By Cameron Duodu
The killing of five Dallas police officers during protests against the shooting of black men by white policemen is the latest manifestation of a social cancer that will destroy the United States if it is not brought to an end.
The Dallas protests formed part of a widespread reaction to the shooting, one or two days earlier, of two blackmen, in separate incidents in different states, by white police officers.
Such shootings are so common in the US now that they have passed the point of rational analysis. As soon as a white police officer shoots a black person, no-one in the African- American community feels the need to ask for details. “It’s happened again!” they tell one another. And they ponder what manner of reaction would be appropriate.
For although the circumstances of each shooting incident are necessarily different – of course – essentially, the pattern contains the same main ingredients: white police officers stop a blackman, usually a motorist. The white police ask the blackman for a driving licence or other ID document.
The white police may be doing this because the black motorist is suspected of having done something against the law – like jumping red lights or driving a car whose licence is out of date.
Or, as often happens, the blackman has only been stopped because a racist white police officer has taken it into his head that the blackman has no right to own such a car and must have stolen it! So he demands documentary proof of ownership of the vehicle.
Such requests usually agitate a blackman, for subconsciously, he realises that he might not come out of the encounter alive. He knows he has only been picked upon entirely on the basis of the colour of his skin. He already probably harbours enormous resentment against the way he is routinely treated in the United States. He resents the difficulties he has in obtaining the sort of jobs he desires. He may detest the neighbourhood in which he is forced to reside. All these resentments he has been actively suppressing, boil to the surface when a white policeman stops him even though he has committed no offence that merits his being stopped and frisked. Or at the very least, asked for identity documents.
Experienced black men and women tell their youngsters not to become resentful and jittery when they are stopped by white police officers. But that is more easily said than done, for adrenalin is adrenalin! So, as he reaches for an ID card, either from his pocket-book or the glove compartment of his car, the blackman may utter a curse or otherwise make a move which is misinterpreted by the white police officer as a threat. And the white police officer opens fire.
The blackman dies. Another statistic is added to the figures of blacks shot by white policemen in America.
The Rev Jesse Jackson describes such a scenario as an “execution”. And many other black Americans agree with him.
Currently, these are the terrible facts about such executions in the US:
# Police killed at least 102 unarmed black people in 2015; [that is] nearly two each week.
# Nearly 1 in 3 black people killed by police in 2015 were identified as unarmed, though the actual number is likely higher due to under-reporting.
# 37% of unarmed people killed by police were black in 2015 despite black people being only 13% of the U.S. Population.
# Unarmed black people were killed at 5x [times] the rate of unarmed whites in 2015.
# Only 10 of the 102 cases in 2015 where an unarmed black person was killed by police resulted in officer(s) being charged with a crime, and only 2 of these deaths … resulted in convictions of officers involved. Only 1 of 2 officers convicted for their involvement in [one of these deaths] death received jail time. SOURCE: http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/
Amplifying these figures, the London Guardian newspaper wrote:
QUOTE:
“Young black men killed by US police at highest rate in year of 1,134 deaths
“[The] final total of people killed by US police officers in 2015 shows that …young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers… A Guardian study recorded a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers this year…..
“Despite making up only 2% of the total US population, African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15% of all deaths logged this year by an ongoing investigation into the use of deadly force by police. Their rate of police-involved deaths was five times higher than for white men of the same age.
“Paired with official government mortality data, this new finding indicates that about one in every 65 deaths of a young African American man in the US is a killing by police.
“This epidemic is disproportionately affecting black people,” said Brittany Packnett, an activist and member of the White House taskforce on policing. “We are wasting so many promising young lives by continuing to allow this to happen.”UNQUOTE
Details of the shootings in Dallas were still coming in, as this piece was written. But I have no doubt at all that a person or persons –most probably African-Americans – have taken it into their heads to wreak vengeance on white police officers on behalf of the unarmed blacks killed by the police.
President Barack Obama has again tried to arouse the consciences of white Americans over the killing of black people by white police officers. But his outrage is usually so restrained that it annoys his fellow black Americans.
Now that he has nothing to gain by appeasing the whites, it is to be hoped that he can take some executive action to try and improve the situation of blacks in America vis-a-vis the racist police forces that are dotted all over the country. Is it possible for the Federal Government to extend FBI (that is federal government) surveillance of the state police forces, for instance?
Obama is in charge of a government machinery that can kill the enemies of the USA several thousand miles away from the US with drones. It does this because it believes foreign terrorists should be taken out before they can threaten American lives.
Surely, American lives are being more than threatened at home by racist police forces?
These racists no longer use the paraphernalia of the Ku Klux Klan. But they are just as deadly as the KKK ever was. Obama should crush them – with all the force at his command as US commander-in-chief. Otherwise, his presidency will mean very little to black Americans and by extension, to all back people all over the world.
For the future will be bleak for all America if the current situation persists into the future. James Baldwin has warned that it will be THE FIRE NEXT TIME.”
If this prophecy is fulfilled, America will have itself to blame. For another book, far less accommodating than Baldwin’s book, warned more than half a century ago that there can also be “NEGROES WITH GUNS!”