generalspeaking

A National Powder Keg

"It is as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened."
"Dallas, I'm here to say we must reject such despair. I'm here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem. And I know that because I know America. I know how far we've come against impossible odds."
U.S. President Barack Obama

Mourners attend a Monday candlelight vigil for five officers killed last week during protests in Dallas. CNN

Has a pathological virus of bigotry and reverse-bigotry suddenly manifested itself in a cycle of violence, white against black, black against white, deviating from the usual black-on-black and white-on-black? Weapons seem always to be at the fore. Children carrying toy guns and being shot on suspicion of doing harm because they are black and seem to be threatening. Blacks turning their backs and running rather than be apprehended by a policeman looking to interrogate him.

A policeman confronting a street vendor, convinced he sees a gun nestled inside the belt of his trousers, initiating a response whose end results cannot be reversed. A man, stopped in his car, telling a police interrogator that he has a firearm in his possession by license, an admission that so frightens the man in blue that he shoots, convinced the man he has stopped demanding to see his license, is reaching for his gun and he will be the target.

And Black Lives Matter calling upon society to reject the suspicion of blacks, since they're just like anyone else in that society though they may be over-represented as gang members in a community, as drug pushers, as weapons dealers generally averse to law and order, contemptuous of both the law and those who keep it in order with their blue uniforms and their propensity to shoot first, rue the impulse later.

The two contradictory statements above by President Obama aside, the circumstances and details leading to the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling at the hands of police officers in Minnesota and Louisiana, have galvanized public opinion with the horror of the casual transitory nature of life and death in America awash with guns and mired in black-on-white fears and suspicions and assaults and white-on-black privilege and reactions out of proportion to reality when reality is allied with death. 

Now there's something called intersectionality, where aggrieved groups make common cause with one another, making improbable, albeit welcomed links that seem to serve their agendas. Black Lives Matter, in asserting their claims to insufferable maltreatment by police in America, have found it useful to cast blame on other minority and ethnic/religious groups, like for example, Jews, who are always front and centre in causing trouble.

"In the past 48 hours another two black men have been lynched by the police.... We must remember that many US police departments train with #IsraeliDefenceForces. The same forces behind the genocide of black people in America are behind the genocide of Palestinians. What this means is that Palestinians must stand with our black comrades. We must struggle for their liberation. It is as important as our own. #AltonSterling is as important as #AliDawabsheh. Palestinian liberation and black liberation go together. We must recognize this and commit to building for it."

New York University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)

David Brown prays during a a vigil at Thanks-Giving square in Dallas on Friday, the day after the shootings. Photograph: Laura Buckman/AFP/Getty Images

Labels: Bigotry, Firearms, Human Relations, Prejudice, Threats, United States

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, July 14, 2016