'They Think We Are Animals': How America's Police State Controls Black People

[Brewman_Jax]

http://www.alternet.org/rights/155389/%2...ack_people


From the article:

Quote:It wasn’t a knee-jerk anti-authority reaction but a heavy feeling based on history. Months later I read of the NYPD killing 18-year-old Ramarley Graham and 68-year-old Vietnam veteran Kenneth Chamberlain. They join Duane Brown, Sean Bell, Timothy Stansbury, Patrick Dorismond, Michael Stewart and others on the growing roster of black men killed by the police.

Once the smoking guns cool and the body is buried, mainstream media repeat the same words, “accident” or “tragic.” But we, who are black or Latino or politicized, hear the slurs and threats shouted in the background. Progressive news show Democracy Now reported that when cops banged on Chamberlain’s door and he told them he was fine, one shouted, “I don’t give a fuck nigger!” In 2011, cops created a Facebook page to complain about working the West Indian Day Parade, on it they called the black partiers “animals” and “savages,” and one wrote, “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.” Repeatedly, journalists or lawyers smuggle out of the Blue Code of Silence evidence of police using racist, animal imagery to describe the very people they are supposed to serve.

Racism in America's police force is linked to their role as keepers of the status quo in an unequal society. They enforce laws written by politicians on behalf of the wealthy -- laws that end up trapping poor and working-class people in desperate lives. Racial and sexual minorities, legal and illegal immigrants are seen as threats to the social order. When we protest the law and “occupy” a space we are beaten and arrested. When we commit a crime to “get some” we are beaten and arrested. And when we do neither but simply live we’re busted to make a cop’s stop-and-frisk quota.

Language plays an essential role here. It starts with a defensive joke, a “perp” profile that becomes so blurred it encompasses nearly everyone on the street and a constant sense of danger. Each builds on the other until the change is complete and one day, they casually listen to NYPD Capt. James Coan give a racist hurrah speech to detectives executing warrants in Brooklyn. “They’re fucking animals," he repeatedly said of black people from 2008 to 2010, “If you have to shoot, you shoot them in the head.”


...

Slave traders, then society at large, saw black people as not human and dangerous animals. A lot of those racist attitudes from the past have become social norms and major components of the racially-based social caste system of the present. For example, during the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, various news articles covering the situation skewed actions by certain people. Sentences in the articles said that black people looted various stores, while white people foraged for basic necessities, hence creating the catch-phrase "black people loot, white people find". During political campaign seasons, black people that voted for black candidates were often called "racist", while white people that voted for white candidates, sometimes over black candidates, were "voting for the most qualified candidate". Examples and reports documenting this are numerous.

When "those people" aren't considered truly human, basic rights, courtesies, and privileges are not extended to them; what few they get are easily ignored or taken away.

[jaxx]

People won't lose their prejudices as long as parents teach their kids to hate like they do. It's like a sickness that festers.