Christchurch and Colonialist Violence

By Biko Agozino

The massacre in a Christchurch Mosque raises doubt about the applicability of the theory by Martin Luther King Jr. that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. White supremacists have been reported celebrating the shooter as a hero while the shooter hailed Donald Trump as a hero of white nationalism. Perhaps, white supremacist terrorism is an exception to the universalistic Ubuntu thesis of Desmond Tutu which states that I am because we are. Chinua Achebe also saw postcolonial genocide as a contradiction of African traditional preference for tolerance of difference.

On further reflection, however, it is clear that racist-imperialist-patriarchal violence has repercussions that are felt by all across the world, though not in equal proportions. The white supremacist terrorist travelled from Australia to go and commit the massacre in New Zealand and so it may be a good idea to look at conditions in Australia that may have produced that level of hatred and intolerance and how the repercussions are felt by all to different extents.

In June 2018, media reports indicated that Australian troops in Afghanistan displayed a Nazi flag on their tank and collected killings as trophies. The terrorist shooter in Christchurch may be the same age as the Australian troops who identified with Nazism and could admire them. Officials were reported as saying that such white supremacist ideologies were not consistent with Australia. But indigenous peoples in Australia say that they have been at the receiving end of such genocidal white supremacist violence institutionalized by the settler colonial state and supported by individual genocidists for centuries.

Irene Watson applied the indigenous Australian story of the giant frog to legal theory as an explanation of the survival by those who governed the land cooperatively for thousands of years prior to being buried alive by colonizers. Moana Jackson applies Indigenous Maori theory to critique imperialist scientism that attributed to Indigenous peoples, ‘warrior genes’, when they were gardeners without repressive fetishes like the prison for thousands of years before being criminalized. Chris Cunnneen, Juan Tauri, Harry Blagg, and Thalia Anthony, among others, condemn the over-incarceration of Indigenous people and call for the decolonization of the justice system and the entire society. Deathscape focuses on the mapping of Indigenous deaths in custody.

It is a fact that the white male terrorism that claims many lives around the world also claims hundreds of white Christian lives just as ISIS violence also claims Muslim lives. That is right, terrorist white men tend to kill many white men in settler-colonial locations. They also kill white women and rape them in large numbers in militaristic Australia, the US, Russia, etc.

Homicide being intracultural more than intercultural in most cases, Indigenous people also kill fellow indigenous people in large numbers more than they kill people who are not indigenous but they kill fewer indigenous people than white male terrorists kill fellow white men. Often the victims are intimate family members, friends or acquaintances with few being random strangers.

Official reports show that homicide rates in Australia occurred mainly through stabbing (38%), beating with fists (24%), other means such as poisoning claimed 15%, while gunshots claimed 13% and 8% of homicide victims died of unknown causes from 2012 to 2014.

This indicates that the banning of assault weapons by the government may not be enough to address the threat of white supremacist violence that has a long history of being institutionalized. Mass violence is not mainly a problem of individual attitudes or choice of weapons but also a problem of institutionalized ways of doing violence that brutalize the conscience of white supremacists who may seek to strike again even against fellow white men. With 64% of homicide victims in Australia being men who are also six times more likely to commit homicide compared to women and with 45% of the killings taking place at home, racist-imperialist-patriarchal violence is a systemic threat to all.

There were 91 deaths in custody in Australia from 2016 to 2017 with men making up over 90% of the victims and non-indigenous people making up 60-78% of the deaths in police and prison custody. Indigenous Australians are over-represented in prison custody at 27% of all prisoners but non-indigenous Australians make up over 70% of the prisoners.

If angry poor white male Australians knew this, they would join the struggles to end the colonial system of mass incarceration and oppose imperialist militarism, racism and sexism which are articulated to escalate intolerance at the expense of all. Part of the solution may be the establishment of Love Studies to replace military academies, to study the decolonization paradigm, and to support reparative justice for Indigenous peoples in the interest of all.

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA. 

Michael Jackson Remains Innocent

By Biko Agozino

"In the history of the United States, the fraudulent rape charge stands out as one of the most formidable artifices invented by racism. The myth of the Black rapist has been methodically conjured up whenever recurrent waves of violence and terror against the Black community have required convincing justifications." Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class

Sexual abuse is a vile crime and especially so when the victims are children. That was why Barrack Obama once wrote that he would support the death penalty for child sexual abusers but Michelle Alexander corrected him by writing that rape is no longer a capital offense for the good reason that it was enforced in a racist manner.

When two adult white men sue the estate of a dead black man for $1.5 billion for alleged sexual abuse when they were children, even after the black man had been tried and found not guilty of any wrong-doing, the benefit of the doubt goes to the black man. 

Michael Jackson remains innocent, according to the rule of law. He was taken to court and dragged through the mud of gutter media for two months with 85 witnesses and 500 pieces of evidence mostly gathered by the FBI for the prosecution. Michael was found not guilty on all nine counts. He was also found not guilty of giving children alcohol for the purpose of abusing them. #MJInnocent.

The prosecution even called Michael's baby mama who was going through a custody battle with him, hoping that she would point a finger and win custody. But she turned against the accusers and told the court that she had warned Michael against them but that he was too kind to beware. Michael would never hurt a child, she said.

A civil suit has a lower burden of proof and the two white men who filed the law suit in 2013 may be hoping to cash in but their story was not credible, though the law suit is still pending. Michael had settled a similar civil suit before with a huge sum of money though the father of the child was recorded on the phone saying that he had something to gain from the allegation rather than focus on getting the person who allegedly hurt his child punished for the crime.

'Lies of Leaving Neverland'

One of the present accusers wanted to work for Michael Jackson's estate after the singer died but he was not hired by the estate. Oparah asked why he would want to work for someone who abused him as a child and he claimed that he did not know that it was abuse even after he was grown up. 

They went into therapy after they had sons of their own and fantasized about sexually abusing their own sons. That was when they said that they realized that they were abused by Jackson when they were children even though they testified when they were teenagers that Michael was innocent and continued to deny the allegations as adults. 

They tried to get a book deal but no publishers would touch a libelous manuscript. They sued for a billion dollars and the documentary film makers got in touch with them to sensationalize their allegations for the HBO broadcasters of the Oprah interview with them. Lots of conflict of interest there. 

The Michael Jackson estate refused the attempted extortion and sued the broadcasters of the documentary for $100 million. Maybe they should have sued for a billion dollars given the way that the music of Michael was allegedly pulled off the air by broadcasters following the airing of the documentary.

Oprah Winfrey, a child sex abuse survivor, got a room full of male child sexual abuse survivors and asked some leading questions that indirectly exposed some of the lies of the two white men who now claimed that they did not know that Michael was abusing them as children. 

Oprah still managed to expose them as liars because they now claimed that they did not tell the truth during the trial, they lied during therapy, and now they want to be believed that they have no financial motivation in their false allegations even while suing for more than a billion bucks. In the documentary, they alleged that Michael Jackson raped them on top of a train station in Neverland whereas the said train station was not yet built when they were in Neverland. As a result, HBO is forced to deny cancelling the promised run of the documentary until September after it was suddenly shortened to April and Oprah Winfrey appears to have deleted all her tweets about Leaving Neverland.

Michael never abused them sexually but maybe members of their own families did abuse them (the way they imagined abusing their own sons) and they may have been prompted by hypnosis to transfer the blame to a dead black man for monetary gains. On a balance of probabilities, the accusers are not credible witnesses against Michael. #MJisInnocent.

Read chapter 11 of Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis to see how allegations of rape were used by white men to terrorizer the black community and to justify lynching of black men at a time that white men felt entitled to rape black women and white women with impunity. 

Ida B. Wells documented evidence that allegations of rape were the 'bare-faced lies' with which lynching was justified because the vast majority of lynching did not include rape as an allegation. Moreover, about a third of the victims of lynching within the 30 years documented by Ida B Wells were white men, especially those who supported equal rights for African Americans. The Michael Jackson Estate alleged that the media reports and post-humous allegations amount to attempts to lynch the legacy of Michael.

According to Angela Davis, early white feminists easily embraced the image of the black man as a rapist who should never be trusted by white women. The white feminists failed to realize that such a propaganda resulted in white men feeling also that they were entitled to the bodies of white women. Therefore, white men raped white women and black women in large numbers but blamed it on black men and 90% of those executed for rape from 1932-1972 were black men. This persuaded the Supreme Court to abolish the death penalty for rape in the case of Furman v. Georgia in 1976.

Davis concluded that the problem of rape and racism was that the intersectionality of poverty, racism and sexism flourishes under capitalism to the extent that poor parents would allow their children to have slumber parties with rich men but would not think of allowing a poor man to sleep in the same room with their children even if the poor man means no harm. 

The lesson for parents and children is to stop worshipping wealth and stop hoping that they could swindle or defraud the rich of some of their wealth by using their poor children as baits. Instead, they should borrow a leaf from the parents of the Jacksons and the Williams sisters: 

Invest some time and resources to train the natural talents of your children instead of trying to pimp them and hope that you could then sue an innocent black man for money to satisfy your greed for fame or to be paid what Du Bois called the psychological wages of whiteness. 

As Michael Jackson told the Oxford University Union in 2001, there is a lot of violence and neglect against children around the world even in the richest country on earth. Children deserve to be loved and protected from harm unconditionally, he said. The mistake he made was to allow white children to sleep over in his bedroom even though he knew that the racist system was stacked against him. He was found not guilty of all charges because he had the means to hire top lawyers to defend him and the current accusers testified that he never hurt them.