Marc Lamont Hill: We Don’t Need Reform, We Need Radical Change

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The writer and intellectual James Baldwin wrote, “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

Today, Baldwin’s words resonate more than ever. A two-tiered system of justice dividing the powerful and the politically connected and the rest of us only seems to grow by the passing day. This gap is meticulously detailed in Marc Lamont Hill’s latest book, “Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond.”

In it, the Morehouse College Professor, journalist, CNN political commentator, and VH1 host details how the deaths of unarmed African American victims from Trayvon Martin to Sandra Bland and the residents of Flint, Michigan are victims of a political and economic system that refuses to acknowledge their suffering.

Hill and I recently spoke about his latest work, how it fits into the current news cycle, the revolutionary solutions being proposed by Black Lives Matter, and his new program on VH1.

Kevin Patrick Kelly: Let us talk about the title of your latest book. Who exactly are the “Nobodies”?

The Authoritarianism Of The American Police State

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Two days before Christmas, a “thug” launched an “unprovoked attack” on a female MTA employee on a Bronx subway platform, “choking her” and causing injuries, according to the Daily News. The “hulking brute” then fled the scene, “grinning as he made his may through the turnstile.”

The newspaper’s description conjures images of a fanatical psychopath, aggressively assaulting an innocent victim and showing a twisted pleasure in his deranged actions while escaping. Several days later the perpetrator was located, but he was not arrested. On Friday, more than a month later, police announced he will face only misdemeanor charges.

The perpetrator was allegedly discovered when he saw video of himself on the news and turned himself in, police said. Incidentally the man, 37-year-old Mirjan Lolja, is himself an NYPD policeman.

2015 Predictions: I Can’t Breathe … Can You?

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Eric Garner, a harmless man, who was strangled to death by a brutal police officer, has given me a simple answer to a question that other Americans have often asked me over the years, “why do you live abroad?”

At the heart of everything is the ongoing collapse of the middle class in the most highly developed countries. This is something that is destabilizing precisely those countries whose role has always been to stabilize the rest. That is the multiplier of all the other instabilities.

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