The all-too-familiar scenario
Republican government attempt to cut federal aid to cities to subsidise tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
In the US, the sad paradox was that African-Americans faced shrinking economic opportunities, even as they were gaining political freedoms. The fact that the movement was able to achieve equality before the law, but unable to secure economic justice for many African-Americans still has repercussions today. While a third of the black population now enjoys some degree of social mobility, another third remains mired in poverty. It is often those poor, under-resourced, segregated neighbourhoods that bear the brunt of the systemic police brutality and mass incarceration that has inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, and that epitomises racial injustice in the minds of many after the graphic killing of George Floyd.
“Violence is as American as cherry pie,” Black Panther activist H Rap Brown declared during the racial and social unrest of the late 1960s. Brown meant that violence had birthed the US and been used to take land from Native Americans and enforce the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans. Over time, the role of law enforcement has been refined by a society founded on ideologies of white supremacy and structured in racial dominance. As African-Americans resisted slavery by escaping to free territory or organising armed insurrections, white men were empowered by the state as slave patrollers.
After the civil war, white policemen participated in massacres of black people in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. White police either engaged in violence or stood down as white mobs vented their fury on African-Americans and their homes and property on several occasions, including in Philadelphia in 1918 and, perhaps most infamously, in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. Localised urban rebellions by disenfranchised black people during the mid1960s were invariably started by incidents of excessive force by white police against black people (with the notable exception of the civil unrest
It’s often poor, under-resourced neighbourhoods that bear the brunt of police brutality and mass incarceration
that exploded in more than 160 cities and towns across the nation immediately after King’s assassination in 1968). The all-too-familiar scenario of anti-black police violence and angry street uprisings played out again and again: in Miami in 1980, South Central LA in 1992, Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore the following year.
Underlying these explosions of unrest is pent-up fury over daily indignities of unredressed, systemic anti-black violence and harassment by urban police forces, and deaths in custody, that has stretched back generations. The recurrence of high-profile murders of black people by white police officers suggests a culture of police impunity but, before the advent of social media, rampant police violence remained mostly a local problem. Wilful blindness, among white people and others, to black suffering is a key manifestation of anti-black racism. At the dawn of the 21st century, opinion polls of public perceptions of the police revealed a substantial gap between white and black Americans.
Barack Obama was elected as the first African-American US president in 2008, but anti-black racism seemed to be on the rise. Obama’s expression of identification with 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, killed by a vigilante in Florida in 2012, elicited howls of outrage from conservatives. African-American students, journalists and activists decried racism in its escalating forms of anti-government extremism and police and vigilante murders of unarmed black people. The alarming increase in the latter during Obama’s second term led to the social media hashtag #Black Lives Matter, and the international mobilisations of the Movement for Black Lives. Police union leaders and conservative pundits fiercely attacked the movement and its protests against police killings after Eric Garner was choked to death by a police officer in 2014. George Floyd is only the latest, and surely not the last, of the litany of people killed by police violence and memorialised by the Movement for Black Lives.