Page 14 - Sonoma County Gazette July 2020

Black Lives & Endemic Violence Rooted in Economic Expediency History
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” ~ Ida B. Wells Ida B. Wells was an African American journalist, abolitionist and feminist who led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s. She went on to found and become integral in groups striving for African American justice.
To understand today’s racial strife and the police violence against black people we need to track the history of black lives in the United States of America.
thread in American history starting with
the decimation of native peoples. Focusing here on Black lives, the beginning was slavery enforced through violence by slave patrols, which were the first form of policing. Abolition and the ensuing race-based violence to keep black lives in control for economic reasons, the civil rights struggles, and the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition and the rest of the country’s accommodation shows clearly a thread of unbelievable and unending violence against blacks.
Perhaps the starkest statistic, recent data predicted one of every three black boys, and one of six Latino boys, born in 2001 would go to jail or prison within their
By Ceylan Karasapan-Crow
Racial violence is one long continuous
lifetimes if current trends continue.
Yes there are today, educated, well to
do Blacks and this may attest to some “progress,” but lets be real put any one of those same up and coming black individuals in different garb and situate them in a ghetto and they will experience the same police violence if they find themselves in an ‘unfortunate’ situation.
News broke in 2017 that up to 40 percent of the firefighters battling California’s outbreak of forest fires are prison inmates working for $2 an hour. Practices like these are disturbingly common: military gear, ground meat, Starbucks holiday products and McDonald’s uniforms have all been made (and are still made) with low-wage prison labor. [ https://billmoyers.com/story/ time-stop-using-mass-incarceration-system- free-labor ]
“The bold and unpunished deaths of black men, women, and children deemed dangerous—like Trayvon Martin in Florida; Philando Castile
in Minnesota; Tamir Rice and Samuel DuBose in Ohio; Alton Sterling in Louisiana; Sandra Bland in Texas; Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland; Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, and many, many more—continue to demonstrate the fatal consequences of a racialized presumption of guilt permitted to fester for more than a century. The trauma borne by Anthony Ray Hinton and countless more men and women condemned to death only to be exonerated many years later reveals the arrogance of a judicial system built on a history of injustice but still confident in its ability to fairly and justly judge who should live and who should die.” Jennifer Rae Taylor senior attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative.
than half of the 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons work while incarcerated, and the vast majority only make a few cents per hour.
The outright in our face, brutal, unflinching violence/murder we recently witnessed of George Floyd cannot happen without the entrenched history of such violence throughout American History, his was, I would argue, a modern day lynching.
But long term solutions they are not.
There are solutions that may start to address the entrenched economic inequalities that are at the root of the historically pervasive racism. Please READ what I have learned about where we came from to get to this point in time when RACISM is being examined throughout our lives and culture.
Ceylan Karasapan-Crow has written a History of Racism using
films, books, and historic references in her online essay, including:
Systemic Racist violence isn’t manifested just in physical violence, it is a part of keeping black lives down for economic expediency via a racist agenda. It is well accepted how violent slavery was, both psychologically and physically,
a practice solely to serve the economic needs of the south — not cheap labor - but FREE labor.
• Slave patrols
• Segregation
• Reconstruction
• Terror Lynchings
• Black Codes and Segregation • Jim Crow
• The 13th amendment
• Mass incarceration
• “The Projects” or “Ghettos” • The Tulsa race massacre
• Redlining
& MORE
[ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/ crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_ home/black-to-the-future/tolerance-for- violence ]
Inmates are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that workers are paid at least the federal minimum wage. That makes it completely legal for states to exploit inmates for free or cheap labor. More
Years of exclusion from wealth, suppression by government policies, and terrorizing by violence begets destitute citizens, who are then somehow seen as the cause for their lot in society.
Many Blacks. are stuck today in inner cities as well as rural out-lands, in neighborhoods that have poor social, economic and educational opportunities. Police-minority violence is fueled by centuries of racial and ethnic divisions in American society that perpetuated segregation and exemption from economic opportunities, and cannot be changed simply by police reform or even defunding policing. Such solutions as police reform, may be a start and at least addressing immediately what must be addressed.
Today African Americans make up about 13 percent of the nation’s population, but constitute 28 % of all arrests, 40 % of the incarcerated, and 42 % of those on death row. African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans are all more likely to be arrested, jailed awaiting trial, and sentenced to jail or prison when compared to white Americans.
Please visit www.SonomaCountyGazette.com for Ceylan Karasapan-Crow’s complete essay.
14 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 7/20