On Smollett, BLM, and the Chicago Police Department
by Don Hall
Jussie Smollett paid two goons to pretend to attack him and lied to everyone in the world about it. He staged a racist attack that made headline news and media figures grab their smelling salts for a solid week.
We all know it. In today's open-ended video court, it's so substantially obvious that the idea that there is even a trial rather than a summary sentencing based on what we all know seems preposterous.
Jussie Smollett is guilty as charged.
Dr. Melina Abdullah, Director of BLM Grassroots and co-founder of BLM Los Angeles posted a statement on the BLM website in support of Smollett nonetheless:
In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom. While policing at-large is an irredeemable institution, CPD is notorious for its long and deep history of corruption, racism, and brutality. From the murders of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, to the Burge tortures, to the murder of Laquan McDonald and subsequent cover-up, to the hundreds of others killed by Chicago police over the years and the thousands who survived abuse, Chicago police consistently demonstrate that they are among the worst of the worst. Police lie and Chicago police lie especially.
It makes sense that a BLM co-founder would state that "policing at-large is an irredeemable institution." That's the central platform of BLM in the first place. The poll numbers indicate that this stance is wholly in the minority including an overwhelming majority of black citizens who would prefer more police presence in the neighborhoods.
On the other hand, his statement regarding the corruption at the very heart of the Chicago Police Department is as blatantly true and obvious as Smollett's guilt.
"I'm not supposed to say this but what keeps me going is hate. Every morning I wake up and feel a moment of hate for those who tortured me and enjoyed it. That hate fuels me."
His brutal honesty was both a breath of reality and a wake up call.
He is one of the 110 black men tortured into coerced confessions in the 1980’s and early 1990's by Jon Burge in Chicago. Under the shield of authority, Burge and his men burned, electrocuted and suffocated men in order to gain confessions to crimes they did not commit. These were not innocent men, for the most part—the man speaking was an enforcer for one of the prominent street gangs in town. It is likely that he beat, tortured and perhaps murdered others in this role. But he was innocent of the crimes he was tortured into confession for. In lieu of actually doing the job they were employed to do, Burge and his detectives opted to cheat the law, to tarnish the entire justice system, for an easier road to conviction.
I've read others claim that these men deserved to be tortured and put away—that Burge was a hero, putting away the bad guys regardless of the laws he broke, regardless of the trust in authority he destroyed—like Sorkin's Colonel Jessup, a man who sits on a wall and faces down evil as if that position justified his every racist, sadistic whim. Like Jack Bauer with a pointy pillowcase on his head.
An eye for an eye, they say. Rough justice, they say. By any means necessary, they say. What they don't say, because they either don't see or simply don't care, is what this "eye for an eye" process creates. It isn't justice. It isn't truth. The bloodlust that foments this sort of vigilante attitude really only grows one thing.
Hate. A fuel for a daily rage that cycles between torturer and tortured, criminal and victim, aggressor and aggrieved.
His hate for the men who tortured him and got away with it, who smiled as they called him nigger and beat him and humiliated him and applied electrodes to his balls and earlobes and burned his skin with cigarettes, seems completely human. Normal. Who, in their right mind, would NOT feel hate for men who did this him?
I'm not in a position to lecture anyone who has been through torture or wrongful prosecution to adjust his perspective. I've had some obstacles in life, I've had my fair share of hardship, but I've never been in a position in my life when society's guardians have decided, based entirely on the color of my skin, the loudness of my voice, the fundamental visuals of ethnicity, that I somehow deserve to be arrested and brutalized.
I was lucky enough to be born white and have a strong, loving and attentive mother and an indoctrinated belief that education was an end in itself. I feel anger at injustices in the world but have never experienced the soul crunching, crumbling of self image that being subjected to the helpless, hopeless Kafaesque loss of freedom and the cold, sadistic grins of men who enjoy both tacit authority and authentic pleasure in my pain.
Whether you believe Smollett or that policing is an irredeemable institution is your thing. Make no mistake, however, that the long history of the Chicago Police Department is soaked in racism, torture, and dishonesty on levels not known since the hey-day of the Confederacy.
