Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide

Percy D. Luján

Bronx Journal Staff

Carl Dix is calling for an end to what he says is “the brutality and misery the capitalist system enforces on humanity.” Dix, a Communist and cofounder of the October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, says a revolution is needed to end mass incarceration.

He spoke to a crowd of over 200 in a dimly lighted assembly hall in the basement of the Riverside Church served.

Revolutionary Books sponsored the talk, which was hosted by the Mission and Social Justice Commission of the Riverside Church.

Reverend Robert Coleman from the Riverside Church introduced Dix, saying that even though the church and the Communist Party disagree on the way society must be transformed, they agree that it must be transformed.

Carl Dix then stepped into the stage. He wore a grey baseball cap with a red star on the middle, a pin with the portrait of Bob Avakian on the left pocket of his grey shirt, and a violet digital wrist watch in his left arm. He is an average height man with a white beard and glasses, and a scar on his right forearm from an industrial accident he had while working in a mill.

The color red dominated the stage with a red curtain that served as background, a red tablecloth over the panel table, and red chairs where the audience sat. Even the podium from which Dix addressed the audience was made of red wood.

Dix began by mentioning Bronx resident Ramarley Graham who was killed by police on February 2nd inside his apartment. He also talked about the beating of Jatiek Reed by the NYPD, and the death of inmate Christian Gomez after taking part of a hunger strike in protest of the practice of solitary confinement inside Corcoran State Prison in California.

Dix said that these were more than isolated incidents and that policies such as Stop and Frisk serve as pipelines to incarceration. “It comes down to a slow genocide that can easily turn into a fast one, when targeted to black people,” Dix said.

The revolutionary enthusiasm of the 1960s opened opportunities for further change, he said, but the capitalists maintained state power. Dix talked about the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the US, and the how the Nixon administration began the war on drugs.

Those in power have demonized the masses by criminalizing them, says Dix, and they have doubled down on their punishment with the purpose of controlling them.

Over the course of his talk, Dix challenged Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to a debate on Stop and Frisk. “Let’s talk about the brutality that your pigs inflict on people,” he said. He also criticized President Obama’s statements blaming absent parents for black youth not succeeding, saying that mass incarceration is the reason those parents are not with their children in first place.

He spoke of the need for a Communist revolution, saying that the system offered opportunities to make things right. Dix said that the unfulfilled promise of four acres and a mule, the repression of the Black Power movement and mass incarceration represented three strikes and therefore the system has to go.

The idea that the people choose to violate the laws is blaming the victims for the way the system treats them, said Dix. “Just because someone ‘chooses’ to sell drugs, or a woman ‘chooses’ to commodify herself sexually doesn’t mean that they chose to have those choices.”

Dix then answered some questions from the audience. One man asked what he should do when he sees someone being stopped by the police. Dix told the audience that they should document the incident, even when this means putting themselves on the line.

“We cannot get into thinking Obama is an answer to all that,” Dix later said. He told the audience that the election of Barack Obama has meant the “disarming” of the people who were opposed to George W. Bush foreign policies. These policies, he said, continue under Obama.

At the end of his talk, Dix had a message to the youth of the Bronx. He asked them to stand together, saying that what happened to Graham could happen to any of them. He encouraged them to organize in their campus and to take the information to the people. “It is not just an individual problem,” he said.

Carl Dix is also a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA. Since 2009, he has engaged in series of dialogues with Prof. Cornell West titled “On the Age of Obama: Police Terror; Incarceration; No Jobs; Mis-Education… What Future for Our Youth?”