It is painfully obvious by now that slavery
remains a chronic germ in the American blood stream. All that’s happened in recent weeks has
happened before with this difference: a community relations-trained generation of law enforcement that improved
on police behavior after the Civil Rights and anti war turmoil has been
followed by a policing generation come of age in harshly different times. Their context includes chronic unemployment, a thirty year decline in job incomes,
terror attacks, and the Middle East wars that have added new temptations for
White Americans to deploy their fixations about racial superiority. The Pew Foundation reports this week that in
spite of all the gun mayhem in recent years more Americans than ever prefer gun
rights to gun control.
For the first time in more than
two decades....there is more support for gun
rights than gun control. Currently, 52% say it is more important to protect the
right of Americans to own guns, while 46% say it is more important to control
gun ownership.
This tension is surely growing from
the continuing fertile post slavery racial superiority divide to which has been
added a poorly understood Muslim world in turmoil. To the “Black threat” has been added the
“Muslim threat.”
The first symptom of the racial superiority disease is its blinding effect.
The direct line of this infection that began with the power of some to
enslave others is described by slavery scholars Daina Ramey Berry and
Jennifer L. Morgan. They cite a clause enacted in 1669 in the Virginia colony
“that gave white slaveholders the authority to murder their slaves without fear
of prosecution. This act, “concerning… the Casual Killing of Slaves,” seems
deeply inherited by police today.
The same line of slavery’s infection
runs through Abu Grebe prison, the CIA torture sites, onto U. S. streets where
a Black man selling cigarettes or a 12 year old child with a toy gun can die at
police hands in minutes or seconds (for your own eyes to see, courtesy of the
videotape) without indictment. Berry and
Morgan tell of this trial twenty years after the end of slavery:
In 1886, in the heart of the Jim
Crow South, Hal Geiger, an African-American attorney and prominent leader of
the black community from Texas, was shot five times in court. The prosecuting
attorney and confirmed shooter, O.D. Cannon, did not like the way Geiger spoke
to him. Taking the law into his own hands, Cannon pulled out a pistol and shot
Geiger, who died a month later. It took 10 minutes for a jury to acquit Cannon
of this “crime.” [The American Prospect, 12/9/14]
There is better news. A new virus-free generation is stopping the
trains in Oakland. Medical students by
the hundreds, wearing their white coats, “died-in” Wednesday across the country.
The West Side highway in New York City has been blocked repeatedly this week and
tomorrow Washington streets will be filled with protests against unindicted
police shootings of Black citizens.
The next challenge is to create a legislative
translation. Curing the slavery/racism virus requires a non-violent political
revolution that in 2016 elects new leadership to Congress and the Presidency. A
generation of old and new, inoculated with human rights serum, must include several
policy changes: a revision of the Grand Jury process with restraints
on prosecutorial freedom; passage of a
more stringent version of Dodd-Frank to regulate Wall Street much more strictly
so that we begin to close the middle class-wealth gap; and of course laws that reverse Citizens United that permits unbridled campaign contributions from the wealthy. The
list is much longer. Without a virus-free political translation that protects
and enforces democratic practices the die-ins alone won’t change anything.
