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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2002
Column: Black/Red View by John Alan
Racism and terror
President Bush has declared a
war on "terrorism and evil." But his war totally ignores the racist
terrorism which is alive and active in this nation today and has been for
several centuries. Many Americans are well aware
of the fact that racism is an evil and often violent force in this country.
Newspapers print exposes on how the police profile and kill innocent African
Americans with impunity. They also point to the race disparity in prison
sentencing. A recent documentary on public television revealed that the Miami,
Florida police force had systematically framed African Americans by planting
guns on them after they were arrested. However, any exposure of racist
terrorism in this country today will not by itself cause the two old capitalist
parties to seriously oppose it. Both parties feed on it, since the vital source
of this terrorism is racism, which is at the very foundation of the social
structure of American capitalism. A racist specter of
"evil" African Americans ready and able to spring from their
impoverished urban communities to commit crimes against whites has long been
used by politicians. President George Bush Sr., the father of President George
W. Bush, won his 1988 presidential victory by playing the race card. He accused
his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis of being soft on Black crime because he
furloughed an African-American prisoner, Willie Horton, who later raped and
murdered a white woman. New York City's former Mayor
Giuliani began his rise by permitting the New York police to terrorize, torture
and kill innocent African Americans. Giuliani's police force constructed a
regime of terror in the name of combating crime. Former President Clinton, in a
political sense, practiced terrorism. His clap-trap about a crisis in Black
"morality" boiled down to getting Congress to enact punitive crime
laws, such as the "three strikes and you're out" law—a mandatory
life sentence if one is convicted of a third felony—as well as mandatory
minimum sentences for minor drug offenders and the construction of more prisons.
The result of those punitive laws are two million in jail and prison of which
African-American men and women compose 50%. U.S. LEGAL AND 'ILLEGAL'
TERROR Imprisonment of such a large
number of African Americans, by the political action of a supposedly liberal
president, says more about the depth of racism in American society than
about actual or alleged crimes committed by those African Americans. In many
parts of this nation, the very presence of African Americans implies crime in
the thinking of white Americans and gives the police a reason to profile or
shoot African Americans. What history has clearly shown
is: legal equality and political freedom do not, in themselves, abolish the
practices of racism, sexism and classism in America's "democratic"
capitalist society. African Americans have been
engaged in a ceaseless struggle against racist terrorism. Once freed from
chattel slavery, they discovered they were not at all free, but landless people
existing under the terrorism of lynch mobs. The Tuskegee Institute's
conservative numbers show 3,426 African Americans were lynched between 1882 and
1947. Lynching was a brutal and a dehumanizing affair. Before hundreds and even
thousands of spectators the victim was often stripped naked, mutilated and
burned alive. No president of the United States ever intervened to stop those
grisly affairs, even when the victim was the African-American postmaster of Lake
City, South Carolina. NO REPARATIONS YET FOR TULSA May 31 is the 8lst anniversary
of one of the many race riots against African Americans, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In
1921 deputy sheriffs and national guardsmen carried out one of the most violent
acts of terrorism, killing 300 and making 10,000 homeless. To this day there has
been no official acknowledgment of this state sponsored terror, not to mention
reparations for the still-living survivors. That is true even though Congress
appropriated $29 million, after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal
Building, to fund the Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the
Prevention of Terrorism. One cannot help but recognize that the long struggle against racist terrorism has both put American civilization on trial and given a greater dimension to the idea of freedom than the founding fathers were able to recognize or imagine. Then, as now, the fundamental issue is not pompous declarations about the evil of terrorism, but everyday human relationships. |
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