Almost every injustice listed above has exact parallels in the daily life of occupied peoples in foreign lands. And these injustices are committed against American blacks at astounding rates.

And almost all of it can be traced to the beginning, in the late 60s, of the “law and order” and “tough on crime” policy movement. What adds outrageous insult to outrageous injury is that the establishment has managed to propagate the myth that this is precisely the time in which things allegedly got much better for black Americans, and that they have the government to thank for it, since it is also the period in which the state began to tranqulize and etherize the black community with the debilitating sop of the Great Society welfare state and Federalized public schools, as well as the corruption and distraction of egalitarianism-through-force and electoral politics. “Social justice” and “civil rights” were the mess of pottage that American blacks were fed to cover the fact that they were simultaneously being systematically deprived of actual justice and self-ownership rights through the imperial police state.

This is why New Orleans-based singer/songwriter Randy Newman, in his 1974 song, “Rednecks,” was able to skewer the conceit that the government policies of self-satisfied 20th-century Northern liberals had liberated and uplifted the black people:

Down here we're too ignorant to realize That the North has set the [black man] free Yes he's free to be put in a cage In Harlem in New York City And he's free to be put in a cage in the South-Side of Chicago And the West-Side And he's free to be put in a cage in Hough in Cleveland And he's free to be put in a cage in East St. Louis And he's free to be put in a cage in Fillmore in San Francisco And he's free to be put in a cage in Roxbury in Boston They're gatherin' 'em up from miles around Keepin' the [black men] down