Recent events – be it the death toll in Gaza, police killings of unarmed Americans, or the Torture Report – highlight that mainstream America takes positions with respect to the use of and accountability for violence that everywhere else in the world would be considered undeniably extreme. It may be time to look in the mirror and accept that we Americans are in fact extremists. Continue reading
Filed under Essays, We The People
Watching and listening to the way more than half of the country is discussing the killing of Michael Brown and its aftermath, I keep thinking that there is something incredibly ruthless and unforgiving about Americans’ sense of justice.
Central to the problem is that the vast majority of White Americans, including myself, really have no idea of what it means to be black in America. Therefore, they have a very different reality when it comes to the police and justice system. White Americans have this very naive sense that you get what you deserve, and that if you are in jail (or shot by the police), it is because you must have done something wrong.
Unfortunately, most White people don’t know any Black people. They don’t know that being Black in America means getting followed by security guards in the shopping mall and constantly asked to open your bag in stores. It means getting stopped all the time by police (particularly in poor neighborhoods), and definitely being stopped by the police if you are in a White neighborhood. You are constantly a suspect, whether you are rich, poor or middle class. Any Black person you speak to, without exception rich or poor or with or without a father (as the cliché goes), can tell you stories about being treated as a suspect. Even the President of the United States, having won the elections in 2008 with more votes than any other president in the history of the nation, is constantly being accused of being a foreign entity, an intruder, and illegitimate.
Yet all of the studies show that when the police do stops, Blacks are not more likely to be carrying guns or drugs than Whites. Yet, Blacks are stopped much more and incarcerated more frequently and for longer periods for the same offenses. Then, of course, there are all of the cases of unarmed black men being shot be the police (even when following orders) with complete impunity. None of those cases would pass the standard “self defense” defense. But in America, a Black male — especially a large one — is always considered a threat. It is amazing to think that a professional police officer, one being charged with protecting the community — could so recklessly shoot at Brown a dozen times (there were bullets found lodged in the door and walls of a nearby building, talk about a total disregard for public safety) and not have had other options. The notion that Brown deserved to die because he was big or had smoked pot or because 18 isn’t really that young is not just ruthless and unforgiving but also shows an incredible lack of skill in policing. Forget about race for a second. Why are police killing so many people? Why are you nine times more likely to be killed in the U.S. by the police than by a terrorist? Why are Americans so eager to shoot in self-defense or to carry fire-arms for protection in general?
Do Americans even realize that no where else in the world do the police, security guards and the general public so happily discharge their fire arms at the slightest hint of danger, if at all? Officer Wilson unloaded his gun more times than the entire number of bullets discharged from police fire arms in all of England last year.
But back to my point, life in America is very dangerous for Blacks, especially men. I was just reading an article about a black teenager who was walking down Arthur Avenue in the Bronx when the police came and accused him of having stolen a backpack. When the kid said that he wasn’t carrying any stolen property, the white accuser suddenly changed his story and said it was stolen 2 weeks early. The poor kid spent 3 years in Rikers Island waiting for a trial that never happened for a crime that was not only not committed by the kid but was not committed at all. He spent most of his time in jail in solitary confinement.
So when a young Black male gets shot by the police and everyone in the community wants a trial and the prosecution says “no” and the police says that he deserved to die because he was no angel, you have to think that America, even without race, is a ruthless, unforgiving place. A place where only Angels are allowed to live.
Filed under We The People
Today I had intended on writing something about Ferguson and how and why the Revolution would begin. I was going to explain how the system is supposed to work: prosecutors belong to the executive branch with the communities they serve as their constituents. When there is a murder or an alleged crime and the community wants a trial, the prosecutor practically has a political duty to try the case. And in a case like the Brown one where the facts are very much open to interpretation, the only way for a satisfactory resolution is for a trial where the community – in the form of the jury – can listen to the presentation of the facts and the witnesses and render a verdict based on the standards of that community. In what I thought was going to be a profound observation, I was going to note that this was clearly not the case in Ferguson, and has not been the case in almost any of the other countless instances where an unarmed black male lay dead at the hands of the police. And this, this ultimate failure – arguably deliberate – in the system was what would eventually lead to the Revolution. Heck, less than that led the Revolutionary War in 1776.
But then I read Ta-Nehisi Coates reflection on the matter. Absolutely no one writes better about race in America today than Coates. Just a few highlights:
What clearly cannot be said is that violence and nonviolence are tools, and that violence—like nonviolence—sometimes works. “Property damage and looting impede social progress,” Jonathan Chait wrote Tuesday. He delivered this sentence with unearned authority. Taken together, property damage and looting have been the most effective tools of social progress for white people in America. They describe everything from enslavement to Jim Crow laws to lynching to red-lining.
“Property damage and looting”—perhaps more than nonviolence—has also been a significant tool in black “social progress.” In 1851, when Shadrach Minkins was snatched off the streets of Boston under the authority of the Fugitive Slave Law, abolitionists “stormed the courtroom” and “overpowered the federal guards” to set Minkins free. That same year, when slaveholders came to Christiana, Pennsylvania, to reclaim their property under the same law, they were not greeted with prayer and hymnals but with gunfire.
“Property damage and looting” is a fairly accurate description of the emancipation of black people in 1865, who only five years earlier constituted some $4 billion in property. The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 is inseparable from the threat of riots. The housing bill of 1968—the most proactive civil-rights legislation on the books—is a direct response to the riots that swept American cities after King was killed. Violence, lingering on the outside, often backed nonviolence during the civil-rights movement. “We could go into meetings and say, ‘Well, either deal with us or you will have Malcolm X coming into here,'” said SNCC organizer Gloria Richardson. “They would get just hysterical. The police chief would say, ‘Oh no!'”
What cannot be said is that America does not really believe in nonviolence—Barack Obama has said as much—so much as it believes in order. What cannot be said is that there are very convincing reasons for black people in Ferguson to be nonviolent. But those reasons emanate from an intelligent fear of the law, not a benevolent respect for the law.
The fact is that when the president came to the podium on Monday night there actually was very little he could say. His mildest admonitions of racism had only earned him trouble. If the American public cannot stomach the idea that arresting a Harvard professor for breaking into his own home is “stupid,” then there is virtually nothing worthwhile that Barack Obama can say about Michael Brown.
And that is because the death of all of our Michael Browns at the hands of people who are supposed to protect them originates in a force more powerful than any president: American society itself. This is the world our collective American ancestors wanted. This is the world our collective grandparents made. And this is the country that we, the people, now preserve in our fantastic dream. What can never be said is that the Fergusons of America can be changed—but, right now, we lack the will to do it.
Filed under Obama 44, We The People
A few weeks ago I finished Laila Lalami’s new novel A Moor’s Account, a fictionalized account of the 1527 Narvaez expedition in Floria as told through the eyes of Estevanico, a slave of Moroccan descent.
I was interested in Lalami’s book for a few reasons: she is from the same city in Morocco as my wife, I had read and enjoyed Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and I follow her very insightful articles and commentary on twitter. So, I was excited to read her new novel.
After having read it, I realized that it was based on the same story as Walk the World’s Rim, a novel I had absolutely fallen in love with at the age of 12.
In any event, A Moor’s Account has sparked my interest in learning much more about slavery under the Spanish in the Americas and Native American history, and the Columbian Exchange. In the past few weeks since finishing Lalami’s book, I have read The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin that uses a slave mutiny aboard a Spanish vessel off the coast of Chile in 1805 to discuss the slave trade in the Southern Cone during Spanish rule and its relationship with New England.
I have since moved on to the excellent The Son by Philipp Meyer, a family saga that traces the history of Texas, and Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, soon to be followed by the sequel 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.
It is amazing how much the history of slavery and Native Americans differs from what I had learned as a boy growing up in Potomac, a town with an Indian name. For example, I had not known that in the early 19th Century close to a half of Argentina’s population was of Black African descent. Their absence today is more than conspicuous. And when I was a kid in school we were given the impression that Manifest Destiny was about the expression of freedom of religion where a vast open, mostly unpopulated terrain was there for the taking. But we wouldn’t want to upset Republicans by trying to teach our most able kids otherwise? And someone should tell Newt Gingrich that maybe Texans aren’t a people either.
Filed under Literature, We The People
In a very insightful interview in today’s New York Times about race in America, Naomi Zack explains that asking yourself what the Michael Brown case has to do with you, that is White Privilege:
Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right. But I think that is what “white privilege” is meant to convey, that whites don’t have many of the worries nonwhites, especially blacks, do. I was talking to a white friend of mine earlier today. He has always lived in the New York City area. He couldn’t see how the Michael Brown case had anything to do with him. I guess that would be an example of white privilege.
Of course, I don’t live in the U.S. anymore, but if I did, I don’t think my fear would be the police shooting my son (but maybe the All American psycho), and that is White Privilege.
Filed under Parenthood, We The People
[UPDATE below]
Before I begin:
Guns kill 30,000 Americans per year. The Flu kills thousands of Americans per year. You are nine times more likely to be killed by the police than by a terrorist.
Now let me begin:
The War on Terror is probably the greatest pro-Big Government sham in American history. We have spent trillions of dollars to fight wars against foreign enemies and in foreign lands in response to the murder of 3,000 people on 911, and in the process have created whole new billion dollar industries for government contractors. Those 3,000 lives we lost was a tragedy. But in terms of the real risks to national security that Americans face, terrorism has proven to be far down on the list of actual threats. Just look at the numbers.
As mentioned here previously, Americans are nine times more likely to be killed by their own police than by a terrorist. You are more likely to be killed by dog bite or diarrhea than be by a terrorist. The vast majority of the people we’ve been fighting in Afghanistan have never even heard of 911. Yet we fight on and are now supposed to believe that Isis is the next mortal threat to America. Yes, you heard it: Isis is a mortal threat to the country with the most expensive and most sophisticated military in the history of mankind.
At the same time, we are now supposed to be in a panic over Ebola. Some are even calling for a blockade on all flights out of West African. Is Ebola that big a threat to Americans? But doesn’t the run of the mill American flu kill around 20,000 Americans per year. As a matter of fact in 2004, 48,000 Americans died of the flu. Shouldn’t there have been a travel ban on all American domestic and international flights?
In recent days while one person died of Ebola in America, three American high school kids died after suffering head injuries during football games. Should we ban football?
Vox recent published a list of the less sexy but real life threats to Americans, and the top six were:
Guns kills more than 30,000 people in America. Could you imagine if Congress actually gave $22 billion to make gun deaths less likely instead of spending it on a bunch of nincompoops that call themselves Isis? Imagine if instead of fighting those guys in Afghanistan that had never even heard of 911 or the guys in Iraq who didn’t have any WMDs, we had spent trillions making guns safer?
John Hagee — the Christian pastor who endorsed John McCain in 2008 and whose endorsement McCain accepted — has recently claimed that Ebola is God’s judgement on America as a result of Obama trying to divide Israel (apparently by giving Israel more money). Does Mr. Hagee believe that 30,000 gun deaths per year is God’s way of punishing Americans for having the N.R.A. and an activist Supreme Court that rules in favor of a Second Amendment right to personal gun possession?
That’s right: we Americans — especially of the Bible waiving kind — love our guns as much as we love our Big Government military and its contractors.
So the next time you hear someone say Isis or Ebola, please ask them to do us (and our tax payer wallets) a big favor and shut the f_ _ _ up.
UPDATE (November 7, 2014):
Last week the Washington Post came out with an infographic on “How likely are you to die from Ebola” which compares numerous other ways Americans are much more likely to die than from Ebola, including – amongst other things – your pajamas catching on fire, spider bites, falling out of bed, and yes, the good old fashioned death penalty. Good thing we just elected into office a large swarm of Republicans who can keep us even safer.
Filed under Essays, We The People
With all the talk about our freedoms and after all the trillions we have spent (and continue to spend) on national defense and anti-terrorism since 9/11, you might be surprised to learn that more Americans are killed per year by their own police than by terrorist attack. In fact, if you are American you are nine times more likely to be killed by the police than by a terrorist. If you live in New York City, you are at a greater risk of being shot and killed by the NYPD than an Israeli is at risk of being killed by Hamas rock fire.
My brother, who is a public interest attorney in the Bronx, tells me that the teenagers in his neighborhood get stopped almost every day by the police. Stop and Frisk is in effect a daily police check point. Before you judge, listen. Listen to people’s stories. For example, here and here and here and here.
And I definitely recommend this or anything else by Mr. Coates. You don’t have to agree with him, but you should definitely listen. Americans have different realities. If all you hear is your own, then yours just isn’t real.
Filed under We The People
In American pop culture tradition – in every movie or TV show you’ll ever see – the villains never come with the standard vanilla Mid-Atlantic English. On the rare occasion that the bad guy is American, he usually either speaks in an ethnic or urban tough guy vernacular or if the story is “politically correct” – meaning that there is something inherently white about the bad guy’s badness – then he’ll speak with a Southern drawl (of the strictly redneck variety).
But the vast majority of the time, the evildoer is a foreigner, with his scary foreign accent. Back when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, it was quite common for the bad guys to speak with a Russian accent; though I do recall that one of the Lethal Weapon movies had South African bad guys. And remember Die Hard? Those bad guys, of course, were also foreigners, of the seedy European variety (often with mischievous British accents).
You see, the worst of the worst used to be the Germans. Back before the only threats to the world came from Islam and we had Homeland, 24, and a Fifth Amendment that didn’t apply to certain groups, Germans were the scrooges of the earth and always made for the perfect bad guys (cut to the Nazi faces melting scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Over the past few weeks, my (almost) three year old and I have been watching Santa Claus is Coming to Town, that 1970 Christmas special that I used to love when I was a kid. Guess who the bad guy was? The Burgermeister Meisterburger. A ruthless autocrat wearing lederhosen, shouting in a German accent, and outlawing toys.
As some of you may recall, the Germans – a white, Christian people from Europe – sought to dominate the world, impose their superior culture, and eliminate the undesirable races through genocide. Seventy years later, we have thankfully accepted that societies evolve and times change, and we no longer equate all things German with a mortal threat to our pristine society. There is no anti-German movement in the U.S. passing laws to protect the public from being contaminated by Germanic culture, values, or beer. Instead we have new accents and skins tones to type cast.
But it is ironic when you think about it: there is so much talk these days about how our imaginary Santa Claus must continue to be white. What’s so good about being white? I am old enough to remember when the real life Hitler and his followers were oh, so milky white.
Filed under Digressions, We The People
Via Glenn Greenwald, the above graphic illustrates just how tribal American politics can be.
As mentioned before, we love pointing to the Iraqis and rationalizing our invasion of their country by saying, “We didn’t destroy their country, they did because they are tribal and barbarian.” But take a look at the American civil war in the 1860s, the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, the Pan-European civil war that was World Wars I and II, and you see that it doesn’t take much to turn neighbor against neighbor in horrible bloodshed, even in the most Christian of lands.
When I look at today’s tribalism in America – where the president is incessantly accused of being a socialist crpyto-Muslim who wants to sentence grandma to a death panel and end America as we know it, despite repeatedly proving himself as a status-quo worshiping, pro-business, pro-defense industry, pro-Israel politics-as-usual All American politician – I often wonder what it would take for the U.S. to fall into the type of murderous political chaos that has afflicted places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or anywhere else that has been blessed with liberation.
Deep down inside and even on the surface, we ain’t so different.
Filed under Digressions, Obama 44, We The People
Suffice it to say that it has been interesting to witness the different reactions to the recent leaks that the NSA is acting in conjunction with private companies to monitor our private conversations. These reactions have been more than predictable. Besides the obvious game of mirrors where Democrats (including Obama himself) who used to loath Bush and were tearing their hair out over the Patriot Act are now blindly defending the Obama administration’s expansion of the Surveillance State, you also have the mainstream, establishment media in a love affair with government secrecy, their arguments being that:
It all makes you wonder which side of the fence the David Brooks, David Frum, Tom Friedman, Andrew Sullivan and others like them would have been on back between 1776 and 1791 when the American people were fighting for, amongst other freedoms, the freedom against government intrusion into their homes and personal lives. Their full defense of surveillance and secrecy is tantamount to siding with both King George and Big Government. Why is it that the guys who most hate our values are not the terrorists but the chicken hawks who are willing and eager to sacrifice our values as soon as a buffoon plants a faulty bomb in his underpants.
Now, I know that I repeatedly promise to steer clear from these American political issues and focus more on life in Europe, but I think that as an American living abroad, I am particularly affected by the Surveillance. So here are my two cents: Continue reading
Filed under Essays, Obama 44, We The People
Grave Error 