White Supremacy On Display

One Caribbean Nation.

White supremacy on display

Mohammed Iqbal Degia

IN RECENT WEEKS, the spectacle of heavily armed white supremacists walking the streets of America unimpeded has been broadcast worldwide. They are “protesting” the COVID-19 lockdowns. Several even stormed the Michigan capitol building.

Nowadays, the menacing sight of people of this ilk parading is common.

It would be erroneous, however, to believe white supremacy emerged with President Donald Trump. He has merely emboldened some to express more openly and loudly the fascism they had quietened to an extent after the civil rights movement.

White supremacy has been entrenched in the United States since the first invaders landed from Europe and embarked on their colonial project. A centuries-old order does not simply shed its core.

Thus, white supremacy continues to exhibit itself in the post-civil rights era in various structurally embedded forms.

An example of this is in the law enforcement and justice systems. Countless studies demonstrate how black people and other minorities are arrested wrongfully, convicted unjustly and given disproportionately harsher sentences than white people. Black people also receive the death penalty in far greater numbers and worse, many of them are not guilty of any crime.

Technology and social media now enable police brutality against black people to be captured on video and disseminated. The constant stream documenting unprovoked beatings and murder of innocent, unarmed black children, women and men by police disproves the utterings of officials who claim these are isolated incidences rather than the rule. In most, if not all of these cases, there are cover-ups, refusals to charge the guilty or acquittals in the rare instance of prosecution.

Terror attacks

Juxtapose this with how white supremacists are treated by the government and mainstream media. The media never refers to them as terrorists despite the fact that white supremacists commit the majority of terror attacks in the United States. These terrorists are portrayed as nuanced individuals in media coverage and photos are always pleasant and convey humanity. Police manage to capture and arrest them without harm but innocent black people suffer the opposite fate.

Furthermore, the media digs deep into the past of black people to find any material to smear them.

The tiniest of unrelated infractions are stressed to suggest they deserved their fate. Imagine a group of black people appearing at a state capitol building armed like a military platoon and proceeding to push and shout at police. There would be carnage if they were even allowed to reach the area. Yet, white militias, outfitted as if entering combat, are depicted as ordinary protestors and remain unharmed despite inciting the police. Conversely, peaceful, unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters are met with tear gas, assaulted, killed and labelled violent miscreants.

This brings me to 35 years ago and the date May 13, 1985, when Philadelphia State Police dropped a bomb on a home in a black neighbourhood. The house was occupied by a black liberation group called MOVE which had previous confrontations with the police. On this day, they refused to follow orders to exit the premise. A shot was fired from the compound and police, aware that the occupants included six children, bombarded it with hundreds of rounds of heavy fire. Then the mayor granted permission to bomb the house. The ensuing blaze spread but the police commissioner ordered firefighters to stand down. Sixty-one homes were razed and 250 people became homeless. Six adults and five children burnt to death while two survived. None of those responsible for this reprehensible act faced consequences.

On May 13 last week, police in Kentucky barged into the apartment of Breonna Taylor and offloaded a barrage of gunfire. She was shot eight times and her home resembled a war zone. Police had attacked the wrong location. A headline in the magazine The Nation was apt – “Breonna Taylor was murdered for sleeping while black”.

Mohammed Iqbal Degia is a former Barbadian diplomat navigating life after the Foreign Service.

(From The Nation Newspaper 5/19/2020)