Sean Bell was murdered and his two friends, Joseph
Guzman and Trent Benefield, were maimed by New York City cops minutes
after the trio finished celebrating Bell's marriage the next day.
The three were set up by undercover cops who were looking for trouble
in a bar in Queens; they were trapped in their car desperately trying
to leave the scene. New York's finest pumped fifty bullets in their
direction-twenty-one shots hitting the car the three friends were
in - invoking the ghost of Amadou Diallo.
The NYPD is already leaking and spreading lies to
a willing press in hopes of shifting the blame onto three unarmed,
innocent Black men, as per usual. So now we can read about the "sympathy
shooting" explanation, likened to how when one person in a
room laughs, everyone starts laughing: when one cop started shooting
they all started shooting. The cops and the media are bending over
backwards to troll through the histories of these men to bring up
juvenile criminal records that were supposed to have been sealed.
We are fed uncorroborated stories that Guzman bragged he had a gun.
Predictably, in the smoking carnage of the aftermath of the NYPD
execution of the three buddies, no guns were found.
In many ways, this case is just another example of
the racist police terror that grips most of the inner cities in
the United States. Police departments in New York, Chicago, Los
Angeles, New Orleans, Dallas, and Philadelphia, to only name the
most egregious, have spent the better part of the last two decades
locked in corruption scandals from accusations of torture and racism,
to drug dealing and murder for hire, to forced confessions and planting
evidence, and battling lawsuits against charges of police brutality
and police misconduct.
Racist police practice remains the main culprit for
the disproportionate numbers of imprisoned African-American men
and women in the nation's jails and prison. 58 percent of all convicted
drug felony cases involve African-American men, even though Black
men are only 6 percent of the national population and 72 percent
of all illegal drug users are white. 12 percent of Black men aged
25 to 29 years old are imprisoned, compared with 3 percent of Latinos
and 1 percent of white men. In 2002, there were 603,000 Black men
in college, compared with 791,600 Black men in prison. Black women
are two and a half times more likely than Latinas and four and a
half times more likely than white women to be imprisoned. In total,
49 percent of the U.S.'s two million prisoners, in prison or in
jail, are African American. This is a shocking statistic, considering
that Blacks are less than 13 percent of the entire United States
population.
Legitimizing Racism
The legal lynching of Sean Bell certainly fits into the historical
continuity of racist police violence directed at African Americans.
But racism against Latino immigrants, Arabs and Muslims has also
risen sharply. The cold, hard facts are that the political rancor
in Washington amongst Democrats and Republicans about immigrants,
so-called border security, homeland security, and the War on Terror
in general, has made racism permissible, tolerable and legitimate
all in the name of "political debate".
The racist backlash against the nascent immigrant
rights movement is not only embodied in the neo-fascist Minutemen
Project, but has also found expression in a number of "state's
rights" initiatives aimed at rehabilitating Jim Crow segregation
for Latinos and relegating Latinos to second class citizenship.
Since the mass marches of last spring, several local ordinances
have passed in favor of English-only laws, prohibiting the extension
of social services to the undocumented, and essentially criminalizing
the undocumented, and those who look like the undocumented, across
the country. Local officials and anti-immigrant activists have taken
their cue from Washington D.C., where politicians from both parties
have blamed the presence of immigrants in this country for everything
from unemployment, to low wages, to poor schools, and to placing
an undo burden on the social safety net - a ludicrous charge, considering
the now two billion dollars a week the U.S. continues to plow into
a losing effort in Iraq. Both Democrats and Republicans worked together
to sanction the building of the 700 mile long wall along the U.S.
and Mexican border, including liberal darling Barack Obama who pitched
in his vote for the wall as well. During a heated race for a Senate
seat in Tennessee, Democratic Congressman Harold Ford bragged, "I'm
the only person on this stage who has ever voted for an anti-illegal-immigration
bill" Congressman Tom Tancredo, an elected representative of
the United States government, recently compared the 65 percent Latino
city of Miami to a Third World country. He complained about Miami,
"the sheer size and number of ethnic enclaves devoid of any
English and dominated by foreign cultures is widespread. Frankly,
many of these areas could have been located in another country.
And until America gets serious about demanding assimilation, this
problem will continue to spread."
It is not only the racist nature of the "debate"
over undocumented immigrants that poisons the atmosphere, but it
is also the shrill anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric that has been
the political vogue since 9-11, with no end in sight. Since 9-11
and the racist roundups of thousands of Muslim men, it has been
open season on Arabs and Muslims in American society. According
to a Washington Post poll taken last March, a majority of Americans
think that "Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence".
The same poll found that one in four Americans has a negative view
of Arabs. A USA Today poll in August found that almost 40 percent
of Americans harbored some prejudice against Muslims and the same
number favored Muslims having to carry national identification cards.
This anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism has been sanctioned
from the highest levels of government as the Bush administration
and the Democrats who support its war efforts demonize and de-humanize
the Arab "enemy" to justify both the U.S. and Israeli
destruction of Arab country after Arab country. The unfathomable,
genocidal deaths of 655,000 Iraqis, since the war began in 2003,
is only tolerable if the Iraqis are viewed as having less humanity
and less worth than the rest of the world. Even as late into the
war as 2005, there was a 30 percent increase in hate crimes perpetrated
against Muslims. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
tracked 1,972 incidents against Muslims in 2005, the highest number
since 1995 in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. According
to a study compiled by the University of Illinois, the wages of
Muslim men in the United States have dropped by 10 percent since
9-11.
Racism and the State
Racism in American society is hardly new, but there is a new respectability
for it that is sanctioned by the highest levels of government, lending
an air of authority and legitimacy to the attacks on Latinos and
Arabs in our society. Racism has historically been used to divide,
distract and rule American workers. Today is no different. Neither
political party has solutions for the ongoing crisis that all workers
lives are mired in: unattainable healthcare, rising taxes, low wages,
raided pension funds, perpetual downsizing and layoffs and general
insecurity spurred on by unending wars and an uncertain future.
In the absence of a real political program, the powers that be have
opted for scapegoating and repression.
The resurgence of racism is coupled with ever expanding
police powers and the legitimization of a "by all means necessary"
approach to law enforcement. From wiretapping to the purposely vague
"enemy combatant" label, the Bush administration is not
only preparing for battles abroad but the inevitable conflicts at
home. In other words, not only has the Patriot Act allowed the Bush
Administration to follow and surveil perpetually suspect Muslim
organization, but the same laws are used to monitor and harass peace
and anti-war organizations. From Abu Grahib to Guantanamo to the
South Side of Chicago, to East L.A., to the streets of Queens where
Sean Bell was gunned down, law enforcement has been allowed to roam
unchecked by city halls, state houses and the federal government.
It is inevitable that this web of "respectable"
racism directed at the undocumented, Latinos, Muslims and Arabs
would eventually entangle African Americans. American racism is
not like a water facet that can be turned on for some and turned
off
for others. It is a continuous stream that eventually gets everyone
wet. In the 1990s in California, tens of thousands of African Americans
voted for the racist Proposition 187, an ordinance aimed at stripping
immigrants of their access to a wide range of social services. Blacks
were told that the presence of Latino immigrants, documented and
undocumented, were cutting into desperately needed resources for
the Black community. Of course the passing of Prop 187 did not increase
resources in the Black community, it only helped to stoke general
racial animosity so much so that a few years later Proposition 209,
a California ban on affirmative action, passed, resulting in thousands
of Black students being locked out of universities across the state.
When Latinos buy into the stereotypes that Blacks
do not work as hard as immigrants, it helps to preserve an atmosphere
of finger pointing and scapegoating and divides Latinos against
a necessary ally. When Blacks and Latinos accept the racist caricatures
of Muslims and Arabs as terrorists, it only helps justify government
spending on "security" and law enforcement, which in turn
contributes to a "law and order" atmosphere allowing the
police, the military and the border patrol to do "whatever
it takes to keep us safe", including harassing, detaining and
sometimes killing Muslims, Latinos and Blacks. The American state
has used the scapegoating and demonization of undocumented immigrants
and Muslims to rehabilitate racial profiling after African American
protest in the late 1990s largely discredited the practice.
Fighting Back
The attacks on these affected communities has not only created victims
but has also produced resistance. The immigrant rights movement,
which drew millions of documented and undocumented workers onto
American streets in unprecedented numbers, is the most powerful
example of this dynamic. The movement was largely born out of reaction
to a proposed congressional bill that would have criminalized the
mere presence of the undocumented in the United States, while turning
all Latinos into suspects.
But there have been smaller expressions of resistance
showing that the pieces for a generalized movement against racism
exist. Earlier this month, when six imams were handcuffed and herded
off a U.S. Airways plane because some passengers complained the
men made them "uncomfortable", supporters organized a
pray-in at the airline's ticket counter at Reagan Airport in Washington,
D.C. UCLA student, Mostafa Tabatabainejad, was handcuffed and tasered
in the school library when he was profiled and asked to show identification
and he refused. In response to this blatant act of racism and police
brutality, two hundred students organized a protest against the
police tactics and anti-Muslim racism. When management at Smithfield
Foods fired 75 immigrant workers because they said the workers social
security numbers did not match federal data, nearly 1,000 Latino
workers walked off the job to audible shouts of "justicia"
, "we want justice" and "no more abuse." Within
two days, management caved, reinstating most of the fired workers
and promising no reprisals for those who participated in the wildcat.
Finally, in the aftermath of the murder of Sean Bell, hundreds of
Blacks took to the streets to demand justice and an end to police
brutality in the Black community. This all just in the month of
November.
The current debate and discussion amongst activists
and in movement circles on how to achieve "Black-Brown"
unity and collaboration are not simply abstract projections on "can't
we all get along". These are desperately needed discussions
on how to organize a movement based on the political principles
of solidarity and "an injury to one is an injury to all".
In fact that debate needs to be widened to include Muslims and Arabs
and white workers who are rapidly being disabused of any false notions
of privilege and power as their living standards have followed everyone
else's down a bottomless sink hole.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an activist and writer
based in Chicago, Illinois. Her writings have appeared in the International
Socialist Review and CounterPunch. She is author of Civil Rights
and Civil Wrongs: Racism in America Today and Rediscovering
Race and Class after Katrina. She can be reached at [email protected]. |