Picture that begs the question... is America going back in time?
A massacre on the Mexican border. Black politicians told to go home by Trump. Now an image with horrific echoes of slavery . . .
The photo has evoked horror and disgust around the world. Flanked by two mounted white police officers leading him by a rope, the African-American man walks wearily but obediently down a busy street, hands cuffed behind his back.
The rope, gripped by one of the officers, is clipped to his handcuffs.
Donald Neely, dishevelled, unshaven, homeless and mentally ill, cut a pitiful figure against the two officers, wearing white stetson hats like the ‘good guys’ in cowboy films when the picture was taken last Saturday.
his alleged offence was trivial: criminal trespass in a commercial area of the island city of Galveston, Texas.
Police say he had been repeatedly warned not to trespass, the last time only two weeks previously, before they apprehended him.
however, they would also have known that Mr Neely suffers from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and regularly sleeps on the streets.
More to the point, says his lawyer, they knew he was compliant and would hardly need to be tethered with a rope.
even leaving aside Galveston’s long and ugly history of slavery, the sight evoked grim parallels.
As some noted in dismay, fugitive slaves used to be marched publicly back to their owners by rope or chain.
The tableau also had echoes of the dreaded Ku Klux Klan, whose members originally rode out on horseback to lynch black people. Texas has long been a hotbed of the race-hate group, whose enduring grip on the Deep South was laid bare in the 1988 film Mississippi Burning, starring Gene hackman and Willem Dafoe.
Mr Neely’s family, lawyer and local activists all insist a white suspect would never have been treated in such a way.
EVEN if, as seems unlikely, the two officers weren’t aware of Galveston’s history of slavery, what were they thinking in pulling a black man down a street by a rope, like an animal?
‘They should have never did what they did, put a black man in between two horsemen that are white,’ said Mr Neely’s sister, Taranette.
In a jarring irony, the outcry coincided with news of the death of Toni Morrison, the African-American author who wrote so compellingly about racism and her country’s toxic legacy of slavery. In her most acclaimed book, Beloved, an escaped slave kills her young daughter to save the child from a life in bondage.
Morrison would have had something to say about Galveston police’s insistence that the so-called ‘rope escort’ is ‘a trained technique and considered best practice in certain scenarios such as during crowd control’.
There was, of course, no ‘crowd’ to control here — just a 43-year-old father- of- seven whose mental illness worsened after the death of his grandmother in 2006.
Galveston’s black police chief, vernon hale, has apologised for the two officers’ ‘ poor judgment’ and vowed that the rope- escort practice would stop immediately.
Mr Neely has been released on bail and is back on the streets. his lawyer, Melissa Morris, said he had walked along with the officers because he did not want to be kicked or dragged by the horse.
‘he doesn’t think he was violated. he said they [the officers] were nice and he doesn’t feel like anything is wrong,’ she said.
But Mr Neely is mentally ill and hardly the greatest judge. his family is considering legal action.
Many Americans, however, will almost certainly sympathise with the arresting officers, who, according to police chief hale, ‘want people to understand that they were using tools they were provided with to perform a job they were asked to do’.
Yet it must still be asked whether
the police would ever have used such a ‘tool’ on a white man.
even as Toni Morrison is feted for bridging the racial divide (she was the first African-American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature), the case has highlighted how America, more than 150 years after it outlawed slavery, remains a country riven by race.
Yesterday, that divide was exposed once again as Donald Trump visited el Paso, a mainly Latino city also in Texas, as it mourned the massacre of 22 people in a shopping complex last Saturday.
The alleged killer, Patrick Crusius, 21, published a white-nationalist, anti- immigrant ‘ manifesto’ on social media before the atrocity.
Democrats were quick to note that Crusius’s words echoed Mr Trump’s own attacks on Latino immigrants, including his description of them as an ‘invasion’ and his various references to them as drug-traffickers, rapists, thugs and animals.
‘how do you stop these people? You can’t,’ the U. S. President complained of ‘illegals’ at a May rally in Florida.
Someone in the crowd shouted: ‘Shoot them!’ The audience of thousands cheered and Trump smiled, commenting: ‘Only in the Panhandle [Florida’s conservative north-west] can you get away with that statement.’
On this occasion, Trump unreservedly condemned murderous white supremacists. But he hasn’t always done so, fuelling allegations that he is a racist — whether his target is Latino immigrants, Arab Muslims or urban blacks.
LAST month, he rebuked four ethnic-minority Congresswomen and said they should ‘go back’ to the countries they came from, despite the fact that three were born in the U.S. and all four are American citizens.
A few days ago, he again caused uproar when he turned on elijah Cummings, a black Congressman, calling his predominantly African-American Baltimore district ‘a disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess’ and claiming that ‘no human being would want to live there’.
As America’s first black president, Barack Obama liked to encourage the idea that the U.S. had overcome its racial demons. however, studies
suggest he was wrong and that America remains deeply divided along racial lines that are getting more pronounced.
White and black Americans disagree on the extent of racism, for a start. Surveys have shown that African-Americans are increasingly concerned about racism, while white voters are moving in the other direction, ranking America’s racial diversity as less important than its embrace of capitalism, nationalism and individual liberty.
A recent detailed poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that blacks and whites disagree fundamentally on many political issues, including what it means to be American.
Nearly 60 per cent of white Americans believe speaking english is a very important part of it. Blacks and hispanics say that believing in God is far more important to American identity.
Most blacks didn’t think you had to support capitalism to be an American, while whites strongly disagreed. And so it went on.
Critics of the Republican Party say it is becoming increasingly hostile to blacks as it falls more under the influence of Donald Trump and the so-called alt-Right, a loose and largely online grouping of far-Right groups and individuals who believe ‘ white identity’ is under attack from immigration and multiculturalism.
The party’s share of the AfricanAmerican vote continues to shrink drastically. Last week, Will hurd, the only black Republican in the house of Representatives, announced that he won’t be standing again.
hurd, who has openly criticised Trump, had become frustrated with his party’s failure to increase its popularity by condemning racism, homophobia and misogyny.
Studies show white Republicans — a bloc of voters who may hold the key to next year’s presidential election — continue to believe that America is a colour-blind society, that affirmative action in favour of blacks is not necessary and that ‘white privilege’ is a myth.
Meanwhile, even before the el Paso killings, there had been warnings that white supremacist violence — whether by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis or racist skinheads — is on the rise again.
Inevitably, the polarising President has been blamed. A study of 75 far-Right leaders concluded that many ‘credit his candidacy as the start of their awakening’.
Toni Morrison harboured no Obama-esque illusions about racial harmony. Racism, she said, would only disappear in the U.S. ‘when it’s no longer profitable and no longer psychologically useful’ to prop up the egos of insecure whites.
‘If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem,’ she once said in a message to white Americans.
The two Galveston police officers, towering over their shuffling, roped-up black prisoner, might like to ponder that.