MODERN DAY SLAVE CODES
Recent online videos haveshown African Americans being arrested, sometimes violently, in places like Starbucks and Waffle House, but also while barbecuing in a gated community or sleeping in the common area of an Ivy League university dorm, after having had the police called on them by a white people. These aggressively racist incidents made the headlines briefly and but have all but dissipated from public discussion.
The Starbucks incident only lingered, arguably, because the Black men arrested were not brutalized, but perhaps more importantly, because the Black men at the center of the incidents didn’t portray anger toward the police, the company or the system that allowed the police to arrest them for sitting in a restaurant. In fact, their statement that it wasn’t just a black thing, turned a clear incident of racial hostility on the part of the Starbucks employee and on the police into a feel good story for Starbucks, the city and America. It became part of the lame, useless “conversation on race” Americans like to exhalt, none of which leads to anything concrete from the masses of Black people.
In each of the incidents, none of the police personnel were fired or disciplined and in fact, at least initially in the Starbucks case, the cops were supported by their Black supervisors. What these incidents show is that Black people are never free from white hostility or police violence and it also shows that, despite the enactment of Title II, the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Black people still occupy a separate and unequal status in public places, …...which (the police still are a necessary instrument in the maintenance of (this) unjust system... to continue this informal version of Black Codes, which were laws enacted after the Civil War that regulated Black life in ways such as preventing African Americans from testifying against whites in court, denying the right to own and bear arms, and mandating employment contracts with the former enslavers. The beating of the young sister at Waffle House reminds one of Jim Crow lynch laws, where Blacks could be killed based on nothing more than the accusation of a white person, typically a white woman.
(See)Despite the nonsense of a post-racial America that was kicked around at the election of Barak Obama, our supposed right to equal citizenship with whites is not yet fulfilled and, frankly, may never be.
We must remember that John Crawford was shot dead by the police in the public space of a Wal-Mart. Tamir Rice, a child, was murdered by the police in a public park, paid for by the citizens which included his mother. Trayvon Martin was killed in a gated community that his parents paid to live in. And, all across America, black people are killed by law enforcement whose salaries they pay, with bullets they paid for. The reality is that African Americans continue to occupy this space of contingent citizenship where our ability to exercise our supposed rights on the same level as whites is conditioned upon our willingness to act a certain way, our income, or whether white people call the authorities on us, which frequently leads to the police exacting the price of our life, liberty and/or health or dignity, from us based solely on the word of someone white.
This is a modern day version of a white woman claiming rape against a black man in the south with no evidence. These incidents often resulted in death (Emmit Till, a child accused of simply whistling at a white woman) or even in the destruction of whole Black communities, as in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Instead of being told to get off the sidewalk when a white person approaches, with the penalty being vigilante justice, now the domestic militia (which is what the police look and act like) is called on us if we, while in public spaces, dare to refuse to order coffee, have the temerity to ask for proper utensils, or to be tired enough to sleep in the common areas of universities we pay to attend. This neo-Jim Crow will take more than a Starbucks training day, or conversation on race, to defeat it. (Source:Attorney Bryan K. Bullock)
(bobbeethehater.blogspot.com) (edited by eric d.graham)
(bobbeethehater.blogspot.com) (edited by eric d.graham)
