, who lit a lamp in the Pope, who lit the lamps of the people surrounding me. That, plus Beatlemania.

Coming soon- more dispatches from the Pope's visit, what I saw regarding
- race
- gender
- lgbt
- class
- spirituality
- immigration/American ideology
and of course, Aretha Franklin