Black World
March 2000

Diallo verdict: meaning and movement

by Lou Turner

Those who were shocked by the Feb. 26 acquittal of the four white New York City cops who murdered young West African immigrant Amadou Diallo the night of Feb. 4, 1999 have not fully grasped the newly scripted repressive world order now in force in cities like New York. Those who were not shocked are already intensifying their organizational efforts around such causes as Mumia Abu-Jamal, abolition of the death penalty, fighting police abuse and murders, wrongful convictions, and solidarizing with a new prisoner rights movement emerging behind the prison walls themselves. Both, however, need to consider the meaning of the verdict of a jury of eight whites and four Blacks that exonerated Amadou Diallo's murderers of "depraved indifference to human life" after unleashing a barrage of 41 bullets at him, 19 of which struck their target. We also need to consider the meaning of the actions now unfolding in response to the verdict.

The trains run on time in Rudolph Giuliani's New York. His New York will not be Seattle (1999), nor Los Angeles (1992). It will be quiet under a heavy, repressive police presence, as the 5,000 demonstrators who marched down Fifth Avenue found out the day after the verdict when it seemed that as many police as protesters showed up. No doubt that heavy police presence was itselfa barely disguised NYPD support rally for their four exonerated fellow officers.

New York City is quiet. Part of it as if in mourning, like a swallowed scream; another part in "deep denial" about the extent of NYPD blues' brutalization of the city's dark communities, as NEW YORK TIMES columnist Bob Herbert observed (2/28/00); and another part rests uneasily behind Giuliani's phalanx of storm troopers in the streets.

The sacrifice of Black life is the of price paid for New York City's quiescence. It's a price that comes cheap in these raw and repressive days in America. It's a quiescence that the liberal and conservative elite alike attribute to the "finest hour" of Rev. Al Sharpton. It took more than "Can't we all get along?" Sharpton immediately admonished demonstrators after the verdict: "Let not one rock be thrown!"

The whole scripted process that unfolded, from the murder of Amadou Diallo by one of New York's legalized "death squads" called the "Street Crimes Unit," to the acquittal of Diallo's murderers, through the days of rage a year ago in which celebrities and public intellectuals got ceremoniously arrested protesting the Diallo murder, reflects the new repressive reality to which all are supposed to accommodate themselves. After all, the trains run on time.

In this this newly scripted repressive world, the pathos and moral suffering that gets prime time coverage is not that of the oppressed but the oppressor-crying cops whose lives and "careers" have been tragically wasted by a young Black man "acting suspiciously." Suspicion is written all over the forces at work in the Diallo tragedy, but in the end the jury found, under instructions from New York Supreme Court Judge Joseph Teresi, that young, unarmed Diallo is where the suspicion lay. The jury and the people of New York City were told by Judge Teresi and Mayor Giuliani not to put themselves in the shoes of the "suspicious acting" immigrant, but in the shoes of his armed-to-the-teeth, bullet-proof vested murderers.

And yet the inner universality of Amadou Diallo's life is also the outward reflection of Black and immigrant communities from Paris, Vienna and London to New York and Los Angeles. To America's Black urban landscape has been added the "suspicious acting" immigrant.

This newly scripted repressive world is that of civil society and its public good, "served and protected" by Giuliani's NYPD; it is a civil society that wants the trains to run on time and its streets safe, apparently at any cost. "Public service" in the name of civil society lends nobility to the NYPD; it is what substitutes the pathos and moral suffering of four murderous cops for the tragic death of a young African man who had his whole life before him. "Public service" is what impelled Judge Teresi to instruct the jury to put itself in the shoes of Giuliani's "death squads" instead of the shoes of Amadou Diallo.

The meaning of the Diallo verdict is simply this: Behind the show of public service to civil society is the public authority of the state which renders obedient service in ITS, not society's, interest. It serves itself not the society it claims to serve. Thus, Rudolph Giuliani's public hubris-"The verdict makes me proud to be an American."

There is likewise a social consciousness that doesn't follow the script of Black leaders or "public servants," however. Instead it harbors a deep and abiding hatred for this "new world order," and, as Hegel declares, "stands ever ready to burst out in rebellion." It is then that the meaning of the Diallo verdict becomes a revolutionary movement.

The wanton murder of another young Black man by the NYPD five days after the Diallo verdict, only three blocks from the spot Amadou Diallo was killed, is evidence that the verdict has increased the repression. That the young brother shot down had only days before been arrested protesting the verdict is also evidence of what stands ready to burst out.