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we can look at the individual who had been conditioned to tr and separate himself from his family in order to "make it" in society.
The latter is of course, the lower class individual, the black, the brown and poor. The very first failure of this individuals' attempt to "make it" lies in the fact of society's recognition of the family and not the individual. The second element of failure lies in the insufficient "social background;" poor education, or note at all; a lack of layman training, etc. This is the trend of action taken by the black; from the early age of understanding the black realizes that his/her family is a hindrance to success rather than an asset. This is an effect conditioned into black people by society-that the lower class black family is crude, and unsophisticated. Not solely because they are black, but primarily because they are poor-the poorest class in class society. So the individual black is conditioned to reject his/her family among other things, in lower class communities. The black youth has not been taught by his family to love and respect the next door neighbor, but rather, the black is taught by society to competitively out-do his brother. The gang fights merely show a competition reenactment between two sections of the black community. Though the fighting may appear to have been sparked by an isolated incident, the underlying stimulus is the desire to "prove," to show superiority of someone because society has labelled all black people as inferior. Thus: so many blacks kill blacks, so many blacks rob blacks, hurt blacks, etc. Society says blacks cannot participate-so he takes, sometime to survive, because he wants to possess what society has deprived him the opportunity to obtain by competing in class society. This is an added factor to black separation.

THE BLACK is not in a position (not a societal location) to compete-especially against white people. So the black must compete against his brother, the black who robs must rob his brother, not because his brother has a great deal, but because the black who has a little something is the most convenient for another black to take from. We often hear "those niggers are always stealing from themselves." Yes, but is our stealing any more opposed to humanity, when we are stealing for survival 99% of the time, than the white robber, the capitalist who creates the condition that leaves only "stealing" as a means to life? Is our stealing a loaf of bread to feed our children wrong? Or is it wrong for one man to steal all and then build a prison for the man who steals because he has nothing? These are practical questions which can be answered quite simply.

   If a black steals or robs in order to live or provide for his family's life, is this wrong? We can and in fact must conclude that if societal arrangement proscribes black people from participating in the mode of societal living, i.e., if the society says to blacks you can not work in this society because you are inferior, because you are black, because you are not a part of this society, because you can see the "barriers" before you, then black people have the right to do whatever is necessary in order to maintain subsistence, in order to stay alive. So if a loaf of bread is needed for survival, and society says you cannot have this load of bread, it is not wrong for black people, or any people, to take the bread. It is not wrong for black people to live.

  Is it wrong for one man to steal all then build a prison for the man who steals because he has nothing? The man who has it all is the capitalist. We have seen that the latter owns everything ; that he is constantly stealing the profits of wage slavery and that he is sharing absolutely nothing with the lower class and less than nothing with blacks. We do not have to repeat the specifics of stealing going on by the capitalist. It is obvious that it is wrong for one man (or as the case in Amerikla, for a few capitalists) to own and control everything while black babies starve to death. So our attention must be focused on the vlaidity of the capitalist owned and controlled prisons.
  If we consider the handicap in which black people live under capitalist Amerikla, and the fact that this handicap is not an innate feature within black people, we must wonder why there are any black people in prison for the "crime" of taking money, property, etc. We must wonder because it has been established that the Ameriklan society has forced blacks to take; Amerikla has forced blacks to take in response to the black need to survive. It is not out of line that comrade Angela would say: the prison is a key component of the state's coercive apparatus, the overriding function of which is to ensure social control... While cloaking itself with the bourgeois aura of universality-imprisonment was supposed to cut across all class lines, as crimes were to be defined by the act, not the perpetrator-the prison has actually operated as an instrument of class domination, a means of prohibiting the have-nots from encroaching upon the haves.14
  A look at the prison population throughout Amerikla will point out certain distinctive facts which are interrelated to the social makeup of class society. The bulk of the prison population in Amerikla, is made up of black, brown, Puerto Rican and poor people. The black prisoner makes up a high 42% of the entire prison populace; the poor (this is poor whites and what the system calls "others" - the Chinese, Japanese and other non-white) prisoners make up 22% of the prison population in Akerikla. "...Imprisonment was supposed to cut across all class lines," yet when we look at the 42% of black faces in prison we can at once tell that "the bourgeois aura of universality" is in actuality a myth, that crimes are not "defined by the act," but are defined by "the haves" to apply only to the "have-nots."
  It is obvious that the laws have been created by the upper class for their benefit. Only 2% of the prison population consists of upper class (or rich) people. Since the upper class built and control prisons, they surely will not build a cage in which to house themselves. They would not create a law which would expose and therefore incriminate themselves. Surely the possession of money does not compel or necessitate the right or wrong of a matter. Yet in this country, the possession of money gives the right, the power, to make and define laws so as to procure the advantage. Since prison populations do no cut across all class lines, the primary reason prisons exist is the exert supreme control over the category of people who are subjected to imprisonment (i.e. the lower class-black people.) Prisons, outrightly as well as indirectly, force people to accept sick, capitalist society.
  Prison is a threat to the lower classes. The threat maintains that all who comprise the lower class must abide by the laws which the upper class has set forth, but such laws can only be adhered to by the upper class. Contradictory? Yes, but fact. The lower classes, in short, are being made to adhere to slavery of an economic slavery. Without the wage slave of the capitalistic process, the motor of the means of production would not be accessible to the mechanism of capitalism and therefore it could not function. It is then clear that the capitalists must have some way in which to reinforce the acceptance of the captialist process; to assure themselves that the masses are dependent in every sense upon the function of the capitalist process rather than resisting the dependency. So prisons serve as a threat over society to keep capitalism from falling apart at its root. If you do not work as a wage slave you go to prison; if you do not own large holdings of capital (control), you must be a wage slave.
  This peculiar institution of society-operating as a reinforcement stimulus-is easily comparable with certain historical social phenomena that have actually lingered on to the present in essential form. One such historical phenomenon was lynching.
 Both the overt threat of lynching and prevented lynchings function to maintain white dominance. They both...the socio-psychological matrix of the pwer relationship between the races."15
  Oliver Cox points out the dual effect of lynching. On the one hand it was employed to enforce white omnipotence; to prevent the

BLACK SCHOLAR OCTOBER, 1972            PAGE 25


Transcription Notes:
There are some misspellings but they seem to be accidents of the editor or an intended use of wordplay