Suffocating Justice: The New York Daily News's cartoonist, Bill Bramhall, captures the shock and dismay of liberal America at the frightening implications of a New York Grand Jury's refusal to indict those responsible for the homicide of Eric Garner.
“I CAN’T BREATHE!” Who could hear those words and not respond?
What sort of police officer, effecting the arrest of an unarmed black man by
placing him in an illegal chokehold, could hear that anguished cry and refuse
to lessen his grip?
The first part of the answer is, quite simply: a person who
has never learned how to look at a black person and see a human-being. The second:
a police officer who understands that, if the deceased is a black man, then his
arresting officer/s will never be made accountable for his death.
Racism, and the informal legal protection afforded to racist
police officers by America’s Grand Jury system, is what makes the deaths of
unarmed African-Americans, like Eric Garner, inevitable. In spite of the fact
that the NYPD officer responsible for Mr Garner’s death had a record of “racial
bias”; and regardless of the fact that the whole outrageous incident was
recorded on a witness’s cellphone; a Grand Jury composed of “ordinary” New
Yorkers declined to press charges.
The widespread protests that followed the Grand Jury’s
decision have made headlines around the world. Less visible, however, was the counter-protest
of a group of female primary school teachers against their union’s condemnation
of Mr Garner’s death. These women, all of them white and all wearing an “I
support the NYPD” t-shirt, took a photograph of themselves and posted it on
Facebook. They were all employees of a public school with African-American and
Hispanic children on the student roll.
Racist to the Core: Teachers from Public School 220, Queens, New York, indicate the value they place on the life of a Black father of six.
What shocked liberal Americans was not only the nature of
the counter-protesters’ profession – these were teachers, for God’s sake! – but
also their absolute and deeply disturbing ordinariness.
Presented to the public gaze were not the angular,
lock-jawed matriarchs of some 1960s Mississippi backwater staring malevolently
into the lens of a photojournalist from Life
magazine. No, these were “Soccer Moms” from Queens. Gals next door. The sort of
friendly, fresh-faced suburbanites Americans bump into every day at the super-market.
The “lovely women” encountered several times a year at parent-teacher evenings.
The trained professionals who teach their kids!
Racists to the core.
The teachers’ Facebook posting produced the same jarring
effect as photographs taken at lynchings during the 1920s and 30s. Surrounding
the charred remains of the lynch-mob’s Black victims were, typically, scores of
perfectly “normal” white people (and their children!) who had turned out to
watch the “fun”. The bland, smiling faces of the female staff of New York City
Public School No. 220 offered a visual echo of those dreadful images from 90
years ago. They bear grim testimony to a white community every bit as oblivious
to its complicity in racial injustice and exemplary violence.
Faces At A Lynching: "Ordinary" people utterly oblivious to their complicity in racial injustice and exemplary violence.
The example of New York’s, Eric Garner, like the example of Ferguson,
Missouri’s Michael Brown, and countless others before them, has exposed the
extent to which African-Americans remain the despised “Other” of United States’
Society. Many other ethnicities have had to endure the scorn of America’s White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. But, while the Irish, Italians, Poles and Jews
eventually found their hyphenated niche within the American Dream,
African-Americans remain, overwhelmingly, on the outside looking in.
Can anyone honestly say that the extreme animus directed
towards the presidency of Barack Obama owes nothing to his colour? That the Tea
Party’s extraordinary political traction among elderly white Americans has
nothing to do with a Black President’s determination to admit African-American
and Hispanic citizens into full membership of the national family? That the
relentless arithmetic of demographic change, which points to White Americans
falling below 50 percent of the population within the lifetimes of children
living today, has not reignited the same primal fears that spawned the
intractable racial violence of the Deep South?
Those of us who remember the American Civil Rights Movement
of the 1950s and 60s also recall the central role Southern law enforcement
played in the enforcement of racial segregation and the maintenance of white
power. Southern county sheriffs and local police departments had always
provided the front-line troops of Dixie’s racial war. On the rare occasions Southern
police officers were charged with offences against African-Americans, Southern
juries inevitably voted for acquittal.
The fate of Eric Garner points to the “Dixiefication” of the
whole of the United States. The same racialization of poverty and powerlessness
that characterised the Deep South has migrated both North and West. The same
fetishisation of skin pigmentation as the crucial determinant of one’s place in
the social hierarchy now infects even that last, great bastion of liberal
influence, the teaching profession. And, finally, the near universal
contracting-out of the practical business of racial oppression to local law
enforcement is leading thoughtful Americans to the grim conclusion that, in the
long-run, it is the South that won the Civil War.
America, herself, will soon be gasping: “I can’t breathe!”
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
9 December 2014.
