HOW CAN WE STOP THE RACIST VIOLENCE?

Harry Targ

 

                                                    A Chicago Tribune photo.

 There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!! Mario Savio, December 2, 1964, University of California, Berkeley.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14, 2021

A Repost of an essay: RACISM, THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM, AND CIVILIAN POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY (originally posted on Friday, October 14, 2014)

      Harry Targ               

Over the last several years the criminal justice systems at the federal, state, and local levels have threatened the basic rights of citizens, particularly people of color and youth. These violations of equal treatment under the law have included:

-a “national epidemic” of police and vigilante killings of young African American men, for example Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis in Florida, Eric Garner in New York, Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, John Crawford III in Dayton, Ohio, Vonderrit Myers Jr. in St. Louis, and Ezell Ford in Los Angeles

-the mass incarceration of people of color such that, as Michelle Alexander has reported in her recent book, The New Jim Crow, more African Americans are in jail or under the supervision of the criminal justice system today than were in slavery in 1850;

-the institutionalization of laws increasing surveillance;

-and the passage of so-called Stand Your Ground laws, justifying gun violence against people perceived as a threat.

On August 9, 2014 unarmed nineteen-year-old African-American Michael Brown was shot multiple times by a Ferguson, Missouri policeman. In response to the collective expression of community outrage that followed, the local police initiated a multi-day barrage of tear gas, strong-arm arrests, and the threatening of street protestors with military vehicles and loaded rifles. The images on television screens nationwide were of a people under assault. The fear that young African American males in Ferguson have historically felt every time they stepped into the streets of their city was heightened by the killing of Michael Brown.

Significant events since the police murder have been protests, the visit to the Ferguson community by Attorney General Eric Holder and national mobilizations in Ferguson and around the country. Subsequent to that police killing, many more African American men have been killed by police officers across the nation.  However within the last few days “testimony” leaked from the grand jury investigating the police crime has appeared in the St Louis Post-Dispatch and Washington Post that promotes a narrative that the police officer who murdered Brown was acting in self-defense.

Along with police killings other police abuse occurs regularly. In Hammond, Indiana, on September 24, 2014, an African American women, who was the driver of a car and mother of two children in the back seat, and an adult male friend in the front passenger seat, was pulled over by a police officer for a seat belt violation. Fortunately nobody died, but the policeman drew his weapon and shattered the automobile’s front side window. The policeman had ordered the male to roll down the window, tasered and then arrested him while the seven year old daughter of the driver cried in the back seat. Subsequently Hammond authorities have defended the conduct of the police officer.

In a recently released study, journalists discovered that between 2010 and 2012 young Black males were shot to death by police 21 times more than young whites. Their data was limited to those two years because earlier information accumulated by the FBI was incomplete. Prior to that time police departments had not filed required reports when police used force.

Even though data is partial, Professor Colin Loftin, co-director of the Violence Research Group, University of Alabama, said, “No question, there are all kinds of racial disparities across our criminal justice system.” (Ryan Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones an Eric Sagara, “Deadly Force, in Black and White,” http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white, October 10, 2014).

A growing body of evidence suggests that the criminal justice system administers justice in an unfair way--from general police/community relations, to trials and incarceration, to the use of violence and deadly force against minority youth.

While police are supposed to serve the interests of the communities in which they work, compelling evidence suggests that, to the contrary, force is used to stifle dissent and challenge assertions of political and cultural autonomy. The data overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that police systems are institutionalized forms of racism.

In response to racist police violence the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a branch of the National Alliance founded in 1973, has been working to “stop police crimes,” establish “prison reform,” and to oppose the incarceration of persons wrongfully incarcerated including political prisoners.

The CAARPR has proposed the establishment of a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC) for the city. According to the plan, the city would create an elected CPAC which would oversee the personnel and policy of the police department. CPAC would appoint the Superintendent of Police, revise rules for police practices, investigate police misconduct, investigate all police shootings, and provide for transparency in investigations. The central premise of the CPAC idea is that the police exist to serve the community not oppose it.

Real community control of police and the criminal justice system is basic to any democracy. Along with the generalized declining perception by Americans about the legitimacy of political institutions, minorities and youth see the police more as an occupying army than a force for protecting the safety, security, and independence of members of their community.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2018

DEEP STRUCTURES, HATE, AND VIOLENCE: The Long Road to Societal Decay

 Harry Targ

 We are mourning again. Violent deaths continue: African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Gays and Lesbians, Women, Youth, Jews, and the list goes on. And the media pontificate about root causes: guns, a divided society, hate speech, the internet, and politicians. Analysts usually lock onto one explanation and deduce one or two cures. But there are other analysts, for example “realists’ and religious fundamentalists, who say there will always be violence. There are no solutions.

The reality that undergirds the killing of masses of people on a regular basis is not easily discovered. That is, there are “deep structures” that have created a brutal and violent world. And movements to transform these deep structures, although complicated, can have some substantial success.

First, and I write this at the risk of being dismissed as an ideologue, the contemporary state of the capitalist economic system must be examined in rigorous detail. What might be called “late capitalism” is an economic system of growing inequality of wealth and poverty, joblessness, declining access to basic needs-food, health care, housing, education, transportation. The increasing accumulation of wealth determines the ever-expanding appropriation of political power. In the era of late capitalism, economic concentration resides in a handful of banks, hedge funds, medical conglomerates, real estate developers, technology and insurance companies, and media monopolies.

Second, late capitalism continues to marginalize workers of all kinds. Agricultural and manufacturing work, the staple of two hundred years of economic development, is disappearing. Highly skilled electronic workers and others with twenty-first century skills are employed as needed by corporations, with little or no job security. Once secure workers who have lost their jobs live in communities with declining access to food, growing environmental devastation, and limited connection to information and the ability to communicate with others. And, of course, conditions are worse for workers of color, women, the young, and the old.  A new working class has emerged, the “precariat,” with skilled but insecure jobs; the service sector, workers in health care, home care, fast food and other low paid and overworked occupations; and workers in the “informal sector,” desperate people who take short-term jobs or are forced to sell drugs, peddle products on the street, engage in prostitution, or engage in other activities so they and their families can survive. In addition, the most marginalized are homeless and hungry. Late capitalism has increased the marginalization of majorities of working people, in core capitalist states and the Global South.

Third, the history of capitalist development has paralleled the development of white supremacy and patriarchy. If capital accumulation requires the expropriation of the wealth produced by workers, what better way to increase profits can be found than marginalizing sectors of the working population and setting them into competition and conflict with each other by creating categories of difference. Racism, sexism, homophobia, the demonization of immigrants, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Muslim hysteria all serve, in the end, profit and the accumulation of wealth and power.

Fourth, systems of concentrated wealth and power require the development of political institutions, institutions that enhance the control of the behavior of workers. From monarchies, to constitutional democracies, to institutionalized systems of law and custom, such as segregation, voter suppression in our own day, the behavior of the citizenry is routinized and controlled. In most political systems electoral processes create some possibilities for modest, but necessary, policy changes. However, as Nancy MacLean points out in Democracy in Chains, economic and political elites use their resources to restrict and limit the influence of democratic majorities.

 Fifth, this economic and political edifice requires an ideology, a consciousness, a way in which the citizenry can be taught to accept the system as it is. This ideology has many branches but one root, the maintenance and enhancement of the capitalist economic system. The elements of the dominant political ideology include: privileging individualism over community; conceptualizing society as a brutal state of nature controlled only by countervailing force; acceptance of the idea that humans are at base greedy; and, finally, the belief that the avariciousness of human nature requires police force and laws at home and armies overseas.

 Sixth, a prevalent component of the political ideology is the idea that violence is ubiquitous, violence is justified, and violence is to be applauded. The trope of living in a violent world pervades our education system, our toys, our television and movies, our sporting activities, and our political discourse. Violence is tragic (we pray for the victims) but it is presented in popular culture as liberating and justifiable. And to survive in this world of evil and strife, everyone needs to be armed.

These are the backdrops, the “deep structures,” that frame the contemporary context. And this context includes a politics of economic super-exploitation-destroying unions, fighting demands for economic justice, shifting wealth even more to the super-rich, and taking away basic rights and guarantees, such as healthcare, education, water, and even the air we breathe. And to justify the growing immiseration of everyone, the Trump Administration, most of the Republicans and some of the Democrats justify their policies by a racism, sexism, homophobia, and virulent rightwing nationalism not seen since the days of racial segregation in the South. And Anti-Semitism, long a staple of political ideology in Europe, reached its most virulent form in the United States in the 1930s, when Father Coughlin’s nationwide Anti-Semitic broadcasts found their way into many households. As late as the 1950s, property deeds included “restrictive covenants” forbidding the sale of homes in specific neighborhoods to Jews or people of color. Local political initiatives led to whole communities excluding African Americans from living there (“sundown towns”) and racial segregation exists today in virtually every United States city.

Given these deep structures is it any surprise that brutal violence flairs up against sectors of the population? Is it any surprise that targeted groups feel intimidated, threatened, and angry? Is it any surprise that volatile and life-threatening cycles of economic insecurity facing most people create fears leading some of them to follow false prophets? Is it any surprise that the economic and political institutions in which we were born and raised, justified by powerful ideologies about the “realities” of life develop in us a propensity to be taken in by arrogant, racist, classist, sexist, and ignorant politicians? In addition to national politics, people at the state level and in their local communities accept unquestioning leadership in economic, political, and cultural institutions that in subtler ways promote the agenda of the rich and white.

 The problem is historical, structural, political and cultural. Identifying the “deep structures”- economic, political, ideological, and cultural-masses of people can begin to mobilize around change. Social movements may begin by addressing political ideology, or addressing public policy concerns, or participating in the electoral arena. Each is of vital importance. However, progressives need to recognize that the violence and poverty today, the racial hatred, the environmental crises are connected to the deep structures. They must work today on what is possible to change right away. In addition, progressives must organize, over the long run to radically restructure society, challenging the capitalist system and the political institutions that maintain it.