By Jack Gerson, retired California teacher
On May 25 George Floyd was murdered by the Minneapolis police, pinned to the ground and strangled, a knee on his neck, for nearly nine minutes. It was a public lynching by the cop Derek Chauvin aided by three other cops.
The following day, Minneapolis cops attacked a mass protest of this murder with tear gas and plastic-coated bullets. Within a few days, demonstrations spread across the country. In city after city, the same scene played out: In New York, cops kettled and beat protesters with clubs several nights running. In Asheville, North Carolina, cops destroyed a medic station. In Louisville, police responded to mass protests against George Floyd’s murder and the March 13 murder of Breanna Taylor, by firing live ammunition into a crowd, killing a bystander.
The cops met protests against police violence with even more police violence. This backfired: the protests grew into enormous multiracial outpourings, many organized and led by young people. Attempts to divide the “majority of peaceful protesters” from the “violent elements led by antifa” have thus far failed as well — protesters and the public saw for themselves that the cops have been the main perpetrators of violence.
When Donald Trump demanded that local officials “dominate” protesters through repressive force and put thousands of security forces on the streets of Washington DC (Secret Service, Bureau of Prisons, National Guard) and threatened to bring in the U.S. Army, rebellion brewed in the ranks, resulting in Trump’s open rebuke by the most prominent retired generals and admirals (including [former Defence Secretaries] James Mattis, John Kelly, Mike Mullen, Colin Powell) and even public pushback from his hitherto obsequious Defence Secretary, Mark Esper. Trump withdrew the National Guard.
Protests spread around the world
Protests have spread to most big cities and to many small ones, and around the world. The explosiveness of this movement has already resulted in acts that would have been inconceivable two weeks ago, including:
* The Los Angeles mayor announced plans to reduce the city’s police budget by over $100 million and reallocate $250 million dollars to “invest in jobs, in education, and healing” in communities of colour.
* The New York mayor announced plans to reduce the city’s police budget and to implement reforms to the NYPD
* The Minneapolis City Council voted its intent to disband the city’s police department and develop an “alternative model of community-led safety.”
* Congressional Democrats introduced legislation to facilitate prosecuting cops for misconduct.
These rapid concessions show the uncertainty and fear running through the US ruling class. But much more fundamental change is needed.
If George Floyd’s murder was the lit match that touched off this explosion, and if four years of naked racist slurs and scapegoating by Trump was the kerosene, then the long simmering anger by black people at their treatment and conditions (and the knowledge of those conditions, if unspoken and suppressed, by many white people) was the fuel: centuries of brutal kidnapping, rape, murder, enslavement, oppression and exploitation. Jim Crow laws, lynchings, mobs burning black communities to the ground. segregation and exclusion of black people from all but low paying, menial labour.
Nearly a third of black people are denied a vote
Slavery was formally ended after the Civil War by the 13th Amendment, but with a loophole exempting felons serving a prison sentence. Today, although black males are not much more than 5% of the population, they comprise more than 40% of the prison system – a system that houses one out of every four of the world’s prisoners. Prison labour is slave labour, and the threat of slavery is used to intimidate the black community. The “school to prison pipeline” carries a steady stream of young people of colour to the prisons.
The US spends $32,000 annually per prisoner, but only $12,000 per student. The Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that “separate but equal” schools weren’t equal and are illegal, but 65 years later de facto segregation and inequality in US schools is greater than ever. Schools in the black and brown communities are underfunded, lack resources, are in need of repair, and are more crowded than schools in the wealthier parts of town.
Thirty percent of black people have lost the right to vote, largely because of criminalization (felony convictions often mean loss of voting rights). Donald Trump and his allies are taking this further, hinting at postponing the fall elections.
Unemployment and poverty have always been worse for blacks than for whites. The pandemic has made it more so. Unemployment in the US is officially 16%, but the real figure is more than 25%. The mortality rate from Covid-19 for blacks is more than double that for whites. The infection rates for blacks, Latino, and Native Americans are much higher than for whites, and they have less access to quality health care needed to recover.
Because few black and brown families have an emergency fund to cover expenses, they are forced to work in jobs that put them at high risk of contracting the virus. “It’s either Covid is killing us or the economy is killing us,” said a young black woman to Time magazine.
Cops like an occupying army
The cops are there to enforce these conditions, to keep black and brown people at the bottom. They act like an occupying army in the black community, and beneath the murders lies the daily grinding degradation of black people – and especially of young black people. This wasn’t just one bad cop. Murder by cop has gone on for generations. Black Americans are nearly three times as likely to be killed by cops than are whites. The cops are there to protect property, wealth, and the wealthy – to protect the haves from the have-nots, by any means necessary.
Changing these conditions will require sweeping reorganization of society. Priorities are upside down. Defunding police and putting more money into essential services is a step, but only a small one (the proposed cuts are relatively small, and the amount of money to be transferred to essential services almost negligible compared to the needs). Disbanding the Minneapolis police, and community-based policing opens a promising discussion, but on its own will hit up against the imperative to protect property and the affluent.
But there are voices calling for more, including:
* Strong measures for holding the police accountable.
* Demilitarize the cops: confiscate the tanks, the armoured personnel carriers, the bazookas, the military helicopters, the Star Wars uniforms, and the snooping surveillance devices that were provided to urban police forces by the Bush and Obama administrations.
* Massive reduction in funding for the entire security state apparatus – the cops, the prisons, the military with the money going preferentially to low income communities and for housing, health care, schools and other vital needs.
* End mass incarceration. End the criminalization of young black and brown people. Shut down the school to prison pipeline. Free all political prisoners.
* End the deportation of undocumented immigrants. Dismantle the vicious U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program.
* Organizing community patrols
Guiding the movement into safe channels
The ruling class will attempt to divide and co-opt the movement, using vast resources at its disposal. With the presidential elections now less than five months away, a concerted attempt has begun to channel the movement into campaigning for Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates, under the imperative of getting rid of Donald Trump. They will try to get protesters to spend less time on the streets and more time phone banking and door-knocking for candidates. We should not underestimate this strategy. It’s worked in the past, and repeatedly.
After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, there were two years of Black Lives Matter protests and major ghetto uprisings in the St. Louis and Baltimore areas whose energy was effectively diverted into the Hillary Clinton campaign. Bad as Trump and the Republicans are, the Democrats have been complicit from their inception in constructing, enforcing, and sustaining the racist, exploitative, and oppressive U.S. system at home and around the world.
But this movement feels like a force that can hurdle barriers. It’s as though the protests of the sixties have been compressed into a few weeks: mass non-violent protests, widespread sympathy for the goals of stopping police violence, ending racism, and establishing true equality; and an emerging wing ready to employ militant self-defence against the cops. It’s a movement in large part organized and led by young people asserting their disgust with the racist system and their entitlement to a decent future in a better world.
From the US socialist website, Facts for Working People. The original can be found here.
June 15, 2020
