March 29, 2018
Tuesday we were assaulted with the completely unsurprising news that the Attorney General of Louisiana had decided not to indict the two Baton Rouge police officers responsible for the murder of Alton Sterling. By now, we are accustomed to the pattern. A black person suspected of a petty crime or a minor traffic violation is killed by an officer of the state. There is an anguished outcry from the black community and a litany of excuses from many in the white community. The officers responsible are never charged, or if charged, not convicted. The murdered person’s name becomes a hashtag and is added to the long roster of names of black people whose lives were snatched prematurely and are fated never to receive justice. Rinse and repeat. When asked whether Trump had a role to play in interrupting the pattern of deadly police violence against black Americans, White House spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it was a “local matter.”We are unsurprised by her reaction because, everywhere we look, we see overwhelming evidence of an unrelenting campaign to terrorize and erase black Americans. If we are not being summarily executed by agents of the state, we are being denied political participation through voter suppression, denied equal education in segregated, underperforming schools, or discriminated against for employment opportunities; a combination that has contributed to the massive wealth gap between black and white Americans. The current median wealth for white families in the United States is twelve times that of black families; a legacy of centuries of discrimination that could not be erased in the 64 years since Brown v. Board of Education (S. Ct. 1954) (Source: “The racial wealth gap: How African Americans have been shortchanged out of the materials to build wealth,” by Janelle Jones, Working Economics Blog of the Economic Policy Institute, www.epi.org, 2/13/17).
This administration seeks to eradicate all progress made in the last sixty years towards a more equitable society with a messianic zeal. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, befuddled black figurehead, Ben Carson, is presiding over a Department that has scaled back fair housing enforcement and has removed the words “inclusive” and “free from discrimination” from the Department’s mission statement (Source: “Under Ben Carson, HUD Scales Back Fair Housing Enforcement,” by Glenn Thrush, The New York Times, 3/28/18). Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, said that “diversity isn’t important,” and targeted a disproportionate number of senior officials of color for reassignment (Source: “Ryan Zinke to employees: diversity isn’t important,” CNN.com, 3/29/18). Although the hatred seems particularly flagrant now, those of us who know our history know that there are antecedents as old as the republic. From our nation’s founding, it has toggled between using terroristic violence and specifically engineered policies to cement the position of Black people as a permanent underclass. The harsh truth, though, is that such a regime could never have flourished, or persisted for 242 years, without the blithe indifference of the majority of the population. The Civil Rights Era was a brief respite. Those hard won victories were secured literally by the blood of Medgar Evers, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Foolishly, we forgot that freedom isn’t free. These folks seem determined to remind us.
#AltonSterling
#StephonClark
#Blacklivesmatter