by B. R. GOWANI
On Wednesday, after the announcement that NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo would not be indicted for killing Eric Garner, the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund Twitter posted a series of tweets naming 76 men and women who were killed in police custody since the 1999 death of Amadou Diallo in New York. Starting with the most recent death, what follows are more detailed accounts of many of those included in the Legal Defense Fund’s tweets. PHOTO/Gawker
http://youtu.be/DF25CN6CAfY
on the one hand
the whites were stealing the Native Americans’ lands
on the other hand
they were bringing black slaves to work on fields and homes
slavery ended
racism didn’t
then came segregation and lynching
not long after
Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff Haldeman:
“[T]he whole problem is really the blacks.
The key is to devise a system
that recognizes this while not appearing to.”
followed by Reagan’s
“war on drugs”
which in fact was/is
war on blacks
and it still is on
blacks are killed by police
but they go scot free
no punishment, or perhaps
a slap on the wrist
Tamara Rice, a 12 year old boy
playing with a toy gun is shot dead
change the age
change the name
somewhere else
another black is shot dead
nothing happens
nothing changes
black is the President
black is the Attorney General
they have some power
but no guts
and so can’t dare to change the system
white is the ruling system
white is the violent power
white is the news media
they have all the power
they have all the guts
and so the racist system continues
black president doesn’t mean racism ended
it just means the white system has chosen
a black face to represent it
a black face that knows how to operate
within the white established framework
while maintaining the façade of democracy
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com