Justice for Alton Sterling
11th July 2016 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
The Louisiana Weekly Editor
In the wee hours of the morning on Tuesday, July 5, Alton Sterling joined a long list of Black men, women and children who were racially profiled, targeted and murdered by law enforcement officers for the unpardonable crime of simply Being Black.
It seems unusually harsh that Sterling was killed by Baton Rouge police for selling mixtape CDs and DVDs outside of a convenience store where he apparently had a good relationship with the owner until you consider that Eric Garner was choked to death by NYC cops for selling individual cigarettes, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was gunned down by Cleveland police for simply having a toy gun in his possession, Sean Bell lost his life to NYC cops for daring to attend a bachelor party the night before his wedding, Amadou Diallo was gunned down by NYPD officers for pulling out his wallet in the vestibule of his apartment building, and Michael Brown was gunned down by Ferguson, Mo. cops for walking in the street and having a facial expression “;ole the devil,” according to one of the cops.
We also witnessed the aftermath of the murder of 32-year-old Philando Castile in St. Paul, Minnesota for daring to reach for his ID card after being asked by the police to show them his license and registration. Things went left for him once he told police that he had a gun in his possession.
That certainly doesn’t seem at all like a crime punishable by death but when you give a gun and a badge to someone who is terrified of Black people and thinks that all Black people are guilty even after being proven innocent, things can go left at any moment.
There is nothing more dangerous and foolhardy than giving poorly trained, unenlightened and undereducated law enforcement officers the power of life and death over entire communities of people they have little or no contact with outside of their jobs. That’s why people in New Orleans and other cities have pushed so hard to have elected officials hire cops who actually live in the cities where they work.
When you live in the community where you work, you have a vested interest in improving public safety and there is less of a disconnect between officers and the residents they come into contact with.
That disconnect likely played a role in last week’s fatal shootings and contributed to the loss of life in Dallas Thursday night. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there is a great deal of fear, anger and distrust on both sides.
Oftentimes, mainstream media organizations, elected officials and law enforcement officials point to Black anger and frustration about being racially profiled, harassed, bullied, terrorized and murdered by cops as proof that people of color are “anti-police.”
For the record, most Black people are not.
But we are anti-injustice, anti-discrimination and anti-oppression.
We should remind ourselves of an observation by the late, great Dr. Frances Cress Welsing who said that the police are the first line of defense for white supremacy. Even though their salaries and benefits are paid for with taxes from every segment of the U.S. population, police are hell-bent on protecting and serving white people, white property and white interests by any means necessary.
People of African descent, as the primary target of racism/white supremacy and descendants of the proud people upon whose backs the wealth and power of this nation was built, are Public Enemy No. 1 to law enforcement agencies and are treated as such even by officers of color. Some do so subconsciously, others have no qualms about violating our constitutional and human rights at all.
One of the lines from the 1997 John Singleton film Rosewood that has always resonated with me was a line from the character played by actress Esther Rolle who told her family, “‘N*gger’ is just another word for guilty.”
That pretty much sums up the way men, women and children of African descent have been treated by the powers that be, elected officials and law enforcement agencies since we were first brought to the “New World” in chains.
Long before a Supreme Court Justice decided in the 19th century that Black people had no rights that white people were bound by law to respect, Black people were being branded with not only irons that identified our ancestors as someone else’s legal property but also as guilty.
We are witnesses to some of the most horrific and unspeakable crimes against humanity in the history of the world, and for that reason we are reviled, resented and viewed as a threat to the status quo.
Our very presence and existence render us guilty and dangerous.
The flip side of that coin is that those whose job it is to contain, patrol and control us and prevent us from mounting a challenge to injustice, economic exploitation, taxation without representation, domestic terrorism and white supremacy are allowed to do whatever is necessary to keep us in “our place” at the bottom rung of society.
Even Harvard University professors, elected officials and the nation’s first Black president need to be reminded from time to time that they are not full-fledged U.S. citizens with all the constitutional rights, protections and privileges that might imply.
So now we have Alton Sterling being executed on the street in Baton Rouge like he was nothing. It didn’t matter that his 15-year-old son was there or that there were other people in the vicinity when Sterling was hit with a stun gun, pinned to the ground and shot at point-blank range.
It didn’t matter that Baton Rouge is the state capitol in a state with a Democratic governor or that Baton Rouge has a Black mayor-president.
All that mattered was that Alton Sterling was a Black man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time and found himself at the mercy of trigger-happy cops who are likely scared to death of even law-abiding Black men and know that they can pretty much do whatever they want to Black people as long as they say their shooting victim had a gun, looked like he had a gun or threatened them in some other way.
With all the talk last week about the possibility of a race war, it should be noted that the United States and other Western nations declared war on African men, women and children the moment they invaded the Motherland to rape, pillage and plunder its human and natural resources. That was a nonverbal declaration of war and throughout the course of American history, slavery-era paddy rollers and police officers have been on the front lines of that war against Black people. The War on Drugs and the War on Poverty was essentially a war on us and there is not a day that has gone by that people of African descent have not been treated like the enemy by the government and its co-conspirators.
We are treated like war captives, not full-fledged, card-carrying U.S. citizens. We have to be honest with ourselves about that sobering reality.
We were spied upon by the FBI during its COINTELPRO program, treated like lab rats during the decades-long Tuskegee Syphilis Study and are still being forced to endure taxes without just and equitable representation and to toil in penitentiaries.
Nothing about the plight of Black people in the United States is an accident.
White fear of Black people and fear of white genetic annihilation trumps any concerns or reservations the majority of white Americans might have about vilification, dehumanization, exploitation, criminalization, incarceration, oppression and extermination of Black men, women and children.
The wholesale subjugation of Black people is simply the price that must be paid for the freedoms and privileges white Americans take for granted.
It’s not enough for those of us who care about what happened to Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, Adolph Grimes III, Wendell Allen, Michael Brown and all the other victims of white supremacy to get angry, shout out, post comments on social media or march in the streets — we have to organize ourselves, harness our economic and political power and hold those elected to serve us and those they hire and appoint to various government posts and commissions accountable for allowing these atrocities to continue.
Talk is cheap unless you follow it up with concrete, carefully planned and orchestrated steps to ensure that the powers that be respect our constitutional and human rights and right to be or pay dearly.
The powers that be don’t have to like us, but we must teach them that we will no longer suffer in silence or act as though we are powerless to change the course of this nation and history. When we do that, law enforcement officers will think twice about harassing, antagonizing or terrorizing us without probable cause or thinking that they have the right to unload weapons our tax dollars paid for on us for Driving While Black, Walking While Black, Breathing While Black or Simply Being Black.
All power to the people.
This article originally published in the July 11, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
