The Blue Plague and Black Death

The pathogen that kills Black people at two and a half times  the rate of whites took the life of 46 year-old George Floyd , this week in Minneapolis. Floyd’s last words were, “I can’t breathe,” much like the desperate utterances of plague victim Eric Garner , struck down in 2014 in New York City.  Unlike the still raging Covid-19 virus, which is virulent among Blacks of both sexes, the Blue Plague is especially lethal to Black males of all ages. According to researchers at Rutgers University and the University of Michigan, 1 in every 1,000 black boys and men  will be fatally stricken by the Blue Plague at some point in their lifetimes – at ages ranging from 12 year-old Tamir Rice , snuffed out in Cleveland in 2014, to 50 year-old Walter Scott , who fell victim to the pestilence in North Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.

Covid-19 is categorized as a “novel,” or new, virus, having mutated recently from wild animals. But the Blue Plague is a serial killer that dates back to the slave patrols of the pre-Civil War South. Indeed, the first vector of the Blue Plague has been traced back to Charleston, South Carolina, which established a paramilitary force called the City Guard in 1783, primarily to “police” Black slaves – although the term police had not yet been invented. The City Guard helped suppress the Denmark Vesey slave rebellion  in 1822 – a success that is believed to have led to the mutation of slave patrols into full-fledged vectors of Black death in cities across the nation, not just the South. 

“The Blue Plague is especially lethal to Black males of all ages.”

Researchers are hoping to find a vaccine for Covid-19, possibly within the year, but the Blue Plague only grows more deadly over time and enjoys a host of immunities. Although Black people had hoped that the historic expansion in the number of Black elected officials would create political antibodies to limit the spread of the Blue Plague, the opposite has happened. In 2014, just months before Michael Brown’s life was cut short by the Blue Plague, in Ferguson, Missouri, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus voted to continue funneling billions of dollars in military weapons, gear and training to local infestations of the plague, despite ample evidence that such infusions have made the scourge even more toxic to Black life. Four years later, 75 percent of the Black Caucus voted to classify the Blue Plague as a “protected class,” further immunizing the disease from the possibility of cure. The Protect and Serve Act of 2018 was “superfluous, since cops are already the most protected ‘class’ in the nation.”

More radical thinkers, steeped in the struggle against social pathogens, argue that the virulence of the Blue Plague can be weakened, at least among concentrated Black populations, through Black Community Control  of the disease. A number of plague control formulas  have been put forward , but the Black Misleadership Class, deeply embedded in the Democratic Party, fiercely resists any curb on the blue contagion, and actively encourages the spread of the disease among the federal secret police. In March of this year, two thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus  joined with a large majority of Democrats in support of the wildly misnamed USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act, which has since passed the Senate , as well. Only 17 of the 50 full-voting Black members of the House voted against the law, which was supposed to expire this year along with other provisions of the infamous Patriot Act. As reported in The Verge , the Act allows the FBI “to collect ‘tangible things’ related to national security investigations without a warrant, requiring only approval from a secret court that has reportedly rubber-stamped many requests.” These tangible things include spying on targeted peoples’ web browsing “without having to demonstrate that those Americans have done anything wrong,” in the words of Oregon Sen. Wyden.

“The Black Misleadership Class, deeply embedded in the Democratic Party, fiercely resists any curb on the blue contagion.”

The Blue contagion has spread around the world as the United States deploys its vast military as a kind of global police force, backed up by killer drones that carry out White House authorized executions in the far reaches of the planet. President Barack Obama authorized a regular schedule of snuff jobs on “Kill Tuesdays ,” but President Trump’s timetable is probably more erratic.

This being an election year, George Floyd’s death by Blue Plague in Minneapolis was widely condemned by the same parties that have encouraged and funded the spread of the fatal contagion. The Democratic mayor of the city fired the four cops involved in crushing Floyd’s neck, and Joe Biden, the presidential candidate who brags that he “wrote”  the Plague-proliferating 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, tweeted that “George Floyd deserved better and his family deserves justice. His life mattered.” But Biden and his party’s history as vectors of mass death say otherwise.

In the absence of an immediate cure, it is certain that some endangered Black males – and sisters, who are not immune to the ravages of the Blue Plague – will resort to home remedies to ward off the pestilence, as did Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and, more recently, some brothers in Dallas  and Baton Rouge .

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com .

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