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| Long Beach CA |
By Jack Gerson
Retired Oakland California Teacher
Teacher Unionist
On May 25 George Floyd was murdered
by the Minneapolis police, pinned to the ground and strangled, a knee on his
neck, for nearly nine minutes. It was a public lynching by the cop Derek
Chauvin aided by three other cops. The following day, Minneapolis cops attacked
a mass protest of this murder with tear gas and plastic-coated bullets. Within
a few days, demonstrations spread across the country. In city after city, the
same scene played out: In New York, cops kettled and beat protesters with clubs
several nights running. In Asheville North Carolina, cops destroyed a medic
station. In Louisville, police responded to mass protests against George
Floyd’s murder and the March 13 murder of Breanna Taylor by firing live
ammunition into a crowd, killing a bystander.
The cops met protests against police
violence with even more police violence. This backfired: the protests grew into
enormous multiracial outpourings, many organized and led by young people.
Attempts to divide the “majority of peaceful protesters” from the “violent
elements led by antifa” have thus far failed as well -- protesters and the
public saw for themselves that the cops have been the main perpetrators of
violence. When Donald Trump demanded that local officials “dominate” protesters
through repressive force and put thousands of security forces on the streets of
Washington DC (Secret Service, Bureau of Prisons, National Guard) and
threatened to bring in the U.S. Army, rebellion brewed in the ranks, resulting
in Trump’s open rebuke by the most prominent retired generals and admirals
(including James Mattis, John Kelly, Mike Mullen, Colin Powell) and even public
pushback from his hitherto obsequious Defense Secretary, Mark Esper. Trump
withdrew the National Guard.
Protests
have spread to most big cities and to many small ones, and around the world.
The explosiveness of this movement has already resulted in acts that would have
been inconceivable two weeks ago, including:
●
The Los Angeles mayor announced
plans to reduce the city’s police budget by over $100 million and reallocate
$250 million dollars to “invest in jobs, in education, and healing” in
communities of color.
●
The New York mayor announced plans
to reduce the city’s police budget and to implement reforms to the NYPD
●
The Minneapolis City Council voted
its intent to disband the city’s police department and develop an “alternative
model of community-led safety.”
●
Congressional Democrats introduced
legislation to facilitate prosecuting cops for misconduct.
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| London England |
If George Floyd’s murder was the lit
match that touched off this explosion, and if four years of naked racist slurs
and scapegoating by Trump was the kerosene, then the long simmering anger by
black people at their treatment and conditions (and the knowledge of those
conditions, if unspoken and suppressed, by many white people) was the fuel:
centuries of brutal kidnapping, rape, murder, enslavement, oppression and
exploitation. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, mobs burning black communities to the
ground. segregation and exclusion of black people from all but low paying,
menial labor.
Slavery was formally ended after the
Civil War by the 13th Amendment, but with a loophole exempting felons serving a
prison sentence. Today, although black males are not much more than 5% of the
population, they comprise more than 40% of the prison system -- a system that
houses one out of every four of the world’s prisoners. Prison labor is slave
labor, and the threat of slavery is used to intimidate the black community. The
“school to prison pipeline” carries a steady stream of young people of color to
the prisons.
The U.S. spends $32,000 annually per
prisoner, but only $12,000 per student. The Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that
“separate but equal” schools weren’t equal and are illegal, but 65 years later
de facto segregation and inequality in U.S. schools is greater than ever.
Schools in the black and brown communities are underfunded, lack resources, are
in need of repair, and are more crowded than schools in the wealthier parts of
town.
Thirty percent of black people have
lost the right to vote, largely because of criminalization (felony convictions
often mean loss of voting rights). Donald Trump and his allies are taking this
further, hinting at postponing the fall elections.
Unemployment and poverty have always
been worse for blacks than for whites. The pandemic has made it more so.
Unemployment in the U.S. is officially 16%, but the real figure is more than
25%. The mortality rate from Covid-19 for blacks is more than double that for
whites. The infection rates for blacks,
Latinx, and Native Americans are much higher than for whites, and they have
less access to quality health care needed to recover. Because few black and
brown families have an emergency fund to cover expenses, they are forced to
work in jobs that put them at high risk of contracting the virus. “It’s either
COVID is killing us or the economy is killing us,” said a young black woman to Time magazine.
The cops are there to enforce these
conditions, to keep black and brown people at the bottom. They act like an
occupying army in the black community, and beneath the murders lies the daily
grinding degradation of black people -- and especially of young black people.
This wasn't just one bad cop. Murder by cop has gone on for generations. Black
Americans are nearly three times as likely to be killed by cops than are
whites. The cops are there to protect property, wealth, and the wealthy -- to
protect the haves from the have-nots, by any means necessary.
Changing these conditions will require sweeping reorganization of society. Priorities are upside down. Defunding police and putting more money into essential services is a step, but only a small one (the proposed cuts are relatively small, and the amount of money to be transferred to essential services almost negligible compared to the needs). Disbanding the Minneapolis police, and community-based policing opens a promising discussion, but on its own will hit up against the imperative to protect property and the affluent.
But
there are voices calling for more, including:
●
Strong measures for
holding the police accountable;
●
Demilitarize the cops:
confiscate the tanks, the armored personnel carriers, the bazookas, the
military helicopters, the Star Wars uniforms, and the snooping surveillance
devices that were provided to urban police forces by the Bush and Obama
administrations;
●
Massive reduction in
funding for the entire security state apparatus – the cops, the prisons, the
military with the money going preferentially to low income communities and for
housing, health care, schools and other vital needs;
●
End mass incarceration.
End the criminalization of young black and brown people. Shut down the school
to prison pipeline. Free all political prisoners.
●
End the deportation of
undocumented immigrants. Dismantle the vicious U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) program.
●
Organizing community
patrols
The
ruling class will attempt to divide and coopt the movement, using vast
resources at its disposal. With the presidential elections now less than five
months away, a concerted attempt has begun to channel the movement into campaigning
for Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates, under the imperative of getting
rid of Donald Trump. They will try to get protesters to spend less time on the
streets and more time phone banking and door-knocking for candidates. We should
not underestimate this strategy. It’s worked in the past, and repeatedly. After
the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri, there were two years of
Black Lives Matter protests and major ghetto uprisings in the St. Louis and
Baltimore areas whose energy was effectively diverted into the Hillary Clinton
campaign. Bad as Trump and the Republicans are, the Democrats have been
complicit from their inception in constructing, enforcing, and sustaining the
racist, exploitative, and oppressive U.S. system at home and around the world.
But
this movement feels like a force that can hurdle barriers. It’s as though the
protests of the sixties have been compressed into a few weeks: mass non-violent
protests, widespread sympathy for the goals of stopping police violence, ending
racism, and establishing true equality; and an emerging wing ready to employ
militant self-defense against the cops. It’s a movement in large part organized
and led by young people asserting their disgust with the racist system and
their entitlement to a decent future in a better world.
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