A Case Against the 14th Amendment: We Are Afrikan

“Law is simply politics by other means.” Such a line goes far to explain how courts really function, whether today, or 138 years ago in the Scott case. It ain’t about “law,” it’s about “politics” by “other means.”

Mumia Abu-Jamal

The words of Mumia hold just as much weight today as they did when he first wrote “Live From Death Row”; law does not require morality, law does not require justice, law only requires that there is someone to enforce it. Typically these enforcers of “law” are the pigs that occupy our communities and neighborhoods, they are the prosecutors and judges that hide their genocidal tendencies behind the “law” rhetoric that has been used since D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation.” Once we dispel the notion of laws as just and recognize the criminalization of survival, we can begin to see how the laws are written and manipulated to continue the exploitation of Afrikans and Brown Indigenous People. If there was ever any doubt about how this kkkolonial government utilizes their laws to oppress, let us not look any further than the “Reconstruction Amendments.” The 13th Amendment, heralded through establishment propaganda actually does not abolish slavery — rather it reforms slavery into an accepted institution: the carceral system. Just as the 13th Amendment provides the illusion of abolition, the 14th Amendment sets the…