In the United States in 2015, the police killed 990 persons according to the Fatal Force count of the Washington Post. And up to the 13th of July 2016 the police had killed 518 persons. A disproportionate number of the victims of police violence are young Afro-Americans.

Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of sociology in Georgetown, said:

“We, black America, are a nation of nearly 40 million souls inside a nation of more than 320 million people. And I fear now that it is clearer than ever that you, white America, will always struggle to understand us.  Like you, we don’t all think the same... But there’s one thing most of us agree on: We don’t want cops to be executed at a peaceful protest. We also don’t want cops to kill us without fear that they will ever face a jury, much less go to jail, even as the world watches our death on a homemade video recording.”

He goes on to say white people will never understand how powerless black America feels observing these events, over and over again, while the shaky images provide a story harder than that which your eyes are disposed to believe: that the lives of black people are worth so little; that the deaths of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, have been recorded on film this week, and happened as people watched the police shooting. The police form part of an undeclared war against blacks... “We feel powerless to make you believe that our black lives should matter. We feel powerless to keep you from killing black people in front of their loved ones.” [1].

The struggle for the rights of African- Americans: “Do not confuse visibility with power”

The shout that "Black Lives Matter" has been the banner of the movement under that name that arose three years ago at the peak of police violence against African Americans, Latinos and other ethnic groups. Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, pointed out that even though the movement has grown and has gathered strength at a national level, it is necessary to expand the work undertaken in these years, to move beyond cultural shift into real transformation, so that with visibility comes power to make black lives really matter.  She noted: “I think people can confuse visibility with power. The reality is the conditions in our community are not that different [from before].” [2]

The panorama that the African-American, Latino and other ethnic communities in the United States live in is devastating: unemployment, mass imprisonment, lack of access to education and health care and police violence that is excessive and goes unpunished.

Although the statistics are well known, we should recall that in a country with the most people imprisoned in the world, 40% of the prisoners are African Americans, while they represent only 13% of the population. There are more African Americans in prison or on parole than persons who were slaves in the 1850s.

A system of racist vigilance

What are the causes of this situation?  A number of outstanding voices from the African-American community have pointed out that the problem is not racist policemen, but a racist system. Determining the profile of a delinquent based on race is amply used by the police throughout the whole country. The system of vigilance is based on the premise that a black person is suspect of a crime. A check undertaken on a stretch of highway in New Jersey registered that 46% of drivers detained were African Americans, Latinos or other minority ethnic groups, although these only made up 15% of suspects for driving over the speed limit. The same thing happens in all the other states.

"Racism serves to make money" 

The African-American writer and Nobel Prize Laureate for literature, Toni Morrison, has underlined that racism is a social construction to make money, since the races do not exist from a scientific or anthropological point of view. She says:

“We sometimes forget that colonialism was and is war, a war to control and own another country’s resources—meaning money. We may also delude ourselves into thinking that our efforts to “civilize” or “pacify” other countries are not about money. Slavery was always about money: free labor producing money for owners and industries. The contemporary “working poor” and “jobless poor” are like the dormant riches of “darkest colonial Africa”—available for wage theft and property theft, and owned by metastasizing corporations stifling dissident voices.” [3].

Legalized assassination at the service of neoliberalism

In the dominant narrative, the debate is framed in terms of "racist policemen" or African Americans that "do not respect the police". But the reality is that the racism and the abuse of police power fulfill a vital function for the neoliberal system: the police are used to repress poor African-American communities, with the aim of avoiding any form of rebellion in the face of the sacking of resources and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the elites.

Chris Hedges, a well-known American investigative journalist, indicates that the police commit "legalized assassinations" against people of color, not necessarily due to racism, but because poor communities have been converted into small "police states". In these communities, the police can detain people, question them, arrest them without cause for long periods and even assassinate them with total impunity. Hedges says: “The miniature police states are laboratories. They give the corporate state the machinery, legal justification and expertise to strip the entire country of rights, wealth and resources. And this, in the end, is the goal of neoliberalism…. Those who are discarded by the corporate state, especially poor people of color, are viewed as life unworthy of life. They are denied the dignity of work and financial autonomy. They are denied an education and proper medical care… They are criminalized. They are trapped from birth to death in squalid police states. And they are blamed for their own misery.”

Hedges calls for an end to the savagery of legalized assassination and notes: "We must free ourselves from the poisonous ideology of neoliberalism. If we remain captive we will soon endure the nightmare that afflicts our neighbor." [4]

14/07/2016

 [1] What White America Fails to See, Michael Eric Dyson, professor of sociology at Georgetown, Sunday Review The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/opinion/sunday/what-white-america-fails-to-see.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

[2] Interniew with Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, with Sonali Kolhatkar, Truthdig: http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/black_lives_matter_co-founder_alicia_garza_reflects_20160707

[3] No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear, Toni Morrison, The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/article/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear/

[4] Legalized Crime and the Politics of Terror, Chris Hedges, Truthdig:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/legalized_murder_and_the_politics_of_terror_20160710