A culture of violence and bias
The recent killing of unarmed black men by the police in the United States is rooted in a culture and institution of violence dating back to slavery, according American actor and humanitarian Danny Glover.
“It goes back to the abominable circumstances that occurred… the exploitation not only of black men and women, but also the murder of black men,” Glover argued in an interview with the Jamaica Observer in Kingston last week.
Glover, who was in the island at the invitation of University of the West Indies Vice-Chancellor Sir Hilary Beckles, was responding to the Observer’s query about race relations in the United States today in the context of the country’s chief executive being a black man — Barack Obama.
Over the past year there has been a lot of commentary over the killing of unarmed black men by the police, which have triggered protests and civil unrest in a number of American cities.
Some people have argued that the deaths of teenager Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray, to name a few, provide proof of police racism and excessive violence that have been nagging problems in the US for a long time.
The city of Ferguson in Missouri has been a flashpoint for protests across America ever since Brown was shot dead by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014.
Protests over that killing ran for weeks and, on November 24, when a grand jury declined to charge Wilson, another wave of protests rocked the city.
A US Justice Department probe of the killing found widespread racial bias in the police force and the city was told to overhaul its criminal justice system.
In August this year, a demonstration commemorating the first anniversary of Brown’s killing resulted in a man being shot and critically wounded in an exchange with the police.
Last week, Glover pointed to the fact that modern technology has served to expose these events. But that exposure, he argued, does not take away from the historic dynamics of the problem.
“If we look at statistics, by 1900 — 35 years after the civil war, 37 years after the Emancipation Proclamation — 70 per cent of the African-American men who were lynched were aspiring businessmen,” he said.
Those men, he argued, had stepped out of the context of being simply property to being human beings with desires, goals, and ambitions beyond those prescribed to them.
“So they were murdered for their attempt to step out of the boundaries,” Glover said, adding: “Now, to murder somebody because of that is some deep and historic pathology that goes with that.”
He said that the laws that were passed after the civil war and during the Jim Crow era, such as those around vagrancy and loitering, and the people associated with those laws, didn’t allow the expansion of expression for African-American men.
“So, in a sense… this process continues… and probably a little of that has derailed or undermined our own progression, political thought, our own ideas of change and everything else, our own way of reimagining ourselves as human beings, as citizens,” Glover said.
“They use the power, the police, and everything else in order to create a barrier to turn around or to forestall our own ambitions and our desires and dreams and everything else,” he argued further.
“So this whole thing, as we begin to kind of think about what is happening to African-American men, has to be taken in the same context you would say is happening with Jamaican men as well,” Glover reasoned.