Politics & Power Quote by George Jackson

Violence becomes so routine it’s trackable the way you’d track box scores: scan the obits, count the names, move on. Jackson’s line weaponizes that sick normalcy. By pointing readers to “the obituary columns of the nation’s dailies,” he’s not just citing evidence; he’s indicting a media ecosystem that files Black death under “local news” and calls it objectivity. The casualness is the knife twist: repression isn’t hidden, it’s printed every morning, sanitized into columns, and therefore made socially tolerable.

The parenthetical sprawl - “Fred Hampton, etc.” - does double work. It names a martyr of state violence while the “etc.” implies an unfinishable list, the kind you only abbreviate when the magnitude is too large or too familiar to fully narrate. That offhand compression mirrors the country’s own shorthand about racial terror: everyone knows, everyone claims to be shocked, nothing structurally changes.

Context matters. Jackson wrote as a revolutionary and incarcerated man during an era when prisons were becoming a primary instrument for managing Black political unrest, and when high-profile killings (Hampton’s 1969 assassination among them) confirmed, for many, that the state would meet demands for liberation with bullets and prosecutions. His key claim is psychological and strategic: this “has not failed to register on the black inmates.” Prison is not isolated from the street; it’s an amplifier. The subtext is recruitment and radicalization: when the outside world signals that Black life is disposable, the inside world draws conclusions, hard, collective, and political.