Insane Clown Posse Launch Website for “Million Juggalo March”
When Insane Clown Posse first announced their plans for the Million Juggalo March in mid-2016 — for the event set to take place in September, 2017 — our own Axl Rosenberg noted the inherent conflict and implications of such an undertaking:
On the one hand, the FBI’s classification of juggalos as a gang vexes me — I enjoy making fun of ICP and their fans as much as the next blogger, but they’re not inherently bad people.
On the other hand, I can’t help but feel that such a rally will give a lot of assholes an excuse to dismiss the plight of groups that face persecution on a far more extreme level. To date, no nutso religious fanatic has walked into an ICP concert and started murdering people just because of the music they love; there aren’t any recorded cases of a juggalo being pulled over and shot by the cops for no reason. Rallying for clown rights at this point feels like ICP are, at worst, belittling people who face far harsher forms of oppression, or, at best, politically tone deaf.
On the other other hand, the Million Juggalos March won’t take place ’til September 16, 2017, by which point America may very well have installed Supreme Leader Trump. If that’s the case, I suspect this will be a moot point, as free speech will either be outlawed, or shooting protesters en masse will become SOP. So there’s that to look forward to.
Now here we are, and Supreme Leader Trump is about to given the keys to the most powerful office in the land: so where do we stand?
Again, it’s conflicting. On the one hand, there’s no question that the Juggalos demands to be treated “equally” — when millions of Americans have been fighting for that same privilege for centuries — seem insensitive and tone deaf, and they’re likely to ruffle more than a few feathers on those grounds alone. On the other hand, all those of us who feel unfairly persecuted should unite in Trump’s America against what is shaping up to be a very, very scary administration with potential consequences that could set back civil rights by decades.
Still, I’m going to have to side with the former: continuing on with this march in 2017 when the rights of so many others — those who can’t simply take their clown makeup off to blend in — are at stake seems a slap in the face to those very people. We have bigger fish to fry. I’m all for fair treatment for Juggalos — as ridiculous as I think they are — but this just seems the wrong way to go about it. Such a march made a lot more sense in the spectre of a Hillary Clinton presidency than it does a Donald Trump one.
There’s more info on the march here if you’re so inclined. Here’s the official press release about the launch of the new website:
FARMINGTON HILLS, MI – At 12:01 a.m. EST on January 1, 2017, underground hip-hop artists and pop culture icons Insane Clown Posse, via their label Psychopathic Records, launched www.juggalomarch.com, the official website for the upcoming Juggalo March on Washington, D.C., scheduled for Saturday, September 16, 2017 at noon at the National Mall.
The Juggalo March aims to bring national attention to the ongoing discrimination and profiling that Juggalos — a subculture built around Insane Clown Posse’s music and horrorcore rap — continue to be subjected to following the group’s inclusion in the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2011 National Gang Task Force report, which labelled Juggalos as “a loosely organized hybrid gang.” For the majority of the last decade, Juggalos all over America have reported incidents of police harassment and profiling, job termination, being disqualified for military service, losing custody of children, and other various infringements of civil rights, simply for identifying as Juggalos.
www.juggalomarch.com provides an overview of the planned public demonstration, including various testimonies from Juggalos describing how the gang label has personally affected their lives, as well as an archive of news reports about Juggalo discrimination, op-eds from such noted national writers as Nathan Rabin, Brett Callwood, and Steve Miller (author of “Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse and the World They Created”), and much more information about the March. The site aims to educate the public on the discrimination and serious legal consequences thousands of people across America face daily … just for listening to a certain type of music.
Psychopathic Records and its legal team, along with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, have been fighting to clear the Juggalo name via the judicial system for the past few years. The Juggalo March takes the message from the courtroom to a national scale: Juggalos are a music-based subculture and not any kind of criminal organization or gang.
The Juggalo March website is now live at www.juggalomarch.com
For further background information, visit the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan’s website on the Juggalo case at the following link: http://www.aclumich.org/media?combine=Juggalos&issue=All&tid=All
