Is Diddy’s case putting all black people on trial?

Racism in America was once institutionalised by segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters in a context that was normalised by bigotry. It was a pigmentocracy in all but name.

In reaction to this, several civil rights organisations sprouted like flowers of love amidst weeds of hate. Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks came to prominence as exemplars of a more inclusive society. However, not everybody agreed with their vision.

The militants

The Black Panther Party (BPP) was a Marxist–Leninist and black power political organisation. It was co-founded by Merritt Community College students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. It sought to disengage from any notion of inclusion.

BPP was an offshoot, ideologically speaking, of Marcus Garvey and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

With its "Back to Africa" message, the UNIA established 700 branches in thirty-eight states by the early 1920s. But the BPP was not interested in returning to Africa, it sought to have a separate state in New York or some other American metropolis.

Besides legally bearing arms in self-defence, the BPP members used music as a Trojan horse against “The Man.” They reportedly infiltrated Motown, a recording company founded by Berry Gordy, Jr., in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., in January 1959. Motown grew into a powerful Black-owned business, easily one of the most influential independent record companies in American history. The die was cast.

Billy X Jennings, a former Panther and the party’s long-time historian, tells us what happened next.

“In 1968, James Brown put out a song that really changed everything, because Black people, prior to that time, referred to themselves as Negro,” Jennings continues.

“James Brown came out and said, ‘We’re Black and we’re proud.’ And once that record comes out, you could never go back and say you’re a Negro. You could never go back! James Brown couldn’t have done that in ‘68 if there wasn’t a group like the Black Panther Party that had set up a foundation of knowledge already.”

The bear having been poked, the authorities had to respond.

Lawyers for Sean "Diddy" Combs are arguing that he should be released from jail and detained at home pretrial.MEGA/GC Images Business Insider USA

COINTELPRO

Under Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover, there arose an obsession with the rise of a Black Messiah. Fred Hampton, rapper Tupac Shakur’s hero, was believed to be that redeemer.

More, the FBI set up COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) to smash dissident political groups within the United States. In the 1960's, COINTELPRO's targets were what Hoover referred to as "black nationalist hate groups," like the Black Panthers.

The authorities successfully stymied any threat from BPP by flooding the ghettos with guns, drugs and booze. Its leaders were arrested. One of these incarcerated freedom fighters was Afeni Shakur, rapper Tupac’s mother. This is partly how black struggle was parlayed into top-selling rap songs.

Fight the Power

Hip-hop in the shape of rap came on the scene as a genre that began at block parties in New York City in the early 1970s.

It helped speak up against injustice. It later morphed into political and gangster rap. Chuck D, the leader of the political rap group Public Enemy, played a signal role in this.

“Black men didn’t have a voice. You might’ve sung records for people who were fortunate to become recording artists. Our music has always been code. Hip-hop is the term for our creativity, maybe for the last 50 years,” says Chuck D.

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The Rise of Diddy

In the 90s, we saw a change in Hip Hop thanks to Diddy. He took over the industry. Diddy, according to several sources, was an FBI agent and probably still is. His remit, it is believed, was to “cancel” any dissidents in the industry and put paid to any black icons who could, conceivably, be black messiahs.

You have to wonder why a black man is portrayed as the ultimate villain. Yet the music industry is full of Satanists. We all know about David Bowie communing with the Devil, by his own admission.

The Devil tends to favour heavy metal, especially dating back to the early years of bands such as Black Sabbath. All these are white bands and artists.

The WOKE movement got some things right. Especially so when they called out the negative portrayal of black people as angry, violent, entitled, feckless without an original thought or invention to their name.

In response, Hollywood made a play for diversity as a means to address this. But reactionary forces also embedded their own agenda and hijacked the WOKE.

Accordingly, Hollywood became a byword for permissiveness in league with Lucifer. Ask yourself why a black man, in an industry that has openly self-described Satanists, is painted even blacker. Are blacks worse than the devil?