(la traducción al español aparecerá en breve)
I recently saw an interview with the black film-maker Spike Lee in which he repeated something he has been saying for many years: The United States was founded on the genocide of the indigenous population and the forced labour of black slaves wrenched cruelly from their families in Africa. With beginnings such as these it was no wonder that the country had developed in a violent and oppressive way towards the black man.
It’s difficult to say anything new about racism; impossible to find something which hasn’t already been said about man’s inhumanity to man. More difficult still to imagine how the Americans are going to get out of the mess they have made.
In the month that followed the murder of George Floyd there were mass demonstrations and street riots; statues of slavers were damaged, defaced or demolished. It is still the case that no football match in this country kicks off without all the players first taking a knee.
In this first month there was a profusion of words and promises and gestures of solidarity with people of colour. We witnessed white people begging forgiveness and expressing their regret for the behaviour of their fellow beings. Others gave money to the cause. We even heard of people making financial reparation to individuals, sending monetary offerings to people, and by this method attempting to cleanse themselves not of their own sins but of the horrors of the past and present committed by the white race.
In his very eloquent opinion column in the New York Times of June 5th 2020, the black author, Chad Sanders, writes that the emojis and the good vibrations from white people do not help. He says that he is receiving hundreds of gestures of white solidarity such as this:
“Hi friend. I just wanted to reach out and let you know I love you and so deeply appreciate you in my life and your stories in the world. And I’m so sorry. This country is deeply broken and sick and racist. I’m sorry. I think I’m tired; meanwhile I’m sleeping in my Snuggie of white privilege. I love you and I’m here to fight and be useful in any way I can be❤️❤️❤️.”
Sanders says that these white “friends” are only afflicted by a fleeting responsibility; instead of texting him such messages and using him as a rubbish bin for their guilt and shame, they would do better to offer the kind of help which is more lasting and worthwhile:
- “Money: To funds that pay legal fees for black people who are unjustly arrested, imprisoned or killed or to black politicians running for office.
- Texts: To your relatives and loved ones telling them you will not be visiting them or answering phone calls until they take significant action in supporting black lives either through protest or financial contributions.
- Protection: To fellow black protesters who are at greater risk of harm during demonstrations.”
You can’t deny the value of these measures but they are only useful up to a certain point. They are mainly defensive measures and they don’t directly confront the devils that have been besetting American society for centuries.
Neither do they help much to keep up the revolutionary impetus obtained from the dissemination of the video of the murder of George Floyd. Don’t get me wrong. I only want to say that, sadly, the impetus wanes without permanent stimulation. History suggests that in a short while the fuss will die down and the situation will revert to normal. Racism has survived innumerable horrendous cases. Nothing much has changed over the past seventy years despite children being lynched, black leaders being killed in the midst of a speech or shot dead in cold blood as they lay sleeping in their beds.
After every atrocity the status quo returns. The reactionary tactic is always the same. During the sensitive period in which public anger subsides, the police, the rednecks, the republicans and the gun lobbyists keep their traps shut and wait for the storm to pass. And pass it always does – because the American Way of Life has become accustomed to this kind of thing. It has adapted and it has become inured to this suffering. It is accepted that racism and violent death are lamentable but inevitable.
This attitude of resignation is already becoming obvious in the case of George Floyd.
What is needed is a campaign that serves to maintain the impetus of the first month and that will be sustained without having to rely on further atrocities: a campaign that has the power to unite the white liberals with black people in the long run; an endeavour in which they can find common cause. And it has to be something closely related to the aim of reducing the enormous violence inherent in American society; an alliance has to be sought against the thing which threatens to destroy the life of everyone. Ideally, it would be an alliance that would tackle effectively the problem most closely associated with the high incidence in the USA of murder, shoot-outs in the street, student massacres and racial oppression: the problem of how to repeal the Second Amendment of the Constitution that grants every lunatic gunman the right to bear his beloved firearms.
It has to be remembered that this right was granted to The People (white) in 1791, almost two and a half centuries ago. In the many debates on the Amendment that have taken place throughout the last two hundred years there have only ever been spoken of two possible interpretations of the law: it was either intended as a guarantee that the people could take up arms against a tyrannical government or, on the other hand, it was a privilege conferred upon individuals so they might carry arms against any possible attack against their person.
Seen from the outside and at this late stage, the debate seems to be irrelevant in the 21st century. Nowadays it is absurd to consider that you can bring down a government with a few small arms. It seems to me that the debate has never quite hit the nail on the head. The Amendment was instituted in the eighteenth century because America was a lawless country and everybody needed a gun to defend themselves from others. The law was introduced because the United States of 1791 was a profoundly insecure society in which all individuals were constantly looking over their shoulder, fearful of being attacked by the bad guys.
But this wasn’t the only reason that the white population needed guns. There was another one, unspoken. The white settlers needed them to defend themselves against any rebellion from the “redskins”, the Native Americans who were being massacred and deported as a matter of government policy; at the same time the slave owners and their overseers needed them to ensure the obedience of the black slaves; the ordinary white people needed them to make sure their servants didn’t get ideas above their station. The Second Amendment was a measure to reinforce the control that the white population exercised over the subject races.
Once the Second Amendment had been introduced there was no going back because nobody wanted to give up their guns for fear of being defenceless against anybody else. It was a circle which has become more and more vicious. Today, even members of the black population who have refused in the past to arm themselves are now buying guns for self-defence.
The millions of deaths caused by pistols and assault rifles have created a national atmosphere of fear. In black and ethnic minority neighbourhoods people live in perpetual dread of being killed by the police or vigilantes. In schools and universities people are always keeping a watchful eye out for the appearance of yet another killer who possesses the deadly combination of a mental derangement and a Kalashnikov rifle. And every time this happens and dozens of children die, we hear a wailing and a gnashing of teeth, but nothing ever happens to prevent it occurring again. And life goes on. And we go on waiting for the next mass killing or the next death of a black person at the hands of the police.
I’m not so stupid as to believe that a black and white campaign to abolish the Second Amendment is going to change hardened attitudes overnight; I don’t want to underestimate how vulnerable so many Americans feel without a gun in the kitchen draw or the glove compartment of the car. Likewise, it would be naive to ignore the financial interest and the political clout of the National Rifle Association and the arms industry. Although I believe that such a campaign is a key stage in the fight to unify blacks and whites and essential for the creation of a mutually understanding society, I understand that this task might be one that is too complicated, especially if you are counting on the support of politicians who restrict themselves to burbling such nonsense as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
As Vicky Elliott wrote so succinctly in her article about the death penalty in the UNESCO Post in 1999:
“In this culture based upon puritanical principles and which exalts the use of arms, human relations are considered in Manichean terms. In a climate influenced by conservative religious sectors, to declare yourself against capital punishment is little less than committing political suicide.”
Perhaps, as a first step, the alliance should restrict itself to the popular campaign “Defund the Police!” which is gaining force and is aimed at getting State governments to withdraw funds from the police and reinvest them in social programmes, employing, for example, social workers in non-violent emergencies.
But watch out. There is a real problem in abolishing the police entirely, in getting rid of them just like that. Who will replace them? Social workers won’t be of any use in the arrest of the perpetrators of violent crimes, rapes, child abuse, child pornography, domestic violence, the ill treatment of the elderly and the vulnerable etc. Who is going to detain those accused of corruption and violent crime? If the cops cease to exist, the hitmen, the murderers, the psychopaths, the swindlers are not going to go away. The fact that the police represent poor value for money doesn’t mean we don’t need forces of order. *
And shouldn’t we resolve the drug problem before we disband the police? Many people believe we should decriminalise drugs and treat addicts as sick people instead of punishing them for their dependency, although we have to do it properly and create a service to deal with it before we sack the police.
Clearly, the US police are the scourge of the black population. Clearly, they hang around in black neighbourhoods looking for trouble and a lot of the time they only serve to bully, intimidate and arrest; in the worst of cases they only cause bloodshed. Clearly, they need their wings clipped. Clearly something should be done now. But, violence in the US is a complicated problem and it is not going to go away with the abolition of the police, not just because the criminals will continue to exist, but also because crime and punishment is big business over there; the domestic market in the buying and selling of guns is worth billions of dollars every year; there is nowhere in the World in which the prison industry is so profitable.
It all goes back to 1791. But, fine, if the campaign to reduce the funding of the police proves to be successful, maybe the organisers can then move on to the dismantling of the Second Amendment.
*It’s a pity we’ve coined the term defund as in English it has undertones of completely strip of money instead of partially reducing it.
Ingleses 