When asked
about an incident in Baghdad in which a U.S. helicopter bombed
a position near
an immobilized Bradley military vehicle, killing at least 13
civilians including Mazen al-Tumeisi, a Palestinian journalist
working as a correspondent for the Al Arabiya news organization,
an American military spokesperson said that the attack was
executed for “the safety” of the people that were near the vehicle – i.e.
the very people that were injured or killed by the strike. The “logic” of
the Pentagon’s statement runs along the same mystifying lines
as that of the overall Bush imperial agenda: “We free the ‘Iraqi
people’ by killing them and denying them basic services”; “we
support ‘democracy’ by installing puppet governments and censoring
or killing the press.”
Of course, Black folks and people of color in general in America
are all too familiar with this sort of white washing of racist
and murderous policies. In Oakland, New York, Detroit, Cincinnati,
etc., we are facing an everyday war at home. Just listen to both
Republicans and Democrats (including Kerry and Edwards) continue
to beat the “homeland” war drum of being “tough on crime,” which
is of course coded language for racial profiling and the mass detention
of people of color. In speech after speech, Kerry continually attacks
George Bush from the right citing the fact that Bush has neglected
to put more police on our city streets. In the case of America’s
prison industrial complex the “tough on crime” war rhetoric of both
major parties translates as: “We protect urban communities by destroying
them”; “We serve disadvantaged youth of color by allowing the public
school system to rot, and by racially profiling and jailing them.”
While there are many factors that underlay
America’s global wars
and its de facto war on women, men, and youth of color at home,
one of the more crucial ones is that of America’s perennial problem
of deep-seated racism. Even if they will not say so publicly, many
American politicians and citizens believe that middle to upper
class white American life is more valuable than that of the people
of Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Haiti, other Third World countries,
and immigrants and people of color in the US. This devaluation
of non-white life was a key factor in the tortures of Abu Ghraib.
But, as those of us familiar with the US criminal “justice system” know
all too well, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are merely exports of what
has gone on for years in American prisons such as Pelican Bay and
Attica, and Louisiana’s “Angola” prison/slave plantation.
In the case of Iraq, American white supremacy
laid the groundwork for prison torture, and in massacres such
as the initial siege
of Fallujah (where over 600 Iraqi civilians were killed). Indeed
this mass murder happened around the same time of the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal, but went virtually unquestioned in the corporate
media. The massacre of civilians was somehow portrayed as “clean” and “legal,” while
prison torture was considered scandalous only because of the PR
problem of the photos being released. Those familiar with the Rodney
King police brutality video should be very familiar with this dynamic.
One of the more vexing aspects of the current devaluation of the
lives of people of color around the globe and at home however is
the fact that, in America,
a great many of the “likely to vote” public believes that racism is a thing
of the past. A key component of this belief has to do with a phenomenon whereby
the violent effects of American racist politics on a global and domestic scale
are submerged under the optical illusion of conservative “multi-culturalism.”
The days have past when tokenism is the sole operation of “liberal
politics.” We are now confronting a moment in the American empire when
right wing ideology has successfully marketed itself as “compassionate
conservatism” and "multi-culturalism” - a time when the Bush administration
can trot token Black people in front of the public as examples of conservative
inclusiveness. Examples of this modern spate of tokenism include reactionaries
such as Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Lt. Governor Michael S. Steele
of Maryland. The abominable lengths to which the “new Black tokens” will
go in their support of right wing policies was evidenced by Steele in his
speech at the Republican National convention, when he actually had the
nerve to use the name of Ronald Reagan in the same sentence with those
of Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In spite of the almost comic nature of modern conservative tokenism,
it contributes greatly to the contemporary myth that racism is a relic
of days gone by. However innervating this scenario may be to those
aware of the veiled omnipresence of structural racism, we shouldn’t
be surprised by such “smile in your face” tactics. This is the same
country where the daily appearance of Black athletes, actors, and singers,
in the mainstream media is flaunted as proof that everything is now
equal, and that America has successfully wiped its hands clean of “the
sins of the past.” This is a country whose president dared to travel
to a slave fort on the Western Coast of Africa preaching reconciliation
while refusing to address African/Third World debt forgiveness or reparations
for slavery, and while over one million Africans in America sit in
prison cages in the most “free” nation on the planet. This is the same
administration that preaches global security while forwarding a policy
of cowboy diplomacy and imperialism redux. This is the same
world leader who continually speaks of “compassion” while virtually
ignoring the AIDS pandemic in Africa and elsewhere (despite promises
to the contrary). Finally, this is an incumbent presidential candidate
who attempts to court the Latino vote through brief outbursts of something
sounding vaguely akin to Spanish while pushing an anti-immigrant domestic
agenda.
One must point out however that current American racism
and jingoism have little to do with what side of the aisle the
American
political representative happens to sit. Although I do sincerely hope
Bush is voted out of office (AGAIN) – and that grassroots mobilization
to this end leads to an invigoration of progressive politics in the
U.S. – let me remind the reader of a couple of key points. John Kerry
is a man who, like most other Democrats, voted for the illegal invasion
and occupation of Iraq based on the bogus excuse of “faulty intelligence,” who
supports the internationally condemned apartheid wall in Palestine,
and who – just before the debates – stated that even if he would have
known about the faultiness of the WMD claim, he still would have voted
to invade Iraq.
Furthermore, the problem of the Democratic support of a militarist
agenda is not just a matter of the shortfalls of their current presidential
candidate.
All we have to do to understand this is flash back to when Bill Clinton oversaw
the sanctions against Iraq – a policy that led directly to the deaths of over
500,000 children – and to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's comment on
60 Minutes that these deaths were “a hard choice” but were “worth it.” As progressive
thinkers and activists such as Arundhati Roy have pointed out, the American
corporate/military agenda operates according to Orwellian political and rhetorical
sorcery no matter whether the imperial figurehead is called a “republican” or “democrat.” We
live in a system where up is down, where two plus two equals billions of dollars
to Dick Cheney’s former company, and where leaders of the “free world” actually
have the gall to refer to a situation in which tens of thousands of civilians
have been murdered as “democratic progress.”
Through this theater of the absurd, many “well-intentioned” Americans buy into
the notion that structural racism has been replaced by reverse (anti-white)
racism as the country’s most prevalent “race problem.” That is, of course,
unless one pays heed to the chorus of reactionary complaint in regard to the
other major racial ill that is supposedly befalling the country – i.e. those
dark-hued complainers who refuse to “just get over the past” and be more like
Clarence Thomas, Ward Connerly, or Bill Cosby. Both of these stances actually
relate directly to the potent fantasy of American “color-blindness,” a mythology
whereby many white Americans take psychological comfort from the Disney-Land-delusion
that racism as a politically and economically crucial issue has vanished from
the American scene – that it is now only the stuff of “race cards” and pathological
victimhood. These modern social mythologies depend on the disavowal of the
fact that racism in general, and American white supremacy in particular, have
never been simply about the dislike of one person by another, nor simply about
southern men in white hoods burning crosses and people. In the now and yesterday
of the American empire, racism has functioned as a social, economic, and political
structure that negates the life-chances of millions of children and adults
a year in a variety of ways which are invisible to some and painfully obvious
to others.
To see racism as a structural rather than merely individual phenomenon is to
see through the fog of historical amnesia to everyday realities rarely covered
in the corporate media such as de facto educational apartheid, criminalization
and incarceration of masses of people for mostly non-violent drug-related offenses,
and a system where the basics of life such as health care and adequate shelter
are made into privileges instead of rights. This is a vantage point that unveils
the mechanisms that feed homeless shelters, unemployment lines, prisons, and
the military infantry. But to talk about such things is to deal with the causes
of social problems, and American profit-driven society never wants to deal
with causes of problems for then it might actually be placed into a position
where it has to contribute to sustainable global and domestic solutions instead
of the comic-book politics of “us vs. them” or the corporate chicanery of profits
over people. It might then be forced to consider the realities of those beyond
its borders and those within its own confines who are not a part of the political
or economic elite.
Despite these facts on the ground, the color-blind myth and the
political dumb show of multi-culturalism allow much of America
to see racism as something
that died during the time of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As revealed in his
last speeches in regards to the genocidal practice of the U.S. in Vietnam however,
Dr. King felt that American empire was just beginning to reach the full reach
of its destructive powers against non-European peoples around the globe at
the very time it was paying lip service to civil rights at home. This oft-ignored
internationalist aspect of Dr. King’s vision led him to describe American imperialism
as the greatest threat to the health and security of the planet just before
he was assassinated. Even though world opinion (the thing that Bush the
lesser now glibly refers to as a “focus group”) was decidedly against the
war in Indochina, and even as America got submerged in a quagmire and eventually “lost” for
the first time in armed conflict, three to four million Vietnamese and Cambodian
civilians were killed under the narcotic-like banners of democracy and saving
the world from an “ism” that was hiding around every corner.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
If America ever will realize the full scope of Dr. King’s dream, and if we
do not want more re-runs of Vietnam, progressives and radicals will have to
work to dismantle structural white supremacy even while struggling against
corporate globalization, patriarchy, environmental destruction, and homophobia.
None of this will be accomplished by modern day “Step-N-Fetchits” parading
themselves as “successful” Black folks while comparing Frederick Douglass and
Dr. King to a right wing want-to-be cowboy president. As Gill Scott Heron said
in “B-Movie,” his classic song about Ronald Reagan, the actor turned imperialist, “it
ain’t really a life, it ain’t nothin’ but a movie.”
Free Palestine!!! Free Iraq!!! Free Haiti!!! Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal!!!
Free Dr.
Mutulu Shakur!!!
Free Leonard
Peltier!!!
And the remaining 2 of the Angola
3!!!
FREE ALL POLITICAL
PRISONERS and the millions who never would have been imprisoned
if given real life chances!!!
Dennis Childs
received his Master's Degree in African American Studies
at UCLA in 1998. He is currently
finishing his Ph.D. in English at the University of California
at Berkeley. Child’s most recent publication is an essay, "Angola
Prison, Convict Leasing, and the Annulment of Freedom," which
appears in an anthology called Violence
and the Body edited by Arturo Aldama (Indiana University
Press, 2003). He can be contacted at [email protected] |