All Lives Matter

guyana Chronicle editorial

October 30, 2015

The world watched in horror as a policeman violently flung a female high school student across a classroom in South Carolina in the USA. According to reports, the student had refused a request by her teacher to leave the classroom, prompting the call to the police who was stationed in the school. The policeman, upon entering the classroom, immediately began assaulting the student.Many groups and individuals across the USA have condemned this action by the police as yet another manifestation of the excessive use of force by law enforcement officers against African Americans. The policeman in question has since been fired from his job and the Department of Justice has mounted an investigation to determine whether the civil rights of the student were violated. This incident is not an isolated one. It is the latest in a string of high profile incidents involving the police and African Americans which have hit the headlines in recent times. From the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida to those of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, the country has had to confront a phenomenon that has long divided public opinion. While many African American advocates and communities have claimed that these incidents reflect a larger institutional racism against blacks, others, mainly white advocates, have contended that the extreme police action in those communities result from the reality of a disproportionate high rate of crime there. Even President Obama, who during his presidency has studiously avoided racially sensitive issues, has been drawn into the discourse. He has, for example, defended the Black Lives Matter movement against charges that its advocacy has led to an anti-police mass sentiment that has put the lives of policemen and women in danger. Only a few days ago he had cause to push back against the expressed view that the scrutiny of police action has led to a spike in crime since the police have been hesitant to do their job. It is not often that a president gets involved in a divisive issue. This is a clear indication that this matter has touched a nerve. As an African American, the president is well aware of the salience of this matter in that community. The Black Lives Matter movement has evolved as a civil rights voice of new and mostly younger activists. Its evolution follows a long resistance tradition in the black community. The reaction to its advocacy is also not new or unexpected. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and the 1960s led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was similarly demonised, leading to a sustained series of violent acts against activists and citizens. We view these developments in the USA with much concern. The continued violence against African Americans by law enforcement points to a clear issue of how human lives have been regarded. It is an indication that the end of legal segregation has not led to the dismantling of the socio-political architecture that underpinned that system. The age of colorblindness that followed has served to mask the continued racism that has been part of the American landscape for centuries. Now, in the era of instant technology, the underbelly of racism is being unmasked. We do not believe that those policemen set out to intentionally inflict violence on African Americans. Rather, they are simply doing what is normal. After four centuries of institutionalising black inferiority, it is not unexpected that ordinary citizens have been socialised to take that inferiority as a given truth. Hence, anti-black racism is generally instinctive and often unconscious. Perhaps the very success of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s has ironically led to a facilitation of what Professor Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow in an age of colorblindness.” We now know that the formal end of a social phenomenon does not mean the cessation of that phenomenon. Institutional racism is not individual racial prejudice; it is the linkage of collective racial prejudice to the power structures in the society. And the criminal justice system is a very powerful structure that understandably mirrors the innate racism that still haunts the wider society. Black lives matter does not and cannot mean that other lives do not matter. It is simply an acknowledgement that black lives have not been treated with the kind of sanctity of other lives. This recent incident on South Carolina clearly brings out this uncomfortable truth.