Friday, December 12, 2014

Knife's Edge


 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.

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