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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2007 - January 2008Black/Red ViewRacism and terrorBy John Alan Jena, Louisiana, was an unknown Southern town until a year ago. On the campus of Jena's high school there was a tree called a "white tree," because only white students at Jena's high school were sitting under its branches. When a Black student asked to sit under it, nooses were hung on the tree by three white students. This noose-hanging by Jena's white students was passed off as a joke. But it is not a joke and every Black person knows that. New noose incidents keep popping up all over the country. When tens of thousands attend demonstrations against this, as occurred on Nov. 16 in Washington, D.C., they are mostly ignored. The present atmosphere echoes back to a practice of racism in American history when a noose over the head of a Black person meant an actual lynching by a mob of whites. Lynching was a form of all-American terrorism to keep the Black population enslaved after legal emancipation. Racism was and continues to be integral to American capitalism. This theme from my column from May 2002, "Racism and Terror," reprinted below, is as relevant as ever. --J.A. * * * 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, S.C. NO REPARATIONS YET FOR TULSA May 31 is the 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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