Neverending season
27th April 2015 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
It would be inaccurate and myopic to say that it is open season on Black men in America.
With Black men and boys — as well as women and girls — being targeted, profiled, tagged and hunted 365 days a year and 24/7, it’s more like Neverending Season.
It’s mass miseducation, vilification, criminalization, exploitation, incarceration and extermination from the cradle to the grave.
Black people in the United States and other parts of the world are literally being harvested by our oppressors as worker bees to amass even greater wealth and power for the infamous 1 percent and/or fuel for the ever-growing prison industrial complex.
• In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tulsa County Reserve Deputy Robert Bates,73, shoots 44-year-old Eric Harris in the stomach with a gun, explaining later that he thought he was shooting him with a Taser. As the dying man tells the police that he can’t breathe and is clearly gasping for air, someone is overheard saying “F*&k your breath.”
• A cop in Charleston, South Carolina shoots Walter Scott in the back eight times after the man gets out of a car and starts running. The victim got out of the car and started running out of fear that he would be sent back to jail for failing to make child support payments. He was Tasered before he was shot and was not running fast when he was shot. It appeared as though the police were preparing to fabricate a story to cover up the officer’s crime until someone came forward with video footage of what actually happened..
• Freddie Gray, 25, “makes eye contact” with Baltimore police before he breaks out running. After a brief struggle, he is handcuffed, arrested and dragged to a police vehicle by police because he is unable to walk on his own. That same day he is rushed to a hospital and pronounced dead two days later with a major break in his spine.
Earlier this year, on January 28, Detroit police officer William Melendez encounters Floyd Dent during a traffic stop and literally punches him to death. While Officer Melendez still insists he did nothing wrong, he now faces murder charges.
Even when cops are caught red-handed on videotape or with eyewitnesses, they are seldom held accountable.
That is a sobering lesson we have learned many times over the years — most notably in the cases of Rodney King in Los Angeles and Eric Garner in New York City.
Despite mountains of evidence that document the many ways that the system of white supremacy controls our actions and limits our ability to secure the blessings of liberty for people who look like us, there are still many who refuse to see or believe it.
We show them the schools that were “integrated” after Brown. v. The Board of Education that were neglected by local, state and federal elected officials after “white flight” to the suburbs and how in many cities the children and grandchildren of those who left these cities in droves are literally returning with a vengeance and privatizing what was once public education, cherry-picking students and leaving millions of children of color behind. We have also shown nonbelievers how casually elected and education officials treat Black and Brown children like guinea pigs in a science lab. We’ve shown them how some charter schools have demonstrated that they are merely in the “education game” for the money and are fronts for corporations for whom running charter schools is no different than running privatized penal institutions. We’ve shown them George Washington Carver Senior High School in New Orleans, where students are still being treated like prison inmates and Walter Cohen College Prep, which Recovery School District officials want to rebuild above a toxic landfill that contains at least eight toxic metals including mercury and lead. We’ve seen RSD officials in New Orleans force John McDonogh High School students to attend a moldy, crumbling school while tens of millions were earmarked to renovate or rebuild the school and saw how casually these officials ignored the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the residents on the West Bank and merged L.B. Landry and Edna Karr high schools.
We’ve seen the powers that be ship several key administrators and school board candidates from NYC down to New Orleans and facilitate the hostile takeover of the Orleans Parish School Board after the state of Louisiana illegally fired thousands of school system administrators, teachers, staffers and employees.
We’ve seen prosecutors letting white men get away with shooting unarmed Black 14-year-olds in the head for trespassing on their property and a Latino Neighborhood Watch captain who considers himself white acquitted after fatally shooting an unarmed Black-17-year-old who he should have never been following in the first place.
Here in New Orleans, we’ve also seen a Jefferson Parish deputy with a martial arts belt continually punch a white 17-year-old in the face for allegedly mouthing off to him and the other deputies. The whole time I’m watching this, a chill is going up my spine as I imagine how much worse it must be for Black 17 year olds in Jefferson Parish.
We’ve seen prosecutors and cops hide evidence here in New Orleans in cases like those of Shareef Cousin, Curtis Kyles and John Thompson, all of whom ended up on death row until their convictions were overturned. We later saw the current Orleans Parish D.A. go to the U.S. Supreme Court and convince the justices to do away with the $14 million settlement awarded to Thompson in federal court because the D.A. told the high court that the City of New Orleans couldn’t afford to pay it.
The cops in New Orleans are particularly good at their jobs. We’ve seen them putting hits on residents for calling police about illegal drug activity, shooting unarmed civilians on an eastern New Orleans bridge after Hurricane Katrina, shooting another unarmed Black man and burning his remains in an abandoned car on the West Bank. Somebody later removed the man’s charred skull from the car and has still not returned it nearly 10 years after Hurricane Katrina. We’ve seen cops stand aside and watch four white bouncers strangle a visiting Black college student in the French Quarter. We’ve seen them rough up an elderly Black gentleman shortly after Katrina for the unpardonable crime of venturing outside of his hotel room to buy a pack of cigarettes. We’ve seen local cops and state troopers in plainclothes assault two Black teenage males for standing around waiting for one of the boy’s mother, a cop, to bring them something to eat. We’ve seen the cops descend on a 20-year-old headed to work at Burger King and fatally shoot him. Less than a week after that shooting, we saw another cop enter another 20-year-old’s Gentilly home and shoot the shirtless, unarmed man in the chest. We’ve seen the cops in plain clothes surround and fatally shoot a Black man sitting in a car outside his grandmother’s home in Tremé after failing to identify themselves as police. We also saw an officer shoot a suspect in the head just after she turned off her department-issued body camera.
We’ve seen up close and personal how very little Black Lives, Hopes and Dreams matter in America, mostly because they have never mattered in this republic.
The stark realization that we don’t matter and have been duped by the system has led to confusion, frustration, rage and, yes, violence, That violence in turn has been used to justify our current shackles.
Although Baton Rouge dentist and playwright Dr. Valerian Smith was referring in large part to the legacy of American slavery and the Jim Crow era, he could have very easily been talking about this city’s ugly history of Blue-on-Black violence when he wrote, “That Mississippi mud, drenched in Black blood…”
It is no secret that New Orleans, once the center of the domestic slave trade, is Ground Zero for the system of white supremacy. It all starts here.
New Orleans is the hub of human trafficking and oppression that teaches other governments and entities how to control, enslave and dominate large groups of “powerless,” disorganized and unenlightened people.
The Crescent City is the audacious little engine that keeps Louisiana functioning as the world’s prison capital, the place that incarcerates more people than any other place on the planet.
Mass incarceration is big business here in Louisiana, where the state depends heavily on New Orleans to provide a steady supply of human chattel to place in privatized prisons and tourism dollars from those hoping to visit Antebellum Disney to get a taste of plantation life.
Despite the incredible odds Black people continue to face in the U.S., we must come together with unity of purpose and a commitment to secure for ourselves political power, economic muscle, justice, equity and equal protection under the law by any means necessary.
Black people in New Orleans have a critical role to play in the struggle for liberation and self-determination. We need to continue to share the stories of our collective struggle with the rest of the world and pass on the many lessons gained from our struggle scars.
If we do that, we might just have a fighting chance of turning this thing around.
All power to the people.
This article originally published in the April 27, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
