Tuesday, July 12, 2016

New racial outbreak in the US?



“There was police brutality and there was atrocity, and the press was just as atrocious as the police. Because they helped the police to cover it up by propagating a false image across the country”                - Malcolm X

New racial outbreak in the US?
Germán Gorraiz López

On April 3, 1968, the eve of his murder, the Noble Peace Prize winner and civil rights activist Reverend Martin Luther King, told his followers, "... I've seen the promised land. It may not be able to reach with you but I want you to know that we as a people, will get the promised land ", which nearly half a century would be brought forward to the election of an African American President. Thus, for the first time in US history, in 2008 was elected as President of the Nation a black due to the vote of the Latino and African American minorities, with what traditional establishment parties have changed their electoral strategy to capture a vote that 2050 on the horizon will be the majority. Thus, according to the US Census Bureau, by 2043 whites will no longer be the majority of the US population and will be displaced by the sum of the Hispanic population increase from 53.3 million today to 128.8 million in 2060 and the African-American, which would 41.2 million today to 61.8 million expected by the projections.

However, according to a publication of the Canadian Global Research, 47.8 million Americans live under the poverty line and should use food stamps (SNAP English) to meet their nutritional needs, which it translates into an increase of 70 percent since 2008 due to high unemployment and poverty that would wroth with Latino and African American minorities. Thus, from the start of the recession in 2008, 28.2 million people were enrolled in the SNAP and about 10 million children would live in extreme poverty, according to the publication. Moreover, the reduction in the budget of 2015 of about 85,000 million dollars, has forced the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) to eliminate benefits to nearly 600,000 mothers, infants and children, according to Canadian publication. In addition, the US unemployment rate in the month of May rose to 5.5% and continues to endemic chronic high unemployment rates among African Americans (17%), a figure triple as regards the young population black (51%), with attendant side effects of marginality, underground economy and increased crime rates. which would rise to ionospheric figures in relation to the young population.

African American dystopia

A dystopia would be a "negative utopia where reality set in antagonistic terms to those of an ideal society" and are located in enclosed or claustrophobic environments. So, Detroit would be a (not ficitica) dystopian scenario real nature and the paradigm of the greatest mass exodus of population suffered from a modern city during the past 70 years, driven by a combination of economic reasons (the widespread corruption of the authorities exodus municipal and the fact that high taxes to live in the metropolitan area were reduced drastically in the suburbs) and race. Detroit would have happened to have in the metropolitan area 1, 8 million in 1960 (90% white) to 700,000 in 2012 (84% of African American race), centrifugal migratory movement known colloquially as "white fligt" (white flight ) since most of the population migrating to the suburbs were white and middle and upper class, leaving the colored population confined to the east of the city in an area ironically named "paradise Valley" (paradise Valley).

We would therefore face a dystopian scenario, where 36% of the population live below the poverty line and with the highest crime rate of all US, favored by the widespread lack of investment in public services and the existence of thousands of solar and left empty homes should be demolished by the city. In addition, the drastic tax collection force will further reduce welfare programs, raise taxes and privatize most public services due to accumulated deficit and the level of bonds issued since they can not print money to finance their deficits as does the nation, transposable situation to other cities in African-American majority. Thus, the city of Camden, New Jersey, the second city with the highest crime rate in the United States, was doomed to lay off 45% of its enforcement, so that the combination of rates stratospheric unemployment (over 15%), drastic reduction in welfare programs for a population of subsidized excessive facto and performance with clear racist overtones of law enforcement,

Obama and Reverend Wright

Rev. Wright in a sermon delivered in 2001 in the parish of the United Church of Christ in Chicago expressed the need for collective metanoia of American society "to transform imperial military wars into internal political wars against racism and injustices class ", for which proposed a fundamental redistribution of wealth through the reallocation of the public budget. Citing the "gift of the Administration of George W. Bush of 1.300 billion dollars in tax breaks for the rich," he replied with a proposal for public funding of universal health care and rebuilding the education system to make it serve the poor . Also, in a lecture at Howard University (Washington) in 2006 he said: "This country was founded and is run by a racist principle (...) We believe in white superiority and black inferiority (...) more than in the God himself, "according to an excerpt published by The Wall Street Journal. Obama, spiritual son of Reverend Wright and debtor title of his book "The Audacity of Hope," was forced to renounce their ideological paternity and did not hesitate to distance himself from the influence of his religious mentor to the attacks received while still Senator, but in his book "dreams from my father," talks about the vital attitude of the African American population, marked by the generational stigma of "racial segregation that has characterized the American future" in his words, unhealed wound that possibly reopens and explode at the end of his second term.

Police racism and the role of the fraternities

After the death of African American teenager Trayvon Martin by vigilante George Zimmerman (acquitted of murder charges), Professor of Cultural Studies and Black at Duke University, Mark Anthony Neal said: "The first thing we learned is that we have not overcome the issue of race. In the 2008 election the hope that electing Obama would allow us to transcend issues of race "was, but the totalitarian drift suffered by the United States under President George W. Bush caused in the name of the sacrosanct security State reached in practice nullify the principle of inviolability (habeas corpus) of people, establishing de facto the principle of "presumption of guilt" rather than the primitive "presumption of innocence", which would have remained indelible stigma the security forces of the US and would reflected in arrogance, brutality and racial contempt that distill police interventions in large US cities (965 killed by police in 2015, of which 60% would be African Americans and Latinos), constituent elements of the "negative perfection", a term used by the novelist Martin Amis to designate "obscene justification for the use of extreme, massive and deliberate cruelty for allegedly ideal state". Thus, after the death of African American 18 year old Mike Brown shot by a white police officer in Ferguson (Missouri), the African American population returned to relive the 60s and the struggle for civil liberties led by the Rev. Martin Luther King , Nobel Peace Prize ( "we have learned to fly like birds, swim like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living like brothers").

According elinformador.com.mx, almost all of the nine historically black sororities, (known as "The Divine Nine"), born of racial conflict in the country and were founded on college campuses in the early 1900s when black students faced racial prejudice and exclusion. Thus, according to Gregory Parks, assistant professor at the School of Law at Wake Forest University and member of the fraternity Alpha Phi Alpha "There was a time when black fraternities were at the forefront of the struggle for civil rights, but those days they have been lost in memory "because most of its leaders would be sedated and sleepy because of the substantial contributions that receive federal funds.

However, the persistence of police violence against African Americans and practical impunity of the police (whose exponent penultimate would be the death of two young African Americans in Louisiana and Minnesota), could oscillate in its values ​​the monolithic former attitude of the fraternities to stay out of violent protests. Thus, black fraternities as Omega Psi Phi, Alpha Phi Alpha and Beta Phi Sigma and sororities Zeta Phi Beta and Gamma Sigma Rho have appealed to its members to join protests against police actions and could assist the media Gigantification the activist pro-civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and a new large peaceful march on Washington (Martin Luther King, 1.963). Also, do not seríadescartable a later reissue of violent race riots of the summer of 1963 that could make metropolitan areas with high rates of African Americans (New Orleans, Washington, St-Louis, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Cleveland and Chicago) break out in violent riots where social demands with those of racial segregation intermingle, forgetting the teachings of Martin Luther King ( "violence creates more social problems than it solves") and being postponed "sine die" utopian dream of seeing sitting in same table the children of blacks and whites in the grasslands of Georgia.

GERMÁN GORRAIZ LOPEZ-Analyst

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