Enemies of the state
25th July 2016 · 0 Comments
On the eve of the 2015 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Ohio, it was surreal to say the least to see Cleveland police union leaders and some GOP officials asking Ohio Gov. John Kasich to impose a temporary ban on the Buckeye State’s open gun law in the wake of the Sunday morning, July 17, killing of three Baton Rouge, La. police officers and the wounding of three others by lone gunman Gavin E. Long.
I was awed by the blind faith and fierce admiration many whites who spoke about the police have for law enforcement officers in general. White elected officials, businesspeople and everyday people talked about cops being quiet, everyday heroes who put there lives on the line every day to protect citizens.
But it has been proven countless times that all citizens are not viewed or treated equally by the American public or law enforcement agencies. We saw that 24 years ago when the world watched in horror as Los Angeles cops beat a handcuffed Rodney King unmercifully and an all-white jury in Simi Valley later found them all innocent.
We saw it in NYC when cops sodomized Abner Louima with a toilet plunger handle in the bathroom of a police precinct and when NYPD officers choked Eric Garner to death.
We saw it in New Orleans when cops stood around in the French Quarter and watched four white bouncers from Club Razzoo choke Black college student Levon Jones to death on the sidewalk on New Year’s Eve and when cops killed two unarmed Black men — one of whom was mentally handicapped — and wounded four other Black people on the Danziger Bridge just days after Hurricane Katrina.
The “Officer Friendly” most people of African descent know is radically different than the Officer Friendly white people talk about in hush, reverent tones. Their Officer Friendly actually protects and serves people them.
In their minds, Officer Friendly can do no wrong.
The Officer Friendly Black folks often encounter in communities of color more often than not performs more like an occupying force than a public servant or peace officer.
You can say what you want about the good work police do every day to keep people safe, but we know what we know.
It is not just the white American public in general that has given law enforcement agencies a free pass to do whatever they please to Black and Brown people. Cops of all races who killed people of color are shielded from justice and accountability by elected officials, all- or mostly white grand juries, district attorneys, state laws that are anything but colorblind, members of Congress, the United States Supreme Court and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Oftentimes, the powers that be rub this unequal access to justice in the faces of the oppressed, as they did in New Orleans when the “Danziger 7” were given a hero’s welcome when they turned themselves in to a Black D.A. after shooting six unarmed Black people in the Danziger Bridge. About seven years later, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu called cops that fatally shot Justin Sipp and wounded his brother Earl as Earl drove his younger brother to work “heroes.”
That set the stage for a decision by U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt to grant new trials to five NOPD officers convicted in the Danziger Bridge shooting case after an online posting scandal involving several top federal prosecutors. Those cops recently had their sentences reduced in some cases by decades, fueling Blacks’ anger and distrust of law enforcement agencies and the judicial system.
The honest, simple truth is that there are bad cops in law enforcement agencies across the country and that those bad-asses are wreaking havoc on communities of color. Most white Americans refuse to see or acknowledge this, even in the Digital Age where phones have become an invaluable tool in exposing racial inequities in the way Blacks and whites are treated by law enforcement agencies.
One of the more interesting developments in the wake of the recent fatal shooting of Baton Rouge police and East Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputies has been the language used to describe the gunman. During updates and press conferences by law enforcement and elected officials, he has been called everything from “demonic” and “diabolical” to a “monster,” “cowardly,” “despicable” and “animal.”
While the hurt, grief and anger are understandable given the circumstances of the officers’ deaths, there seems to be a little something extra in these name-calling rants and tirades.
It felt as though they were not simply condemning the actions of a single culprit but of every Black man in America.
We have seen this kind of vilification, criminalization, dehumanization and demonization before. We saw it in the film Birth of a Nation, where a Black man was accused of raping a white woman and dealt with accordingly. We saw it in the Charles Stuart murder case in Boston where a white man told police that a Black man shot and killed his wife and unborn child when he in fact had committed the crime. Black men were rounded up like stray dogs and treated like they had no constitutional rights that whites or the police were bound by law to respect. The same thing happened in South Carolina where Susan Smith drowned her babies in the back of a car that rolled into a lake and blamed it on a Black man. She, too, almost got away with it.
This time around, with heightened fear and anxiety about national security, terrorist attacks and radicalized assassins, stakes are even higher with law enforcement agencies and elected officials comparing Black men to anti-American terrorists and paving the way for Blacks to be profiled, targeted and demonized the way Arab Americans and Muslims are.
The depiction of Black men as enemies of the state and boogeymen is certainly not a new phenomenon but this time around Black men are being elevated beyond the status of U.S.-dwelling members of al-Qaida and ISIS.
We are the nation’s newly crowned Apex — dare I say “Ape-X” — Predator, the ever-elusive Guerillas in the Mist.
As America’s Most Wanted, we’re the new Resident Evil, the Usual Suspects, the homegrown nightmarish villains that stalk innocent policemen, and in the minds of those who are pushing this agenda, the cops are the only thing standing between US and THEM. As a result, it makes perfect sense to author more legislation like the Patriot Act that erodes the constitutional rights of all Americans and gives the cops a little more leeway to do whatever they have to do to neutralize or completely eliminate the perceived Black threat.
One of the telltale signs that the nation has decided to further demonize and vilify Black men is the refusal by most mainstream media organizations to give any coverage to the case of the inmate who killed two bailiffs inside of a Michigan courthouse recently and the alleged drive-by shooting suspect who killed a police captain in Kansas City recently. Both of these killers were white. That information was conveniently lost in the shuffle as mainstream media, elected officials and law enforcement agencies fan the flames of racial division and set the stage for a protracted war on Black people.
Their job is to convince white Americans and the rest of the world that Black men are a threat to the very foundation of this nation and that it will require draconian and machiavellian tactics and strategies to remove that threat.
Our job is to hold a mirror up to this nation to let it and the rest of the world see what it has become and to expose the lies, treachery and atrocities committed in the name of freedom and democracy…
And to survive the coming mayhem in order to rise up and live out the dreams our Beloved Ancestors planted in us when they traveled to this strange land in the bellies of slave-trading vessels and refused to die. Harambee.
This article originally published in the July 25, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
