By Simone C. Drake | @SimoneCDrake | With thanks to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Friday, June 12, 2015.
On June 5, 2015, the Honorable
Minister Louis Farrakhan did an interview with New York’s 105.1 The Breakfast
Club radio program that was an hour and a half long black public service
announcement. Compared to his heyday in the late decades of the twentieth
century, Farrakhan has been relatively invisible lately, an invisibility he
attributes to mainstream media censorship.
The Black Lives Matter movement, however, along
with the upcoming twenty-year anniversary of the Million Man March, has
compelled Farrakhan to return to more frequent public instructions for black
people and the damnation of white supremacy. His messages have been calls for
social and cultural reparations. In January he called for black military
personnel to divest from military service and fight racial inequalities right
here in the United States. In his most recent commentary, drawing comparisons
to Palestinian resistance, he proposed that peaceful protests cannot produce
change for people who are already socially dead.
His speech was an ominous prelude to a doubly
tragic weekend for the nation. That same evening a pool party in McKinney,
Texas would turn into a scene straight out of the heyday of Jim Crow when black
children are forced to leave a community pool and a 14-year-old bikini-clad black girl is thrown to the ground and pinned
by a white police officer. The next day, in New York City, Kalief Browder, who as a teenager was held on
Rikers Island for three years without being convicted of a crime and during
that time was subjected to severe abuse by authorities and inmates, would
commit suicide.
The violation of civil liberties—most notably a
complete disregard for freedom of speech in Texas and an appallingly
undemocratic criminal justice system in New York—received immediate media
attention and public outcry.
In Texas, over seven minutes of the mayhem was
caught on video. From the opening of the clip with blurred images of teenagers
standing on sidewalks and in streets, and an officer running, assumedly
tripping, and then MMA style rolling and jumping up to continue pursuit, I knew
something was amiss. What ensued was a shameful display of the abuse of police
power, and if not bad enough, the abuse was being committed by a supervisor,
judging by the stripes on his uniform.
The young girl who was the subject of the violence
caught on camera (who knows what happened off camera) will perhaps force
mainstream media to gender the Black Lives Matter movement in ways aligned with
the African American
Policy Forum’s efforts to compel policymakers to bring black women
and girls into dialogues on racial injustice and violence.
There is, however, culpability beyond that of the
offending officer. As the teenagers stood around (or were forced to sit and lay
on the ground), some seemingly confused while others indignantly expressed
their contempt for the treatment, the camera periodically captured white
(assumed) residents of the community.
Caddy-corner to the altercation, there was a group of white men and
women watching the policing, almost like they were attending a lynching-bee. No
one thought to question why the children were being treated as dangerous
criminals. As the tensions escalated, several white men appeared, apparently
acting as George Zimmerman-style “community watchmen.” Once the officer forces
the girl to the ground by her neck and black teenage boys and girls rush toward
them, a large white man stands between the two groups, keeping the teenagers
from intervening.
It was clear that neither he nor the other white
man were attempting to protect the girl or the teenagers from police violence
being inflicted upon them, too—they were acting as perpetrators of white
supremacy and heralding the abuse of police power upon black bodies. This
troubling scenario of dual culpability—officer and civilian—was further
evidenced by the officer’s persistent profane demands that the black teenagers
disperse, while he never once told the white men to stop interfering in police
business. His tacit acceptance of their presence, and their tacit complicity in
the violence (and inciting of a riot, ultimately, by those who called the
police) brings Farrakhan’s commentary full circle.
Farrakhan was and remains a controversial political
figure; one who has repeatedly been subjected to often times unbelievable
misconstruing of his words. The fact that young people are finding his words
and ideas relevant today perhaps suggests why certain unnamed race leaders have
sustained popularity in the mainstream public sphere and Farrakhan has not. His
promise of a fearless, non-passive revolution just prior to the tragedies in
Texas and New York this past weekend should rightfully have the media and
authorities concerned.
When both State authorities (police officers) and
civilians have the right to police black bodies, stripping those bodies of
rights and dignity, people being subjected to the hypocrisy of U.S. democracy
just might fight back as they did in Baltimore. And such a response would not
be unprecedented—perhaps Texas has forgotten the Houston Riots of 1917, but
when one history repeats itself so can another.
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Simone C. Drake is Associate Professor of
African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. She is
the author of Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the
Construction of Transnational Identity (LSU
Press) and her second book, When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making
will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press.