USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Lowering the rhetoric – why activists must listen to Mayor Turner and soften their tongues

Ola,

Yes getting to the root causes of crime is crucial, but you are wrong on key details. First there is the matter of framing. The issue is not about an "acrimonious relationship." Rather, we in the USA have a white problem. African Americans have never been treated as fully human by white people. The criminal justice system in America reflects that reality. Policing has always been fundamentally anti-black stretching back to slave patrols, on down to lynchings and the vagrancy laws, to the school to prison pipeline.

Nor is it true that African Americans commit more crimes than the general population. For example, white and black Americans use drugs at equal rates, yet African Americans are punished for drug offenses far more frequently and severely than white Americans. Moreover, there is a code of silence in police culture. This culture ensures that racist policing is rarely reported, investigated, or punished. More fundamentally, the people who did the oppressing (white people) are crunching the numbers. For many Black people like me who grew up in US ghettos, we know the police are just another gang. But the criminal actions of cops is never reflected in crime statistics. Consequently, the anti-black criminal activities of our police departments are deemed normative and therefore unmarked.

Last, you perpetuate the myth that police departments are getting a bad rap based on the actions of a few rogue cops. This is false. Corruption and racism in the police departments in major US cities is centuries old and systemic. In Chicago, for example, from about the 1930s to 1950s, the police basically acted like an execution squad. They murdered black politicians simply for trying to improve the lives of its black citizens. NYPD was recently exposed for massive corruption that included many examples of planted evidence. I could cite examples all day from Los Angeles, from Baltimore, from Detroit, but I think you get the picture.

Systemic racism criminalizes the everyday lives of black people thereby contributing to vicious cycle. When you treat human beings like criminals, it is unsurprising that a subset of that group will engage in criminal acts. But the real criminals are the institutions and individuals that devalue black life. The burden of change lies with white people-- the group that created and perpetuates these racist institutions--and not with the Black victims.

brother shabazz (kwame zulu shabazz)



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