Lorenzo Komboa Ervins is a former member of the Black Panthers Party. Upon his release from the prison he was imprisoned in for 15 years as a political prisoner, he has resumed his activities as an advocate for social change and the empowerment of coloured communities in the US and Canada. The following is an interview granted by Lorenzo after a lecture he delivered in Montreal on January 24

The Politics of Pacification
Interview with Lorenzo Kombea Ervin, January 24 2001
_________________
By Samer Elatrash

There are many who assert that racism against African Americans in North America is more or less a thing of the past. Sure, you have fringe groups who occasionally commit atrocities; but we’ve come a long way. America now has two African Americans in prominent government positions; one is the Secretary of State. What is your response to this assertion?

Well, the forms of racism have changed. We’ve had a civil rights movement and a black power movement in the 1960s, which defeated the overt forms of racism. But what we haven’t had is the complete eradication of racism. We have an increase of official forms of racism and racist terrorism: police brutality, which is rampant amongst people of colour in the United States. We’ve got poverty, which is concentrated most heavily in black working class communities. You have millions living in the streets; whole families are sleeping in the streets because they don’t have the basic income needed to survive. We’ve got an increase in young black males being criminalized by the white government and the police. This has resulted in over 1,000,000 young black men and women going to prisons in the last ten years. Much of it is the result of a government drug war. The government created the drug war, they created the drugs, then they turned around and entrapped these people.
The fact that you have black faces in high places is meant to pacify the population. The reality is that they have not changed social life for the better for the majority of non-white people. So what we have is a new form of racism that includes these black politicians, and these so black called “representatives