The massacre of Afro-Americans at a church in the US, with its lineage going back to the anti-slavery struggle, raises the obvious question: what is wrong with the US? With all their resources, knowledge and championing of human rights all over the world, they are treating their Afro-American citizens awfully. The latest horrific tragedy apart, the world has recently witnessed a string of killings of blacks, including children, by the country’s trigger-happy police force because it is part of their DNA, so to say, and training where black lives are concerned. It would seem that the country’s police anywhere and everywhere in the country has license to kill blacks.
US political leaders make well-meaning statements from time to time to fix the race problem. The church massacre has evoked the same rhetoric. At the same time, there is always an attempt by the political right in the US to point out that much has been done to improve the race relationship and incidents like the church massacre are the individual act of a white lunatic. But such cases, including the police shooting of blacks from time to time, are the product of a society that sees blacks as somehow dangerous and essentially a criminal tribe. For instance, the 21-year-old white man who killed his victims in the church reportedly said that he had to do so because blacks were raping white women and taking over the country.
When recently addressing the issue of police shootings of blacks, the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton rightly expressed her outrage. Speaking at Columbia University, she said, “From Ferguson to Staten Island to Baltimore, the patterns [of black killings] have become unmistakable and undeniable.” Recounting the pattern, she added, “Walter Scott shot in the back in Charleston, South Carolina, Tamir Rice shot in a park in Cleveland, Ohio, Eric Garner choked to death after being stopped for selling cigarettes and now Freddie Gray. His spine nearly severed while in police custody.” Clinton also dwelt in her speech on the larger problem of the oppression of blacks. As she said, “There is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes and an estimated 1.5 million black men are ‘missing’ from their families and communities because of incarceration and premature death.” She added, “It is a stark fact that the US has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population” with blacks grossly over-represented. For instance, African-Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites. If this is not institutional racism, it would be hard to call it by any other name.
However, it is not difficult to figure out why blacks are at the receiving end of this police brutality. This is because, as pointed out earlier, they fit the majority community’s image of them as a criminal tribe. Whatever Hillary Clinton might say now, her husband Bill Clinton’s presidency did much to aggravate an already bad situation by expanding the country’s prisons and introducing an even harsher sentencing regime of which the blacks were the worst victims. Indeed, former president Bill Clinton has now reportedly “called for an end to mass incarceration, admitting that changes in the penal policies that happened largely under his watch put ‘too many people in prison and for too long’ and ‘overshot the mark’.”
But, not surprisingly, blacks have lost trust in the political system or, for that matter, in the country’s politicians who are too ready to play politics at their expense. To be tough on crime, targeting mostly blacks, is quite a vote winner among the majority whites. When blacks protest to ventilate their outrage against police violence, it seems to validate for the majority white community the need for even stronger police action to maintain law and order. And when the police kill, they are only responding to the familiar situation of blacks holding the community to ransom. In other words, blacks lose whatever they do because the system is loaded against them.
In a recent opinion piece, New York Times columnist Charles M Blow wrote, “The black community in America has been betrayed by Democrats and Republicans alike — it has been betrayed by America itself. Therefore, it can be hard to accept at face value any promises made or policies articulated.” Blow was unapologetic about the recent black outrage in Baltimore and said that “misdirected rage is not necessarily illegitimate.” And he added, “We can’t rush to label violent protesters as ‘thugs’ while reserving judgment about the violence of police killings. We can’t condemn explosions of frustration born of generations of marginalisation and oppression.” While admiring Martin Luther King Jr’s non-violent struggle for black civil rights, he also quoted Lora Neale Hurston who said, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” These are strong words and indicative of the deep hurt and frustration of blacks in the US and a growing conviction that they do not like being on the receiving end all the time.
If blacks were expecting that the election of a black president in Barack Obama would usher in a post-racial US, that was a cruel joke. As a black president, Obama had to tread carefully when making any comment on race relations. Therefore, he largely confined himself to the generalities of ensuring justice and soul searching by all. The fact of the matter is that many people in the US have continued to cast doubt on his legitimacy as the country’s president by questioning his birth in the US, suggesting that he was a closet Muslim and hence not working for the US’s interests. Even at its kindest, his critics cast him as a socialist, considered by many as a subversive term.
In any case, unless US citizens are serious about overhauling the systemic oppression and discrimination of the country’s blacks, their pernicious treatment at the hands of the country’s white establishment will continue. In an article in the New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney highlighted the core reason for the indifference of the majority white population to rough and brutal treatment of blacks by the country’s police establishment. He wrote, “America has always felt the necessity of keeping its black male population under control. Behind every failure to make the police accountable in such killings is an almost gloating confidence that the majority of white Americans support the idea that the police are the thin blue line between them and social chaos.” In other words, it is this innate and entrenched prejudice and fear that is at the heart of the race problem in the US.
The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at [email protected]