Never-ending season of hate
11th September 2017 · 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 like beasts 365 days a year and 24/7, it’s more like Never-ending 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.
Watching some of these videos filmed by police dash or body cameras or passers-by, it almost feels like you are watching episodes of “When Animals Attack,” only with animals geared up with police uniforms, Tasers and guns.
Consider the following incidents:
• 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.”
This is clearly not someone who deserves to have the power of life and death over fellow human beings.
• 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.
• Two years ago, 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 in 2015, on Jan. 28, Detroit police officer William Melendez encounters Floyd Dent during 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.
Then we see body cam footage in Aug, 2017 of a white DeKalb County, Ga. law enforcement officer trying to calm down a white female motorist by telling her, among other things, that “We only kill Black people.”
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 have been adamant about building 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 of dollars were earmarked to renovate or rebuild 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 O. Perry Walker 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 New Orleans’ white district attorney letting a white man in Faubourg Marigny get away with shooting an unarmed a Black 14-year-old in the head for trespassing on his 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 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 more than 12 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 on New Year’s Eve 2004. 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 boys’ 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 plainclothes 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 while the NOPD is in the midst of a federally mandated consent decree.
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 justice 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 penned lyrics that said, “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.
Like it or not, we are the epicenter of white power and privilege.
New Orleans is the hub of human trafficking and oppression that teaches other governments and entities around the nation and the world how to control, enslave and dominate large groups of “powerless,” disorganized and unlighted people.
This is the little chocolate kingdom by the sea that educators visit to learn how to miseducate and undereducate tens of thousands of Black children from poor and working-class families and prepare them for dead-end, service-industry or hospitality industry jobs or servitude in the ever-growing prison industrial complex.
This is the City That Never Really Gave A Damn, where visitors flock in droves to savor “Antebellum Disney,” life in simpler times that the white minority ruling class has never completely abandoned or forgotten.
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. We have legitimately earned the dubious title of Mass Incarceration Capital. Because its laws, policies and practices are every bit as draconian and machiavellian as those employed during apartheid-era South Africa, I call New Orleans “New Johannesburg.”
To be perfectly candid, however, that may be an unfair comparison. Johannesburg could have learned a few things from the Crescent City about racial oppression and total dominance.
White-run South Africa has been toppled — white-controlled New Orleans has been going strong for nearly 300 years.
We hear and read about political repression, human rights violations, brutality and injustice in other parts of the world, but hear considerably less about massive human rights abuses and injustice taking place here on U.S. soil.
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 for those hoping to visit Antebellum Disney to get a taste of plantation life.
We’ve seen overseers, paddy rollers, militia men and cops get away with hunting down, lynching, castrating and shooting Black men, women and children like dogs with very little in the way of legal recourse or accountability from the system. One of the Justices on the highest court in the land told us in 1857 that Black people had no rights the U.S. that whites were count by law to respect, and we are reminded of that sobering reality every day.
All of these things have taken a toll on the collective psyche of Black people in New Orleans and the rest of the U.S. So we rage against the machine, engage in self-destructive behavior and sometimes turn on one another.
If anybody understands it, we know that the police have an unfair advantage in this war on us.
They have many things working in their favor including prosecutors who often work hand-in-hand with law enforcement agencies to railroad poor and working-class suspects and defendants of color; a legal system that routinely allows cops accused of using excessive or deadly force in larger cities to move their trials to mostly white suburbs and allows many of the nation’s rural and suburban areas to carry out “justice” against defendants of color like it’s still the Jim Crow era; prosecutors who are elected officials and, as such, cater to the wishes of white voters and campaign contributors so make decisions on where to prosecute trigger-happy cops and what information to present to grand juries accordingly; mostly white grand juries whose decisions on whether cases should be handed down all too often support the agendas of district attorneys and law enforcement agencies; mostly white federal juries from mostly white states who have demonstrated a propensity for siding with police and prosecutors; and finally federal courts that hold people of color and the poor to a much higher standard than they hold cops accused of using excessive and/or deadly force to and make it all too easy for the few cops that manage to get convicted to win appeals.
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.
We will never know how many times law enforcement agencies have gotten away with murder in New Orleans and other parts of the U.S. What we do know is that this War on Us, the merciless slaughter of unarmed Black men, women and children continues today unabated by calls for constitutional policing, opportunities for cops to get a free college education and the declaration that the era of “post-racial America” has begun with the election and re-election of the nation’s first Black president.
Because of our residence in the belly of the beast we call white supremacy, Black people in New Orleans have a critical role to play in the struggle for liberation and self-determination. We’ve looked white supremacy in the eyes and stood our ground. 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 September 11, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
