Massive Black Lives Matter protests are hitting the streets in at least three cities (and possibly more) in this country -- New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle. The hashtag #ShutDownA14 was, for a long time, one of the most trending topics on Twitter.
Certain people simply don't get it. While there have been some positive changes made after the Mike Brown shooting and the refusal of the authorities to indict Officer Wilson, the changes have not gone far enough. These protests are not going to stop until there is an expectation throughout the country that if you are an officer and you use excessive force on anyone, whether they are Black, White, Latino, or whatever, that you are going to be fired at minimum. At worst, the expectation should be that you are going to be charged with manslaughter or murder or assault, depending on the situation. And these protests are not going to stop as long as our criminal justice system disproportionately targets Blacks and other minorities for arrest, imprisonment, and the death penalty.
This does not mean that all officers are bad. However, it does mean that there is a culture of violence and exploitation within our police forces in which officers feel that they can act with impunity. Whenever any institution acts with an expectation that they can act above the law, then that plants the seeds for tyranny and erodes the Constitutional protections that have built our country. It is no different than the cult of personality that developed around George Bush, where certain supporters believed in supporting him right or wrong.
For every incident like Floyd Dent or Mike Brown or Eric Garner that makes the news, there are many more which do not make the news. The Mike Brown case was a tipping point in which people said that enough was enough and that they were not going to take it anymore.
Many people were concerned about the tactics of the protests today, in which they blocked bridges and freeways. However, these protests were supposed to be disruptive. The problem is that too much of White America is operating under the mistaken notion that all our racial problems were solved with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act along with the Supreme Court rulings on desegregation. While these events were historic and did much to improve civil rights in this country, they did not represent the end of the battle by a long stretch of the imagination.
Two days ago, the New York Times did a feature article about Catherine Hiller, who has smoked pot for the last 50 years and who has never been arrested, even after a random police stop. The reason? She is white. Even in the case in which she was stopped, the officer looked the other way. I guarantee you she would not be walking the streets of New York today had she been Black. When they were first passed, the laws against pot use were designed to target Black recreation.
Also in the NYT two days ago, there was an editorial noting that there were 152 innocent people who were on death row, rightly noting that was unacceptable and that there were far too many. However, the editorial failed to cover race as a factor in the sentencing of people to death. The ACLU notes that most people who are on death row are minorities:
The jurisdictions with the highest percentages of minorities on its death row:
U.S. Military (86%)
Colorado (80%)
U.S. Government (77%)
Louisiana (72%)
Pennsylvania (70%)
While white victims account for approximately one-half of all murder victims, 80% of all Capital cases involve white victims. Furthermore, as of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims.
As long as we continue to disproportionately target Blacks and other minorities with our criminal justice system, there will continue to be cases of police officers shooting unarmed Black civilians and people arrested for Driving While Black or Walking the Streets While Black.
The problem in this country is that we live in a system which is designed to support the corporate elites who make billions of dollars and who are the largest recipients of government welfare programs. The Koch Brothers, for instance, take $88 million per year in corporate welfare. That is why it is great that Hillary Clinton has come out in support of overturning Citizens United and returning our electoral processes to the people. Hillary, unlike the protesters today, is a big believer in working within the system. That's her choice. But the tactics of the Black Lives Matter protesters and the work of people like Hillary Clinton are not mutually exclusive. If we are to effect positive change, we have to support both. What tactics each person chooses to use is a matter of personal conscience.
We have far too many problems on our hands to be excluding people in this day and age. Just today, we learned that a "blob" off the West Coast is responsible for both the drought in California as well as the blizzards and record snowfall on the East Coast. Even China, which had long been resistant to the notion of manmade climate change, is now committing to reducing carbon emissions. This is a solution that will require all of humanity, not just the corporate and political power elites who helped get us in this mess in the first place.