You may recall that in 2011, the FBI classified Insane Clown Posse fans, affectionately known as juggalos, as a “loosely organized hybrid gang.”. Insane Clown Possee has been trying to sue the FBI over the classification for years, but it keeps getting thrown out of court. ICP has since decided to take their protests to the government's backyard.
The Juggalo March on Washington is officially scheduled to take place Saturday, September 16, 2017 and today the official website launched. Here's the full press release, emphasis ours:
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
As much as we poke fun at ICP and their fans, it's absolutely ridiculous that anybody would lose custody of their children because they happen to listen to the band. Where does it stop? If somebody can lose their kid or their job or even military service for listening to ICP, what's to stop somebody from getting fired for listening to Deicide or Cannibal Corpse? Discrimination in any form has no place at the workplace.
Then again, there are stories like this and this that set ICP fans back a little, which is not to say these people wouldn't be out of their mind if ICP hadn't existed, but it certainly doesn't help.
