Black Activists Meet the President

Black Agenda Report asked Phillip Agnew of the Dream Defenders what the top two takeaways of the White House meeting were for him.

“The first was that it was the movement that got us this meeting, the unrest in the streets, and yeah a meeting with the president is kind of like an audience with Pharaoh. We weren't there to negotiate, because the movement is so much deeper than us” Agnew told us. “The second was that we've got a long, long way to go to where officials in this administration feel anything like urgency to meet even the mildest of our demands.”

We also asked Mr. Agnew whose idea the White House meeting was, at whose initiative it happened.

“One of the original demands soon after Mike Brown's murder was that the president come to Ferguson MO and listen to people there. That didn't happen. But that was months ago... the time for that is long past... I don't really know who set the process for this meeting in motion, but I got my invitation from the White House,” he told Black Agenda Report. “They said they wanted to hear from the ground what was going on on the ground.”

“We didn't have much time to prepare, but we laid out a number of demands. We demanded an end to 1033 (the program which provides military grade weaponry to police departments). We demanded the president use his bully pulpit, his last two years in office to shift the culture of policing, imprisoning and prosecuting, and we demanded that they use their federal executive powers to rewrite guidelines in ways that will cut off federal funding to police departments that don't make this shift. We told them that actions in the streets are going to continue no matter what.

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An public audience with Pharaoh, or with the president, as young activists against police impunity got early this week is surely kind of a big thing, especially in the US, where ordinary people are utterly deprived of direct influence upon the polices dictating how their lives are lived.

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My own guess is that the president and his team were not much listening to the young people in that room. The notion that assembly of politicians, aides, top cops and misleaders like King Rat Sharpton are simply unaware of what cops and prosecutors do every day doesn't pass a laugh test. Obama represented Chicago's south side in the Ilinois state senate. Sharpton cut his teeth on this kind of thing. These guys have been hearing horror stories of police misconduct for longer than some of the young activists have been alive. For their purposes, the day's participants were not much more than props in a production aimed to convince some larger audience that the same president who sent an extra 100 FBI agents to Ferguson MO just before the grand jury decision to gather information on dissenters was still fishing for facts on why there was widespread outrage in the first place.

  Black Agenda Report

And, it remains to be seen what, if any, of the activists’ demands the president will meet. We know already that he flatly refused to end 1033.