Debate on the issue of race is again raging in the United States. This time it is over what has happened in Fergusson, a city of 21,000 in St Louis County in Missouri, on August 09. A white police officer gunned down an unarmed African-American (black) teenager Michael Brown that triggered riots and revived the debate over race in the public domain.
The dead teenager had forcibly lifted a box of cigars worth US$49 from a convenience store moments before being killed but the police officer who killed him was unaware of the lifting. He gunned Michael Brown because he was walking in the middle of the road and obstructing traffic!
The other facts that have emerged from Ferguson underline that blacks are still in serious disadvantage in the United States, the huge developments in removing racial discrimination in the decades since the civil rights movements of the 1960s notwithstanding. First, two-thirds of Ferguson's population are blacks; yet they have no major representation in public office and its police force is predominantly white. Second, the white police officer who gunned him down did not do so for his act at the store; the officer had no time to connect him to that offence. Third, the officer knew Michael Brown was unarmed because he had lifted his hands over his head and had asked the officer not to shoot. Finally, the officer shot Michael Brown when he was in no danger and could have easily taken him into custody.
These facts, no doubt, underline that there exists in the minds of the country's predominantly white population, and particularly in its white-dominated law-enforcement agencies, a clear issue of racial profiling. Blacks are naturally assumed to be danger to white folks in any issue where there is a conflict in the public domain. In the United States, this is a dangerous predicament for any minority to be in dispute with the whites as the US laws, under the Second Amendment, allow individuals to buy arms for self-defence as easily as they can buy any merchandise off the counters in the stores.
In the United States, the whites carry in their minds, often unconsciously, that they cannot accept blacks the way they take their fellow whites in terms of social behaviour. Thus when the whites see blacks in public in a situation of conflict, they instantly - and often as a reflex action - fear for their lives. If they have guns, as was in the highly sensitive and widely publicised case of Trayvon Martin/ George Zimmerman in Florida last year, they use it, without bothering that the black in question may be unarmed. George Zimmerman acted upon a preconceived notion that a black is guilty if a white thinks he is a threat and can be gunned own in self-defence. In fact, in that case, in which Zimmerman killed Trayvon, the killer was part of a white vigilante group in his residential area that had been formed in the belief that blacks are a threat to their lives and therefore could be killed for their security. Strange as it may appear, Florida laws and laws in other parts of the USA sanction such vigilante groups!
Despite all evidence that the teenager Trayvon Martin was unarmed and posed no threat to Zimmerman, an all-White jury found Zimmerman innocent that raised furor countrywide leading the President to comment that the verdict had given enough cause to the blacks to believe that they are victims of racial profiling. The President asked the nation's whites a poignant question based on his own experience as a black about how many of them looked behind their shoulders suspiciously when an unknown black individual walks into their midst, like that individual was a threat to their security. The President had said in that emotional statement that most whites acted that way when suddenly confronted by blacks they do not know.
The President has spoken this time too on Ferguson to allay racial tensions. He condemned excessive use of force by police in the killing of Michael Brown and against protesters and journalists some of whom were thrown into jail. The President also condemned the public violence against the police and acts of vandalism that followed the killing. Nevertheless, he overlooked the armoured cars in the street of Ferguson with automatic weapons pointed at the crowds like the people who expressed anger at the police were gravely wrong. The president played on both sides of the racial divide, condemning excessive use of force by the police and also blaming the crowd for the riots and attacks on the police.
Right-wing radio stations that are well known in the US for their hate campaign on race issues and liberal ideas, picked up the President's condemnation of the riots to spin the killing of Michael Brown as justified. One talk-show host, encouraged by the President's condemnation of the riots in Ferguson, dug into history and John Adams' defence of British captain John Preston and seven British soldiers for killing five colonists in the Boston Massacre that had occurred in 1770 to defend the killing of Michael Brown.
The Boston Massacre had erupted from a minor incident involving a British sentry who had used his musket to hit a wig-maker's apprentice that had brought an angry crowd of 200 face to face with the British Captain and the soldiers who were called by the sentry involved with the apprentice. John Adams had argued in favour of the British soldiers by placing responsibility upon the British Government for its policy of placing British soldiers inside the city to put down its extremely unpopular policy of taxation without representation. John Adams further argued that the "mob" had caused tension, confusion and fear in the minds of the soldiers that had led them to shoot. His arguments were strong enough to cause doubts in the minds of the jury that set six of the accused free and sentenced two of manslaughter who were branded on their thumbs and set free.
Many Americans on the right argue that the blacks like Michael Brown die at the hands of the trigger-happy whites and in the hands of the predominantly white law-enforcement authorities in the country for the same reasons that John Adams argued in the Boston Massacre. They feel that blacks pose the same kind of threat to the whites as the "mob" in the Boston Massacre posed to the British soldiers. Unfortunately, in using the analogy, those on the right go into denial over the fact that the blacks do not pose any threat to the whites in the present context of US politics and society and the threat is a matter of racial profiling that is based not on reason or logic but on racial hatred.
In Ferguson, the police officer was in no threat and to make the officer's case even more unpardonable, Michael Brown had his hands raised and ready to surrender. The same was the case with Zimmerman who was under no threat from Trayvon Martin that the White jury pardoned without even a question asked for taking the life of a young man. Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown are not isolated individuals who have lost their lives in the hands of whites where they were no part of any "mob" or any threat to any white, black or yellow. Blacks, because of their racial profiling, run such risks every day. Yet in a country where owning guns legally is no problem, it is the blacks who get killed in gun-related deaths in the hands of the whites and not the other way round. Those who fail to condemn deaths of the Michael Browns and the Trayvon Martins should spare a moment and try to answer why blacks and not the whites are the constant victims.
The President has condemned the riots and thus has put emphasis on the right of property. In doing so, he has undermined the central issue in Ferguson, which is the fact "that a life has been unjustly taken." He may take a lesson from a Martin Luther King quote to realise where he has gone wrong.
The great civil rights activists had said: "A riot is the language of the unheard". If the President and America's right can fathom the meaning of this great quote, they may bring the country back to be what its Constitution promises, that "all men are created equal." Ferguson has underlined once again that blacks are not equal to whites. As Martin Brown was killed because he was a black, the police officer in question should be tried along with murder also for a crime against the constitution.
The writer is a retired                         career Ambassador.                               ambserajulislam@gmail.com
Killing of an African-American and racial profiling in USA
M. Serajul Islam | Published: August 18, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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