Biden has to step outside and provide a contrast in style and substance to Trump, as do other leaders of the Democratic Party and democratic coalition. Actually, everybody, including each of us in whatever way we can, has to find our voice. Silence isn’t an option; speaking out at this tense and dangerous moment is a necessity.
The past week — and it’s too bad we as a country have to learn this way — provided more than enough reasons for a overhaul of our criminal justice system. A crucial element of any such overhaul is democratic and community control with teeth over police departments and policing.
The failure of the county district attorney to arraign and bring murder charges against the 4 policemen responsible for the death of George Floyd yesterday is outrageous. How is it possible? The evidence is in plain sight. Incontrovertible. On a video, more than one, in fact.
A good part of the answer lies in seeing the world as it is, in seeing justice (injustice) as it is practiced, in seeing the systemic racism that is materially embedded in the institutional life of our society, including and especially, in the criminal justice system. Or to put it differently, it is a racialized system of exploitation and oppression that make the securing of justice in the case of George Floyd so difficult, despite the incontrovertible evidence at hand.
Most of us don’t command a big audience, but each of us, nevertheless, can find ways to speak out against racism. And an immediate place to begin is to demand that murder charges be brought against the 4 policemen that cruelly took the life of George Floyd. What we can’t do is bring back his life. And that sobering reality will temper the joy of any victory that might be won.
Black Lives Matter
Racist exploitation and super-exploitation, oppression, and ideology is a constant and defining feature of U.S. historical development from nearly the moment of arrival of colonizing settlers to what would become North American shores in the 17th century. Indeed, it is fair to say that every aspect of the country’s historical process has been deeply and indelibly marked by racism, which is more than a prejudice toward people based on their skin color.
But while racism and racial inequality have been essential cornerstones to the country’s development as well as the guarantor of the hegemony of its white ruling elites, the racialized structures and institutions, legitimizing language and symbols, and the terrain and trajectory of racist and anti-racist struggle have changed over time. In this sense slavery is not as much the “original sin” of our country as the first racial (or racist) order, albeit the most searing, brutal, and hyper exploitive one that co-evolved with contemporaneos racial orders during its long duree.
Fundamental to slavery and its descendant racial orders was not only the denial of rights, but also the extraction of enormous amounts of coerced unpaid or underpaid labor, land dispossession, forced migration, and segregation and confinement of people of color to particular living spaces — the plantation, ghetto, barrio, reservation as well as particular zip codes, towns, and cities.
While slavery met its Waterloo in the course of a sanguinary Civil War, “the chains of slavery,” to use Frederick Douglass’s phrase, invaded and wrapped themselves around the social orders that followed up to the present day in countless ways at the ideological and practical level.
Efforts, therefore, to connect the present with the past is anything but an academic exercise. Its elucidation is necessary if we hope to fully understand contemporary racism and the righteous struggles that we are witnessing today against it.
The provocative actions of extremist groups on the far right and the left symbiotically combine with aggressive policing in Minneapolis and around the country in an attempt to recast the meaning of the non-violent, protest actions that are occurring now. No one would be happier than Trump and Barr if they are successful in burying the legitimate and longstanding demands of the protesters. But I don’t think they will. The political tides of justice and equality are cresting and widening and won’t easily be turned around.
In the antiwar movement of the sixties we saw the same kind of disruptive convergence, but it wasn’t successful.
