At eleven o'clock in the morning on August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, the 18-year-old brown American, was walking on a street in Ferguson, Missouri, with his friend Dorian Johnson, 22, when a police officer named Darren tried Wilson chased him using the official Chevrolet Tahoe SUV police vehicle, claiming that he stole a pack of cigarettes from a store in a nearby market, and an argument erupted between the two men, after which Wilson fired a bullet that struck Brown's right hand, which led him to run and hide behind a car, but Wesslon decided to dismount his car to chase him, and instead of trying to arrest him, he fired six dead bullets at him, and he was killed instantly.
For the next four hours, Brown's bleeding body was left halfway between the police cars crowded to the scene, where many people watched them, took pictures on their mobile phones, and broadcast them on social media accounts that aroused a great deal of controversy and anger. Anger soon turned into mass demonstrations in conjunction with Brown's funeral, denouncing police violence against black communities in the country.
The demonstrations and protest activities were renewed more sharply and violently after a few weeks, particularly in the last week of November, following the jury's decision to acquit Officer Wilson and not charge him, and it continued throughout the winter and was known as the "Black Spring", paving the way for the movement to appear. New civil rights to defend blacks under the name "Life of blacks is important" Her efforts largely focused on denouncing police violence against blacks and exposing racist manifestations and practices within US law enforcement.
However, the Browne murder was not the first homicide committed by American police officers against black and racially segregated or racially motivated people, nor was it the last either, despite the gains that the civil rights movement has brought in bringing more rights to black and African American communities since the 1960s The United States records annually dozens of killings and attacks against black men and boys and girls by the security forces, perhaps the most prominent of which was the severe beating of young man Rodney King by the Los Angeles police in 1991 and caused the outbreak of the most prominent ethnic riot in American history, during which more than 50 people were killed and more than 2,300 wounded, while economic losses were estimated at more than $ 1 billion.
Worse, police officers who commit these facts rarely get their due punishment, sometimes due to the failure of the law that places evidence of conviction in the hands of originally accused law enforcement forces, and sometimes because of juror biases and the failure of the judicial system, which in the end has exacerbated the phenomenon of police violence Racism instead of receding, and, as data from 2018 indicates, among the 992 killings committed by the police in 2018, the share of blacks was 229, with nearly a quarter of them, not to mention that many of these incidents occurred against people who were isolated or interspersed with controversial circumstances.
There is no doubt that all of these facts, and many more, were present in the minds of thousands of protesters who took to the streets recently to protest against the killing of George Floyd brutally suffocated by police officer Derek Shofen in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25 And the demonstrations that have expanded throughout the country are forcing - 6 states and 13 American cities - to declare a state of emergency at a time when the National Guard was called to impose security in 20 states, and a curfew was imposed in almost half of the states.
Apparently, the incidents of Floyd's brutal killing that millions of Americans watched in social media videos, in conjunction with the poor performance of the American administration in the face of the Corona virus, have left many of the wounds inherent in the body of American society, and highlighted the facts of inequality and the legacy Racism inherent in American law enforcement societies, and behind it all other discriminatory practices that still suffer blacks and "people of color" in the country, a long legacy whose roots go back to the founding times of the United States, and it seems that Washington has failed to get rid of it until today.
With the issuance of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, Americans at first sight faced a profound problem in reconciling the values of freedom and equality stipulated in the historic declaration, and the systems of slavery that still dominated American society and ultimately plunged it into the midst of civil war, although the declaration was Designed primarily to confirm the severing of ties between Britain and its American colonies and the declaration of the founding of a new and effective state on the world stage, no one could ignore the contradiction between the values embodied in the declaration and the fact that it was written by Thomas Jefferson, who owned more than 600 slaves, and was published in 13 A colony that allowed varying degrees of slavery.
The constitution that was adopted two decades later with the goal of unifying these colonies in a unified state was not less problematic and controversial, as the authors of the texts found themselves compelled in the end to legalize slavery and reconcile with it in the new state, to the point of granting the slave owners the power to chase fleeing from them, and to establish the treatment of blacks as deficient citizens Rights and eligibility in the text of the constitution itself, and yet the most important fact about American slavery, which distinguished it from other prevailing slavery systems, remained that its basis was purely ethnic, not economic or social, as the American system chose a specific ethnic and color group and cast it - forever - out the society.
As a result, American slavery has historically been linked inextricably with white domination and ideas of white supremacy, so it was not surprising that even when the thirteenth amendment to the American Constitution abolished legal slavery in 1865, there was no incentive for whites to change their attitudes toward the issue, where it remained The color "white" as such represented an absolute value unrelated to economic or social status, and blacks had yet to be demoted to ensure the superiority of white Americans.
This fact was the clearest and most direct reason for the American Civil War (1861-1865), as the founders of the Confederate States of America, the dissident Southern Union of States, protested that slavery represented the cornerstone of the society they wished to establish, and that the equality between the races that he called To it the declaration of independence and the amendments to the constitution were a mistake, and that the "Negro" could not be equal to the white man who should be superior and distinguished by the nature, without regard to other factors.
In light of this, the question of integrating blacks into American society was the most urgent and critical challenge in the post-Civil War reconstruction phase, and although President Abraham Lincoln's reforms succeeded in giving freedom to more than four million black Americans of African descent and giving them the right to vote Education, free marriage, and nomination - in theory - for elected bodies, these reforms were viewed as a nightmare by many whites who believed that the ethnic hierarchy was presented on the ambitious plan to grant blacks full citizenship approved under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868.
As a result, and in just two decades, pressures from whites have caused a noticeable rebound in racial equality plans in the southern states of the country in particular, following the passage of Jim Crow laws that place restrictions on jobs in which African Americans can work It set a low ceiling for their salaries, reduced the places they are allowed to live in, and instituted a system of apartheid between blacks and whites in schools, restaurants, public hospitals, and even transportation, and Jim Crow laws remained in place in most states for 8 full decades, until they were repealed by law Civil Rights of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited all forms of apartheid at the state and national levels.
During the following decades, the ideas of white supremacy waned, and racist practices within American society gradually faded, and people of African descent were incorporated into the political fabric of the American nation, yet racial tensions continued to surface every time in the form of separate incidents of violence against blacks by white racists and incidents of use Disproportionate to the brutal power of the police and law enforcement agencies, incidents that have always reminded African Americans that their long struggle history and the great sacrifices they made did not erase the underlying sense of superiority and righteousness of white Americans.
Apparently, the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in the United States has cemented a particularly troubled relationship between black communities and the police and law enforcement agencies, where it appears that the security and police services have been slow to eliminate racist heritage from other components of American society by virtue of the fact that these devices It was she who played the historical role in stabilizing slavery systems, enforcing slavery-related laws and chasing rebel and black-skinned activists.
The earliest beginnings of this controversial role date back to what is known as “slave patrols” in the pre-Civil War era. They are swarms of white volunteers empowered to use police tactics to enforce slave laws, including arresting fleeing slaves, suppressing rebel uprisings, and punishing violators of rules. Slavery, the first slave patrols originated in South Carolina at the beginning of the eighteenth century and later expanded to most states, and it was armed with wide powers to the extent that it could enter the home of anyone suspected of harboring a person fleeing slavery.
On this day in 1917, Ell Persons, in his 50s, was lynched. He was accused of raping a white girl. He was beaten into a confession. He was doused with gasoline, burned alive and dismembered in front of thousands of spectators. Sandwiches and snacks were sold at the lynching. pic.twitter.com/hjTmKrAqTh
- Sankofa TravelHer (@SankofaTravelHr) May 22, 2019
Despite the dissolution of the slave patrols after the end of the Civil War, tensions deepened again between blacks and the American police apparatus that began to evolve into organized structures in the mid-nineteenth century, as these agencies dealt with the major wave of immigration of African Americans fleeing the hell of Jim Crow laws in South, ultimately finding themselves victims of brutal and punitive police practices in the northern states to which they fled.
At that time, the white communities in the north, including the police, were unfamiliar with the dense presence of African Americans, so they dealt with their presence with a great deal of hostility that was exacerbated by the inherent racist image, as the police automatically assumed that Americans Africans have innate criminal inclinations that require their full control and restrictions on their movements in order to ensure the safety of whites, and as a result, by the mid-1950s, most police administrations assumed that their primary mission was to protect Americans from African Americans, or in other words; Protect the eggs from black.
This culture sparked a great deal of brutality in the police dealings with blacks, including excessive use of force, unlawful detentions, verbal abuse, and even sexual assaults and killings, and the police were often complicit in the drug and arms trade, robbery, and prostitution within African American neighborhoods, and by the early years of The twentieth century brutal executions began to emerge as a tactic of extremist groups to suppress blacks, with the full support of the police whose members participated in executions sometimes, and collusion in covering the perpetrators at other times, and the end result of this was the execution of thousands of blacks without any punishment for the perpetrators.
The most prominent of these executions was the murder of Eugene Williams, an African American teenager, in July 2017, due to his defiance of racist segregation practices and swimming in the egg section of Lake Michigan, which sparked a bloody uprising in the city in which 15 whites were killed And 23 blacks injured more than 500 people, and consequently thousands of black families lost their homes.
In the aftermath of World War II, the brutal police practice against African Americans has become more frequent, intense, and systematic as well, and this can be attributed to several reasons. First of all, the victory of the democratic forces in the war created an increased expectation among black Americans for more freedom and democracy at home, especially since many of them served in separate units in the US armed forces during the war, which prompted them to increase the pace of demanding their official rights, and in return That behavior reinforced the tendency of police officers to view themselves as protectors of white societies, and simultaneously, the growth of the African-American population and the flight of many white people from marginalized states in search of a better opportunity allowed American-Americans to move more clearly within white societies, which is what He made police officers view their actions as a demographic threat to white domination.
Later, as the civil rights movement, which led the struggle of blacks to obtain their rights, gained more momentum, the police focused their efforts on targeting the movement's activists to prevent blacks from obtaining their rights, as happened during the Birmingham campaign in 1963 and the Montgomery marches in 1965, which prompted the leader The civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, to tackle the issue of police violence in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, stressing that blacks cannot be satisfied as long as they remain victims of "unspeakable police brutality."
Although the civil rights movement's struggle was ultimately culminated in a civil rights law that granted blacks equal rights to whites for the first time, Martin Luther's dreams of a black nation that was not subject to police brutality and violence would clearly not have come true any time soon, as cases of police violence against African Americans impose themselves - albeit less sharply - time and time again in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s until today, while blacks still have a disproportionate representation in the police services, and are even treated as second-class citizens by many in these agencies, and police violence remains even Today it is classified in the list of the main causes of black men's death, and at the broader level, the police continue to disproportionately target black citizens through tactics of arrest, search, vehicle licenses and even traffic violations, in a systematic and repetitive pattern that proves that racism against blacks remains one of the traditions that are inherently inherited My will inside American law enforcement.
Although the disproportionate police violence against brown skin remains the main headline for the protests taking place in the United States today, the suffering of ethnic minorities and people of color in the capital of the free world does not stop there, as it appears that the legacy of racism is short of overlooking its ugly face on most aspects of life Black and colored non-white people in the United States, and this appears mainly in the large economic gap between African and African Americans on the one hand, and between whites on the other.
Although the significant growth of the American economy during the past decade has succeeded in bringing great gains for low-income families, these gains have not done enough to narrow the economic divide between races, as the average household income for African Americans remained much lower than their white counterparts, while average White families ’income was $ 71,000 annually in 2018, the average black family’s income was 40% less (about $ 41,000), while the percentage was much lower in Minneapolis, the center of recent protests, where black families earn 56% less Than her white counterpart.
When we move from income to wealth, the gap appears wider, with data indicating that African-Americans have barely 4.2% of total American household wealth (although they represent 13% of the total population of Americans), while more detailed data indicate that black families are not She possesses only one tenth of the wealth that white families possess. While the average wealth of a white American family is about 171,000 dollars, the average for African American families remains less than 18,000 dollars. This gap is mainly due to the low rates of home ownership and the lack of money and inherited property Within black families, the approach to whites.
The effects of this gap appear, by extension, on poverty rates, which in turn show a great difference between blacks and whites. While the United States recorded national poverty rates of 11.8% in 2018, this percentage reached 20.8% among blacks, compared to only 8.1% between Whites, and this was reflected, in turn, on unemployment rates, which witnessed a historical racial gap, where unemployment rates among blacks more than twice that of whites for long periods.
The Corona virus outbreak made matters worse for racial minorities in the United States, especially Hispanics and African Americans. At a time when more than 40 million Americans have lost their jobs since the start of the crisis, the losses among people of colored communities have been much greater compared to whites, given that black Americans occupy the proportion The largest of the low jobs most affected by the crisis are in the public and heavy transportation sectors, postal services, handicraft and craft stores, drug stores and even the lowest jobs in the health care sector, meaning that even those who have retained their jobs quickly find themselves face to face fighting the disease.
Disproportionate unemployment rates were not, therefore, the worst nightmares that African Americans have faced because of Corona, after the crisis clearly revealed the catastrophic implications of Iraqi discrimination within American society, with black Americans discovering that they bear an unfair share of the bill of injuries and deaths due to illness compared to their white counterparts, and as Figures show, 23% of the corona virus victims in the United States are African Americans, although their percentage in the community is much lower.
To make matters worse, the repercussions of the racial divide have reached the health care sector, where the percentage of blacks who do not have any care umbrella is about 9.7% of the population, which is almost twice the percentage among whites (about 5.4%) and this means that although African Americans work In jobs that make them disproportionately more susceptible to disease and reside in areas more eligible for outbreaks, their access to health care in the event of infection remains significantly lower than that of other Americans.
The crisis, then, has its roots in the depths of politics, society, economy, and even security in the United States, which is a much larger and deeper crisis than the murder of George Floyd, despite its ugliness, and the abhorrent racism of the American police over its clarity, and the effects of the Corona virus, despite its seriousness, and even from the US President Donald Trump, his clear white right-wing inclinations, and his stupid statements and decisions that exacerbate crises, a crisis rooted in the legacy of slavery, white supremacy beliefs, and the history of racial discrimination that still haunts Washington, the greatest breach in the image of liberal and pluralistic society and the most worthy state of equality and democracy led by the free world.