Policing in US Was Built on Racism & Should Be Put on Trial

The progress from Western colonial global expansion, and the construction of American wealth and industry on the backs of enslaved Blacks and Native peoples, followed by the abrupt "emancipation" of the slaves and their exodus from the South to the Northern cities, has led us to our current divided society. Divided by economic inequities and unequal access to social resources, the nation lives in a media dream of social harmony, or did until YouTube set its bed on fire. Now, it is common knowledge that our current system of brutal racist policing and punitive over-incarceration serves the dual purpose of maintaining racial prejudice and the inequities it justifies. Brief yourself on this late-breaking development in American history here.

Re: Policing in US Was Built on Racism & Should Be Put on Tr

Postby admin » Thu Jul 08, 2021 10:28 pm

Jovenel Moïse Dead: Haitian President Assassinated, Plunging Country into New Political Crisis
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
JULY 07, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/7/7/h ... assination



GUESTS
Dahoud Andre: longtime Haitian community activist and member of the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti.
Kim Ives: editor of Haiti Liberté.
LINKS
Kim Ives on Twitter

Haiti is reeling from a new crisis after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in an attack on his home in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince early Wednesday. In a statement, Haitian Prime Minister Claude Joseph said “a group of unidentified individuals” attacked the private residence of the president, killing him and injuring the first lady. Moïse, who had led Haiti since 2017, was accused of orchestrating a coup to stay in power beyond February 7, when his term officially ended. For months Haitians have staged large protests against Moïse demanding he leave office, but Moïse clung to power with support from the Biden administration, which backed his claims that his term should end next year. Dahoud Andre, a longtime Haitian community activist and member of the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, says rumors are flying about who could be behind the killing. “As of now, we have no clue where this assassination came from,” Andre says, adding that “the Haitian people loathed Jovenel Moïse” and describing him as a “tool” of the United States. We also speak with Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberté, who says the assailants appear to have been well resourced in their attack. “Clearly this was a fairly sophisticated operation,” Ives says.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with breaking news. Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated early today after an attack on his home in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Moïse’s wife was also shot in the attack; she has been hospitalized. In a statement, the Haitian prime minister, Claude Joseph, said, quote, “A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president of the republic and thus fatally wounded the head of state,” unquote.

Moïse had led Haiti since 2017. Earlier this year, critics of Moïse accused of him of orchestrating a coup to stay in power beyond February 7th, when his term officially ended. For months Haitians have staged large protests against Moïse demanding he leave office. But Moïse clung to power with support from the Biden administration, which backed Moïse’s claim that his term should end next year. Human rights groups report — had accused Moïse of sanctioning attacks against civilians in impoverished neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, the capital, with targeted assassinations and threats against government critics carried out with impunity.

We’re joined now, dealing with this breaking news, by two guests. Dahoud Andre is a longtime Haitian community activist and member of the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti. And Kim Ives is with us, the editor of Haiti Liberté.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Dahoud Andre. Can you tell us what you have heard? Who is responsible for this assassination? And then give us what has been happening — talk about what has been happening in Haiti.

DAHOUD ANDRE: Well, thank you very much, Amy and Juan, for inviting us to speak about what’s happening in Haiti.

We got the call — a call about 5:30 this morning to say that radio in Haiti had reported that, overnight, Jovenel Moïse had been assassinated. I should say that right now, as of now, we have no clue where this assassination came from — certainly not the street gangs, such as the G9; Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, who has been going around recently, after years of demonstrating with an American flag behind his back, and right now purporting to be fighting for a revolution to liberate the Haitian people, so we know it did not come from there.

We know that it could have come from the oligarchy, such people as Reginald Boulos, maybe, you know, Dimitri Vorbe, that at present it appears that Jovenel Moïse has some difficulty with them, because we can imagine that it would take a lot of money to do — and resources, to do an operation such as this.

But a lot of people that I’ve spoken to this morning are saying it’s probably the U.S. government, again, not just affirming their domination over Haiti right now, but maybe to mask the shame of their defeat and running away from Afghanistan in the middle of the night.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Kim Ives, I wanted to get your perspective on this. Clearly, there was a popular opposition and questions, deep questions, about any kind of legitimacy for Jovenel Moïse. So, was this potentially a falling out among the elites, or was there foreign involvement, as well, other than the possible mercenaries themselves being hired from abroad?

KIM IVES: Well, it definitely seems there was foreign involvement. My sources in Haiti this morning tell me that the assailants, the killers, arrived in nine brand-new Nissan patrol pickups. They had a complete understanding of the household of Jovenel Moïse, so apparently they had some inside information. They knew what they were doing. They pretended to be the DEA. So, clearly, this was a fairly sophisticated operation.

Was it Boulos? Was it one of the other members of the bourgeoisie who have had problems with Jovenel? It’s difficult to know. It seems he was also recently in Turkey making some deals, and the Colombians may have not been happy about that. That’s one of the rumors going around. So, we have to wait and see who was behind it.

But definitely, on the street, things have been very hot. The revolutionary forces of the G9 Family and Allies have basically been also calling for Jovenel to go. So I don’t think there’s anybody that is going to be unhappy with this outcome. It was a time when he was very isolated, even within his own circles.

AMY GOODMAN: And the fact that they were speaking Spanish?

KIM IVES: Yeah, and that’s the big question. Yeah, I’m trying to find out why they think it was Colombians involved. I don’t know if it’s an accent question. I haven’t gotten an answer back. But I believe that, you know, it was definitely some fairly sophisticated mercenary operation involved.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dahoud, I wanted to ask you, in terms of — for those listeners and viewers of Democracy Now! who have not been closely following what’s been going on in Haiti in recent years, could you talk about the connections of Moïse to the previous president and the involvement of the Clintons in the continuing, persistent political crises that have occurred in Haiti in recent years?

DAHOUD ANDRE: Yeah. I want to point out first that this is exactly three years since the major uprisings that happened in the country in 2018, July 6, 7th, when the IMF had demanded that Haiti, the government of Haiti, raise fuel prices. And some of these prices were doubled. And the puppet government that Jovenel Moïse headed, they did this in the middle of a soccer game between Brazil and Belgium. And the idea was that Brazil would win and that it would be euphoria, and the people wouldn’t mind. They wouldn’t notice. They wouldn’t be — they would be celebrating Brazil’s victory. And fate had it that Brazil lost shamefully. And immediately after the game ended, uprisings all over the country. So, it’s important to note this date, this anniversary, and that Jovenel Moïse would be killed on this anniversary.

But also, I want to point out what Kim Ives is calling the revolutionary forces of the G9 and Jimmy Cherizier, these are criminals. These are people that are responsible for killing, massacres in poor neighborhoods in the country. These are people — and a lot of people find it amazing, unbelievable, that Kim Ives and his newspaper, Haiti Liberté, would be defending, trying to make people believe that these are revolutionaries — these are the people who are throwing 78-year-old elderly folks off of buildings, burning them alive — that these are the people who are going to save us.

The audience should understand, yes, Martelly was handpicked by the Clintons as a puppet, as someone who would do their bidding and join the campaign. It was obvious that the Clintons, Bill Clinton, who was running the CIRH to supposedly rebuild Haiti “back better” — same slogan that Joe Biden used in his recent campaign — that they would find that this is the person who would be — a degenerate, someone — I know that this program has done much about Martelly, so I don’t want to even go there. But what is important is that Martelly handpicked Jovenel Moïse.

And Jovenel Moïse, who was a crook, an indicted, fake entrepreneur, was put in directly by the U.S. government again. And in that position, he was a reliable puppet to, first, Donald Trump, to the point that he betrayed Haiti’s historic relationship with Venezuela in recognizing Juan Guaidó as legitimate head of Venezuela. And Jovenel Moïse had the nerve to say that with the most recent legislative elections in Venezuela, he would not recognize them because there was not enough popular participation. And this is someone who, by their own numbers, got about 500,000 votes in a country of 12 million people.

So, I need to say that the Haitian people loathed Jovenel Moïse and Martelly, the PHTK government, because they are the tools of the United States, to impose the will of the United States on the people. And they arm these street gangs. They finance these massacres in the poor neighborhoods, that are supportive of, I should say, President Aristide, the Lavalas government. And they just felt — and this was Martelly’s position — he clearly said, so long as the heavyweights — meaning the United States, the U.N., the OAS, the Core Group — supported him and Jovenel Moïse, nothing could happen to them. And this is what we have seen: the support, the unequivocal support, of the United States to the PHTK government, who was killing the Haitian people and stealing the resources of the country.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to get Kim Ives’ response to this clip. One of Haiti’s most powerful gang leaders warned this week he was launching a revolution against the country’s business and political elites. This is Jimmy Cherizier, who Dahoud just referred to, a.k.a. “Barbecue,” a former police officer who heads the so-called G9 federation of nine gangs formed last year.

JIMMY CHERIZIER: [translated] I’m telling people to keep looking for what belongs to them by right. It is your money which is in the banks, stores, supermarkets and dealerships. So go and get what is rightfully yours. Continue looking for what belongs to us, because it is ours.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us who “Barbecue” Jimmy Cherizier is, Kim Ives, and respond to Dahoud’s criticism of your paper, Haiti Liberté?

KIM IVES: Yes, I can. Haiti Liberté, of which, by the way, I’m just the English-language section editor, has been following, with very great interest, the emergence of the G9. Unlike Dahoud Andre, I have met with Jimmy Cherizier and a number of the organizations on the ground in Haiti.

The massacres that he’s describing are really the product, principally, of an outfit called the RNDDH, the Haitian Network for the Defense of Human Rights in Haiti, headed by a guy called Pierre Espérance, who also issued fallacious reports against the Aristide government after the 2004 coup d’état. He has basically waged some kind of holy war against Jimmy Cherizier, who, according to Cherizier, he asked to bump off, to rub out a rival human rights group head.

So, Jimmy Cherizier was a stellar policeman who was basically radicalized by his betrayal by the Haitian police leadership, who hung him out to dry after an operation went badly in Grande Ravine in 2017. And he was dealing with some of the leading lights of the opposition — Reginald Boulos, previously mentioned, a guy called Youri Latortue, who is also an alleged former death squad leader and was called “the poster-boy for political corruption” by the U.S. Embassy itself in the WikiLeaks cables that we released a decade ago. So he soured on them, too, and he saw that both the government of Jovenel Moïse and the opposition, the bourgeois opposition, with which Dahoud is aligned, were rotten. And he said, “We need a revolution, because the people need schools. They need clinics. They need sanitation.”

He took me around the neighborhoods of Delmas 4, Delmas 2, Delmas 6, where he grew up. He’s a street — the son of a poor street vendor. And he showed me how people had to do their toilet in a plastic bag and throw it in a canal. And he said, you know, “People can’t live like this.” So he has been calling for a revolution against the system in Haiti and is being radicalized really by the day and by these events.

So, the portrayal of him in the mainstream press, you know, by the AP, The Washington Post, is he’s this gang leader. He’s the bogeyman. But the reality is, on the ground, that this is an uprising really of Haiti’s lumpenproletariat, which has been crushed over the past decades. And Jovenel Moïse was no different than Martelly. And the people, the masses in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, now some 3 million, 4 million people, have had enough and are rising up.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dahoud, your response on the issue of Kim saying that you are representing more of the bourgeois opposition?

DAHOUD ANDRE: Kim Ives is a joke, and it’s sad that your program is giving him this platform to, again, push this garbage that Jimmy Cherizier, who — and this is not the RNDDH who’s saying that Cherizier, that Barbecue, is an assassin, a criminal, like someone who is responsible for all of these massacres, and despite the denunciations of the people of La Saline, of all of these poor neighborhoods in Bel Air, who themselves they say that it is Jimmy Cherizier. This is RNDDH. This is Fondasyon Je Klere. This is the CARDH and the people in the streets and any radio station in the country that you turn on. And people who are massacred are speaking directly about who they saw came with guns, with gasoline and fire to burn down their homes.

So, now to say that Dahoud Andre is aligned with the bourgeoisie opposition, [laughs]. There is a former ally of Kim Ives and his newspaper, Haiti Liberté, that he owns. But Kim is a white man, an American. And so, he cannot come to this program or anywhere else and say that he is the owner, the puppet master of this newspaper, so he’s pretending that he is just — but I’m sure that Amy Goodman, Juan González and everyone else who knows about this newspaper knows who owns this newspaper and knows that this is just another wannabe white savior for the people.

And it’s beautiful, the song that you started this segment with, Amy, because this is a song called “Ki Sa Pou-N Fe?” “What Is to Be Done?” as you said. And the song, if you continued to play it, it would say it’s a revolution. And who’s going to make this revolution? The Haitian people. It is not our neighbors. It is not wannabe white saviors, like Kim Ives, who are going to liberate the Haitian people.

I want to speak a little bit about, like, this thing, the Jovenel Moïse. This is what this is about. And I should say, if I knew that I was going to be put in this program together with Kim Ives, I wouldn’t even come on. And you should go to Haiti. You’ve been to Haiti, Amy, Juan. And go speak to someone like Oxygène David, who worked for years with Kim Ives. Go speak to Mario Joseph, who was close collaborator of Kim Ives, who are both denouncing him and his newspaper in Haiti for pushing this garbage that a scum like Jimmy Cherizier, who are — he is not going to Pétion-Ville, to Thomassin, to kill the rich people, to steal from them. The people he has massacred for the government. And this is why for three years the Jovenel government has never executed their warrants against Cherizier, because he is in their pocket. He is someone who’s working for them. And find his previous messages on social media, where he has, this same Jimmy Cherizier, an American flag behind his back to show the world who he stands with. And now that he has some little trouble with his people —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dahoud, Dahoud, if we can — Dahoud, if we can, we have only a couple of more minutes —

DAHOUD ANDRE: — he’s pretending that he’s leading revolution. Yeah, the —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dahoud, we have only a couple more minutes to go. I wanted to get —

DAHOUD ANDRE: OK.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to get Kim Ives in for — to respond, briefly, Kim. And also, if you could mention, talk about how the Biden administration has been dealing with Haiti since it’s come into office?

KIM IVES: Yes. Well, just to finish with Dahoud, he’s had a longtime bugaboo with Haiti Liberté. I imagined he might explode on the show if coupled with me. His belief that I’m the owner of Haiti Liberté is as unfounded as his rumors that he’s saying about the G9 and Jimmy Cherizier or my relationship with Oxygène David and Mario Joseph, who I have only recently spoken to, as well. So, this is, you know, just typical.

But as for the Biden administration, the administration has, according to my sources in Haiti, been totally supporting Jovenel up until now. But Helen La Lime, who heads the BINUH, which is the U.N. office in Haiti, has been very much on the fence, really, about whether to go over to the bourgeois opposition and use them for a transition. Well, obviously, that probably is going to happen now, because the president no longer is living. But so, the Biden administration has been having this slightly contradictory sort of message, where on the one hand they say, you know, “We’re going to support Jovenel, and he can be in office until February 7th, 2022,” but at the same time they’re saying, “We’re alarmed by authoritarianism and the decrees that he’s passing.”

So, right now we’ll see which way they go. Will they move over to the opposition, which basically is headed by this fellow Youri Latortue, who we have done WikiLeaks articles on, on Haiti Liberté — people can check those out — a decade ago? And I expect that, you know, they may try to find some sort of compromise candidate, somebody with a slight Lavalas color, a slight progressive color, to be the figurehead of this transitional government. But I don’t think they’ll be able to go forward with the remnants of the crew that Jovenel had working with him now. They just appointed a new prime minister on Monday, a guy called Dr. Ariel Henry, who is an old, basically, collaborator of the U.S. in Haiti. He sat on the Council of the Wise, which facilitated the transfer to the de facto government after the coup d’état against Aristide on February 29th, 2004. And so, he was basically named on Monday, but I see that it’s Claude Joseph, the interim prime minister, who is doing all the talking after this assassination of Jovenel.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there. And, of course, these are just the first few hours after the assassination of the Haitian president, and we will continue to cover what develops since, from this time. Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberté, and Dahoud Andre, longtime Haitian community activist and member of the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti.

Next up, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has rejected the tenure offer from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill after major controversy. She’s joining the faculty of Howard University, after a prominent right-wing donor at UNC opposed giving her tenure. Stay with us.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Policing in US Was Built on Racism & Should Be Put on Tr

Postby admin » Mon Aug 09, 2021 11:09 pm

“The Second Amendment Is Not Intended for Black People”: Tracing the racist history of gun governance.
by Dahlia Lithwick
Slate
AUG 03, 2021 2:27 PM

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


On a recent episode of Slate’s legal podcast Amicus, host Dahlia Lithwick spoke with historian Carol Anderson, professor and chair of African American studies at Emory University, about her new book, The Second. Anderson’s work explores how the Constitution’s Second Amendment was not only crafted to suppress Black Americans, but was continually enforced throughout the centuries in a racist manner, leading to everything from the terrorizing of Reconstruction-era Black Americans to the police killings of even legally armed Black people today. A portion of the conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, has been transcribed below.

Dahlia Lithwick: I wonder if you could start by talking about what led you to this exploration of the connection between slavery, the founding, and guns.

Carol Anderson: It began in 2016 with the killing of Philando Castile. In Minnesota, you have a Black man who was pulled over by the police. The officer asked to see his ID. Castile, following NRA guidelines, alerts the officer that he has a license to carry a weapon with him but he says he’s reaching for his ID. The police officer begins shooting and kills Philando Castile. We see the film of it. It is horrific.

We have a Black man killed simply for having a gun—not for brandishing it, not for threatening anyone, simply for having a license to carry a gun. The National Rifle Association, that protector of the Second Amendment, goes virtually silent. And I thought, how is the NRA silent on this, particularly when it was calling federal law enforcement jackbooted government thugs at Ruby Ridge and at Waco? On this, they’re like virtually silent. Journalists began asking, “Well, don’t African Americans have Second Amendment rights?” And I thought to myself, that’s a great question, and that’s what led me on to this hunt.

In the epilogue to your book, you put in Trevor Noah’s quote from when he looks at a whole host of incidents in which police officers talk down a white man with a gun: They persuade him to disarm and they arrest him. Noah makes the argument that “the Second Amendment is not intended for Black people.” I think the argument is saying that the Second Amendment is in fact working exactly the way it was intended to work with respect to Black folks, and that is as a tool of persistence, subordination, and destruction. I just want to be super clear that you’re not saying the Second Amendment is broken, that it was conceived to do a thing that it doesn’t do. You’re saying the Second Amendment does precisely the thing it was crafted to do.

Exactly. You nailed it.

Going right back to the Colonial era, how much were guns and gun ownership really at the heart of the plantation owners who were attempting to keep control over situations in which they were simply outnumbered?

Guns were central to that, as the militia was central to that. There was this massive fear of slave uprisings and revolts, of Black people fighting for their freedom and willing to do whatever it took to be free. With each rumored uprising, you see the rise of a legal infrastructure in terms of laws banning the enslaved from gun possession, as well as the rise of slave patrols and the militia in order to curtail and control Black people.

The slave patrol was a smaller unit that did the kind of regular routine, going through the slave cabins, looking for contraband, looking for weapons, looking for books, looking for anything that sparked of somebody believing they could be free. The militia was there to backstop the slave patrols so that, if the uprising was too large, more than the slave patrol could handle, the militia could come in.

The numbers that you lay out show that 50 percent of all wealth holders in the 13 Colonies in 1774 owned guns. That number soared if you were looking just at the South: 81 percent of slave-owning states had firearms, and plantations with the largest numbers of enslaved people were 4.3 times more likely to have guns than those with few or no slaves. At the point of the birth of the Second Amendment, already it was absolutely clear that guns were in some sense as essential to continuing slaveholding way of life as were the crops themselves. Guns were just that braided into it.

"With each rumored uprising, you see the rise of laws banning the enslaved from gun possession, as well as the rise of slave patrols and the militia in order to curtail and control Black people."

— Carol Anderson


Absolutely braided into it. You see it, for instance, in the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina. In Stono, you had a group of Black men who were laborers building a road day after day after day, and they began figuring out what the routine and rotation of the guards were. They began figuring out where the weapons were kept. On a Sunday, they struck and killed two of the guards who were manning the arms, and they took those and began this quest toward Spanish Florida, because Florida had no slavery, and they wanted to be free.

They demonstrated that they were willing to kill or be killed in the process of getting free. On that Sunday morning, Stono’s white folks were in church and the alarm bell rang. They grabbed their guns as part of their work as the militia and went after these rebellious folk, hunting them down to kill them, to make an example of them. White men having guns was the expectation by law. Black folks being banned from having access to guns was the expectation by law.

After Stono, you have the 1740 Negro Act. That Negro Act defined the African-descended people as slaves, absolute slaves, for those here and those not yet born. It defined what they could do and what they could not do. They could not be literate. They could not have access to guns, and they could not walk about freely. They had to be subjugated, controlled by whites.

I want to talk for a minute about what you describe as a three-part move for subjugating slaves from Colonial time on into the framing of the Second Amendment and the way we talk about Second Amendment rights. You’ve talked a about the militias denying the enslaved the right to have arms and then of the right of self-defense. And that, I think, is what you would say filters into the way we still frame these questions today.

Absolutely. One of the things I’m tracking historically is how this plays out over time and whether the legal status of black people changes that dynamic. As we move from enslaved to denizen—which was that in-between space between a slave and citizen—to emancipated and freed people to Jim Crow to post–civil rights African Americans, does that change? The answer is no. You don’t see any significant change in the ways that access to weapons, and the surveilling, and the right to self-defense, plays out for Black people in the United States. It was Virginia that actually developed that three-pronged mechanism of control, and we see how well that has worked over time. When I looked at the individual right to bear arms, when I looked at the right to a well-regulated militia, and when I looked at the right to self-defense all over time, I’m seeing that those do not apply to Black Americans—in fact, each of those have been used against African Americans because it is the quality of anti-Blackness, to define African Americans as a threat, as dangerous, as criminal, as people who need to be subjugated and controlled.

Even if you are unarmed, you’re still a threat. How many times have we in this current day heard of a Black person being gunned down simply because they had a cellphone and somebody felt threatened because they thought it was a gun? Or seeing a Black person like Jonathan Ferrell in North Carolina, who had been in a car accident and was happy to see the police because he thought help was on the way, and the police gunned him down? They said, We were afraid. He was dangerous. He was threatening. We see that somebody like Philando Castile—who has a licensed gun—is a threat and he’s gunned down. It doesn’t matter whether you have a gun or you don’t. Your Blackness is the threat, and it is the default threat in this society. This is also why “stand your ground” laws have such a strong racial bias, because it says wherever you have a right to be. So if I’m at the grocery store, if I’m in a parking lot, if I’m in a park, and I perceive a threat, I have the right to use lethal force. Well, when Black is the default threat in American society, that perception of threat puts the crosshairs on Black people. When you look at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission Report on “stand your ground,” we see that for white people who kill Black people using “stand your ground,” they are 10 times more likely to walk with justifiable homicide than are Black people who kill white people. We also see that white people who kill Black people under “stand your ground” are 281 percent more likely to walk than white people who kill white people. Because when Black Americans are the victims in these killings, it becomes much more justifiable because of the default threat.

There was this essential moment at the Constitutional Convention: You’ve got 25 of the 55 delegates who are slave owners, including George Washington, and the Second Amendment is a grand bargain. It was not in and of itself this lodestar of freedom. It was a deal. I wonder if you can walk us through what that deal was and why the question of what they were going to do about slavery baked into the very framing of the Second Amendment?

At the Ratification Convention in Virginia, the Constitution has been drafted, ratification is happening, and then it stalls. Virginia is one of the big holdouts. James Madison runs down back home to Virginia to try to push this thing through. He runs up against Patrick Henry and George Mason, who are apoplectic because Madison has put control of the militia in the federal Constitution, under federal control. They’re like, You know the North detests slavery. If we have a slave revolt, how can we count on them to get the militia to come down here and protect us, to put the slave revolt down? We will be left defenseless. Madison is quaking in his boots because his arguments aren’t working. He’s already like, Look, slavery is protected. You already got the three-fifths clause. You already got 20 extra years on the Atlantic Slave Trade. You already got the Fugitive Slave Clause. But what they wanted was a bill of rights that would protect them. And they said, If we don’t get it, we’re going to push for a new Constitutional Convention. What Madison was afraid of was that this would hurl the U.S. back to the unworkable Articles of Confederation. He runs to that first Congress, and he was obsessed with drafting these amendments.

When you think about it, in these amendments, you get freedom of the press, freedom of speech, the right not to be illegally searched and seized, the right to a speedy and fair trial, the right not to have cruel and unusual punishment—and then you have the right to a well-regulated militia for the security of the state? This thing is such an outlier in this Bill of Rights. And this outlier is because this is the bribe to Patrick Henry, to George Mason, to the Southern slaveholders: This is how you contain federal control, by making sure that the states have control of the militia and so they will not be left vulnerable to “the abolitionist whims,” as Patrick Henry saw it, of those in Pennsylvania or Massachusetts. Now the control of the militia will be in the hands of the enslavers.

I think one of the things you’re saying is that the more widespread white people’s ability to arm oneself to the teeth became, the more unarmed Black people who cannot have arms were put in these untenable lose-lose situations.

Absolutely, you see the asymmetry in access to firepower. There was an 1841 riot in Cincinnati, where white people were coming to basically burn down and kill the Black community. They were moving toward the neighborhood, but Black folks had guns and they shot back. The rioters were just like, “What just happened here? They have the audacity to shoot at us simply because we were trying to kill them?”

They came back with a cannon, the vintage mass murder machine. Then the police finally move in, but what they is they disarm the Black community, thinking that disarming Black folks will calm white folks down, that the rioters will now be pleased that Black people don’t have their guns. Instead, the slaughter happened, because it was so clear that the police were on white people’s side, and that there would be no consequences for their killings of Black people.

We see that asymmetry again happening after the Civil War: in Colfax, Louisiana, where there is an election and white supremacists because Republicans won. These Democrats—who are the white supremacist party at the time—then were going to attack the seat of democracy in Colfax, Louisiana, and oust those who won the election. The Black militia was called upon to protect this bastion of democracy, but they were outgunned. They didn’t have enough ammunition, and they were overwhelmed by the number of white fighters. It was a slaughter. About a hundred Black people were killed, many of them after they had surrendered, because white attackers had set the courthouse on fire where the Black militia had taken up to protect themselves.

This case goes all the way up to the Supreme Court as a look at the constitutionality of the Third Enforcement Act, which was the act to deal with the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. The court ruled that that piece of legislation only applied to state action, not to private action. Basically, the slaughter—that domestic terrorism by these private groups—was fine. And then we had the Hamburg massacre shortly thereafter, which again showed the disparity, the asymmetry, in access to weaponry. President Ulysses S. Grant was beside himself. He said, “What these states all have in common is not Christianity, is not civilization. It is the right to kill Negroes.” I remembered thinking, “Wow!”
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36125
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Previous

Return to Slavery 2.0: Racist Cops and the Prison Industrial Complex

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

cron