Jasmine Abdullah: A new age of political prisoners
2016Moses Garvey 2016-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 10 →
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A great man named Mumia Abu Jamal once said, “Do you see law and order? There is nothing but disorder, and instead of law there is an illusion of security. It is an illusion because it is built on a long history of injustices.”
Nowhere could that be truer these days than in Pasa dena, Calif., where Jasmine Abdullah (Richards), 29, a Black Lives Matter organizer, has been convicted of a felony so rare that she has become the first African American to be convicted of it.
On June 7, the judge sentenced Abdulla to 90 days in the county jail, minus 18 days for time already served, and three years probation. Several hundred BLM sup porters packed the courthouse during the sentencing, and nearly 82,000 signatures have been collected on a petition on Abdullah’s behalf.
The charge against Abdullah is known as “felony lynching,” and it falls under California Penal Code 405a. The law was first passed in the 1930s in re sponse to protests against vigilante violence—at a time when racist white mobs routinely escaped pun ishment for murdering Black people by lynching. Ac cording to California law, the word “lynching” means “to remove someone from the custody of a peace officer by means of a riot.” But the facts of Jasmine Abdullah’s case shows that there was no “riot.” Riot ing requires the use of violence, disturbing the peace, threatening to use force, etc.
According to a “Democracy Now!” interview with Abdullah’s lawyer, Nana Gyamfi, on June 2, “the allega tions are that when the police were attempting to ar rest a person, who was not related to the demonstra tion and the peace march that Jasmine was having, … she made some effort to get that person out of police custody.”
The police were responding to a 9/11 call regarding a woman having a conflict with a restaurant owner. There is video footage of this incident available to watch on Pasadenanow.com. In the video, you can see Black Lives Matter organizers peacefully demonstrat ing to ensure that the young woman, who was de scribed in the video as being “petite,” wasn’t assaulted For brutalized in the course of her arrest. One woman said repeatedly that the police re fused to take her statement even though she had witnessed the entire event.
These individuals were doing nothing ille gal. They were fulfilling their duty as men and women of the community who want to en sure that other community members are not harmed by police.
The Pasadena Police Department has a re cord of violence. One victim was Kendrec McDade, who was gunned down by Pasadena cops on March 24, 2012. He was 19, unarmed, and had NO criminal record.
Jasmine Abdullah founded the Pasadena Chapter of Black Lives Matter in January 2015. Since then, she has made it her per sonal mission to organize and demonstrate on behalf of McDade and other Black youths who were murdered by the Pasadena Police Department.
Gyamfi says, “This is clearly a political per secution, cooked up by the Pasadena District Attorney’s Office, the Pasadena Police Depart ment, and the Pasadena City Attorney’s Office in what we are referring to as the attempted lynching of Jasmine Richards.”
Professor Melina Abdullah of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles calls this conviction “disgusting and ironic. ... The real lynching that’s carried out is done in the same way it was carried out in the late 19th century, early 20th century.” It seems in this so-called, “less racist” society we live in, there’s no shortage of young Black political prisoners. n clownish car-chases—everything that should have been flushed out of the script. Unhappily, the idea is too well established that a Black musician is barely a step away from being a criminal.
The facts are strongly to the contrary. Miles Davis never needed a six-gun to yank money out of Colum bia Records—he had a fountain pen. Better still, he had an enviable contract, which allowed him a full ad vance on royalties for his next album. That is, before he delivered an album, before he recorded even one tune, he could and did receive a sizable check.
This rather generous arrangement—getting paid be fore working—casts some doubt of Davis’s grousing about his lot as a “slave” to Columbia Records. In his autobiography Davis does acknowledge the obvious and says it was the company who had a right to com plain about the deal. Of course, once Davis collected his advance and spent it lavishly—thus, quickly—he did owe the company a record album whether he felt like going into the studio or not.
Compiling a list of factual inconsistencies is no way to see a film. The viewer who will be least inclined to en joy this movie of Miles Davis will be the fan who most enjoys the music of Miles Davis. The jazz enthusiast, familiar at least with the broad strokes of the life, will be the first to note the numerous departures from it, the hyper-fictionalizing—or flagrant distortions, take your pick—in the service of what is intended to be an essentially sound artistic truth.
Political conflicts enter this film through the con frontations with and adaptations to white racism. The infamous police beating of Davis in 1959, on the side walk outside of a jazz club where he was performing, is a fully developed and effective scene. Ostensibly, Da vis was arrested for disorderly conduct and assault ing a police officer; the real reason, as the film shows, had everything to do with a cop’s decision that a Black man in a suit, casually smoking a cigarette after put ting a white woman into a cab, was being too “uppity” for his own good. Davis took several stitches in the head that night, courtesy of a cop’s nightstick.
Racism is also evident in the decisions about casting and the subsequent telling of the entire story. Chea dle has pointed out in several interviews that a white “name” actor had to be featured for the movie to be funded. Ewan McGregor, looking curiously like Kurt Cobain, plays a largely invented character whose ef fort to interview Davis and to coax him out of retire ment makes up a large part of what is wrong in the film’s plot.
By the time this review is printed, “Miles Ahead” will have disappeared into that limbo of lost media, the gap between movie theater and cable/DVD release. The second chance to see it will be an opportunity worth taking—for the music, naturally, and for the performance of Don Cheadle.
Never mind that as a story, maybe even as a film, “Miles Ahead” has miles to go. n