Racism and police abuse the other face of neoliberalism

EEUU | EXTREMA VIOLENCIA POLICIAL | EXTREM POLICE VIOLENCE IN USA

By Silvia Arana: In the United States in 2015, police killed 990 people according to the Fatal Force count the Washington Post. And until July 13, 2016, police killed 518 people. A disproportionate number of victims of police violence are young African Americans.

Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown, said: "It is clear that you, white Americans, will never understand we are a nation of nearly 40 million black souls within a nation of more than 320 million do not all think so.. same ... but there is something that most of us agree: we do not want the cops kill us without the fear of being judged one day, let alone go to jail even when the world sees us die . home videos never understand the helplessness we feel when we observe these events, over and over again, while shaking images tell a tougher than what the eyes are willing to believe history: that black life worth so little, that deaths of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, have been registered in film this week and that happened while we watched how the police fired their weapons. The police are part of an undeclared war against the blackness [...] we feel powerless to make them understand that our black lives should matter. We feel helpless to prevent you continue killing black people ... ". [1]

Fight for the rights of African Americans: "Do not confuse visibility with power"

The cry for "The lives of black matter" was the banner of social movement Black Lives Matter, emerged three years ago at the peak of police violence against African Americans, Latinos and other ethnic groups. Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter said that although the movement has grown and gained strength at the national level, it is necessary to expand the work done in these years, going beyond cultural awakening and translate it into a real transformation, so that the visibility gives way to power and the slogan a reality that the lives of blacks really matter. He warned: "I think that people can confuse visibility with power. The reality is that the conditions in our community are not very different from what they were before. " [2]

The panorama living African-American, Latino and other ethnic groups in the US communities is devastating: unemployment, mass incarceration, lack of access to education and health and excessive police violence and impunity.

Although the indexes are well known, remember that the country's prison population in the world 40% of prisoners is black, when only represent 13% of the population. There are more African Americans imprisoned or paroled that people enslaved in 1850.

A system of monitoring racist

What are the causes of this situation? Several important voices of the African American community have pointed out that the problem is not racist cops, but a racist system. Determining the profile of an offender based on race it is widely used by police across the country. The surveillance system based on the premise that a black person is suspected of a crime. In a count made in a stretch of road in New Jersey it was found that 46 percent of drivers arrested were African American, Latino or other minority ethnic group, although they only were 15% of those suspected of driving above the speed limit. The same applies to all other states.

"Racism serves to make money"

The African-American writer Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize for Literature, has emphasized that racism is a social construction to make money, because the races do not exist from a scientific or anthropological view. He says: "Sometimes we forget that colonialism was and is a war, a war to control the resources of another country, that is, to make money. We can delude ourselves that our effort to 'civilize' or 'pacify' other countries is not related to money. The purpose of slavery was making money: free labor for slave owners and industry. The 'working poor' of today are like the unexplored riches of the 'dark colonial Africa' at bargain-accessed purchase prices and wages, and under the power of corporations that multiply and shutting off the voices of dissent ... ". [3]

Legalized murder in the service of neoliberalism

Within the dominant narrative discussion it is in terms of "racist cops" or African Americans who "do not respect the police." But the reality is that racism and police abuse play a vital role for the neoliberal system: used the police to repress the poor African American communities, in order to avoid any form of rebellion while the plundering of resources is implemented and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the elites.

Chris Hedges, renowned American investigative journalist, argues that the police committed "legalized murder" against people of color not necessarily racism, but because impoverished communities have become small "police states". In them, the police can detain people, interrogate, arrest them without cause for long periods, and can even kill them with impunity. Hedges says. "The goal of the corporate state is to get the machinery, the legal justification and the ability to deprive citizens of rights, wealth and resources discarded by the corporate state, especially the poor blacks, they are denied dignity of work, education, adequate health care [...] it makes them criminals.'re trapped since birth to death in police states. And they blame for their own misery. " Hedges calls to stop the savagery of legalized murder, and warns: "We must free ourselves from the venomous ideology of neoliberalism. If we remain captives suffer the nightmare that afflicts our neighbor.