You can't move forward until you look back.
Cornel West
There is something gravely disturbing when one watches an unarmed, 160 kg, 6’3” tall African-American, Eric Garner, lying sprawled on the pavement, with his face forcefully pressed to the ground, and a white officer on top of him seizing his neck in a chokehold, uttering what were to be his last words, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” Garner, who had committed petty crimes before, had been confronted by the police for the alleged charge of illegally selling cigarettes.
What is disturbing, say, even more than that of the images of an unarmed Walter Scott, being shot eight times from behind by a white officer, is the desperation and helplessness of a man, akin to an animal preyed upon, against the brutal and devastating force of the American state. This force is increasingly being administered in a colour-coded way — the chances of blacks, despite being only 14 per cent of the population, being killed by the police are three times more than that of whites.
That the Charleston massacre happened now is not surprising, coming as it is in the wake of two major race-related riots in the U.S. (Ferguson and Baltimore, both which followed killing of unarmed blacks by white police officers). It is another reminder of the deep racial divisions running through the nation despite 2015 being the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery.
Nevertheless, what is of serious concern is the inability to confront the ghosts head-on, whether it is related to racism or violence. While the entire Muslim community is asked to apologise for the acts of terrorists who are Muslims, whites as a community are not responsible for individual acts. As always, there is a great diffidence in naming racial violence for what it is — Charleston clearly being also an act of terrorism. Moreover, the perpetrators are immediately termed as suffering from mental illness. Ironic, for mental illness is never put forward as a reason for violent acts of people of colour — Islamic terrorists, for instance, are always sane and rational. Mental illness itself becomes demonised, ignoring that mental illness contributes to only around four per cent of violent crimes in the U.S. and that the mentally ill themselves are often subject to violent crimes. Mental illness, further, is seen as an individual problem, and not as something produced by a particular social structure.
The individualisation of larger societal problems like violence and racism by explaining them as caused by a few rotten apples perpetuates them. It should be obvious after horrific incidents like the shooting of 20 young children in a Connecticut school in 2012 the calamitous consequences of providing easy access to guns to the youth. The U.S. has, stupendously, 35 to 50 per cent of the civilian-owned guns of the world! Along with the alarming number of weapons, it is the culture of masculinity and its glorification of violence that is the problem. The popular culture is one which makes video games on the Iraq War for children and movies that show the pummeling of the ‘medieval’ Iraqis.
The dominant discourse might not want any dilution of the right to own guns (bizarrely, one of the responses to Charleston has been to argue that gun laws should be liberalised to make the carrying of guns more easier in places like churches for self-protection!) and it might point to the Nordic countries and their amazing contradiction of having some of the highest gun ownership rates along with very low homicide by firearm rate (despite an Anders Breivik). But this is an American myth constructed by comparing it with societies which are drastically different. In countries like Switzerland, despite the high ownership, experts argue, gun use in public is severely regulated leading to very low street violence. As this had not prevented high domestic-related homicides, even domestic use of guns has been further restricted.
And in countries like Iceland, substantial equality exists between the different classes leading to an extraordinary lack of conflict between them which is argued to be the main reason for the lack of violent crimes. It could not be more disparate from the U.S., which is one of the most inegalitarian societies in the world.
This brings us to the crux of the matter: measures like gun control are necessary to prevent certain egregious forms of violence, but that alone is not enough to eliminate the scourge of American society — racial divisions. According to the U.S. government there were nearly 3,00,000 hate crimes in 2012, and the ones based on ethnicity and religion have grown drastically since the previous decade. Nevertheless, more than the palpable violence of a Charleston, what is more consequential is the intangible violence that has liberated the African-American slaves but consigned them to perpetual ghettos. There is a complete political and economic disenfranchisement of the blacks.
Thus in responses to Charleston, and other police excesses, dominant white discourse argues that while violence committed by whites upon blacks is bothersome, what is shocking is the exponentially more numbers of violent incidents by blacks upon whites, and blacks themselves. Here, blacks are blamed as violent beings, genetically prone to violence. We will be given the statistics of the number of African Americans in prisons to prove the point: one million out of a total prison population of 2.3 million with an incarceration rate six times more than that of the whites.
But this is where the problem lies: an explanation that precisely begs the question and perpetuates the spiral of racial marginalisation and violence. There are no questions of history asked about the African-Americans. As Cornel West, intellectual and activist, argues: “We indeed must criticise and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognisant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live.” If this is overlooked, we will be “blaming black poor people for their predicament.”
This is what is indeed happening after every act of violence. The roots of the present crisis lie in the fundamental fact that the abolition of slavery took place without the necessary accompaniment of material support and economic rights for the liberated slaves. Thus the African-American slaves became only formally free. Leave alone reparations for suffering centuries of slavery, even their minimum demand of “40 Acres and a Mule” — basically ownership of the land that they tilled as slaves — was not granted. This led them to being the pawns of the market suffering its depredations — becoming the vast underclasses, who constitute the labour for the modern capitalist system.
Of course, culturally, at least, there is some recognition of African-Americans — in sports, music, etc. But this is mainly through the imperatives of the market that will commodify anything that can be commodified (here, at least, there is some progress over the situation in India, where the oppressed castes are culturally completely invisible). Even this mainstreaming has had severe consequences with black mass culture taking a degenerative turn — musical genres like hip-hop, which once had their origins in ghettos as resistance to the dominant order, are now a multi-billion dollar business immersed in vulgar misogyny and crass materialism. Thus when the dominant white society accepts black culture, it is by defanging the latter’s critical potential.
This is the imperceptible violence that maintains the racial barriers. There is no breaking them except for the mobility for a few individual blacks like Oprah Winfrey (worth $3 billion). But the life of the vast majority of the African-Americans is a different reality altogether. Instead of the number of blacks in prisons, the more relevant statistic is that the number of people in American prisons went up by nearly five times in a period of two decades from 1980! The U.S., despite having five per cent of the world population, has 25 per cent of the world’s prison population.
What is it that has changed drastically from 1980: have blacks become more violent in a matter of few years, or is it that the collapse of the welfare state and the ever-expanding dog-eat-dog world of an avaricious capitalism is pushing an already marginalised population into more deeper cycles of extreme poverty, drugs and misery (poverty has the highest correlation with gun-related deaths and is increasingly affecting the whites too) further exacerbating racial tensions and violence?
The U.S., or what Americans would like to call themselves as ‘the greatest nation on Earth’, might be the most desired destination in the world for emigrants (one in every 30 people in the world wants to relocate to the U.S.), but unless it dismantles the prison-industrial complex built on the backs of the African-Americans, the Charlestons, Baltimores and Fergusons will keep on repeating endlessly.
Indeed a terrorist act
The definitions of terrorism are always subject to legal and subjective wrangling. Nevertheless, a minimal definition includes the use of violence for the furtherance of political and social objectives. Therefore, it was baffling to see the FBI Director already discount the Charleston massacre as not a terrorist act. If the perpetrator Dylann Roof’s words before shooting: “I have to do it. You rape our women. You’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” his choice of the politically important Church, pictures of his wearing the apartheid-era South African and Rhodesian flag patches and his visit to former slave plantations, and his racist manifesto are all conclusively established, they are undoubtedly political acts which would constitute an act of terrorism.
nmannathukkaren@dal.ca
