=By= Alexander Billet
Editor's Note
Of the several insightful points brought up by Billet in this essay,the most important (in my opinion) is the defining of social space. One of the key components to institutionalized racism in the United States is the legal enforcement of social space. The U.S. has used a variety of mechanisms both private and public to physically (and with that psychologically) constrain people of color to specific
physical and
social spaces. Red lining, neighborhood coalitions, and segregated services were once common ways of controlling and enforcing WHITE space. The laws and practices then and now are maintaining the space of the
privileged by the harsh, and sometimes, deadly examples of what happens to those unprivileged who dare to "trespass" in white space. Henry A. Giroux has done an excellent job discussing the concept of social space as it relates to dispossession, and the
enforcement,
disposability, and
erasure.
Baton Rouge locals referred to Alton Sterling as “CD man,” a figure who can likely be found in virtually any American city. This, in the eyes of a police officer trained to find anything a black man does suspicious, was as good an excuse as any.
Sterling’s death undeniably echoes Eric Garner’s — strangled to death after being stopped by a cop for selling loose cigarettes — and Jordan Davis’s — gunned down by Michael Dunn after he and his friends wouldn’t turn down what Dunn referred to as “that rap crap.” What, in the name of all that is decent and rational and minimally human, could be so threatening about selling or listening to something?
The answer cannot be found in what was being done, but in how a racist society reacts when certain people do it. Those tasked with “keeping the peace” and “maintaining order” aren’t just somehow more susceptible to this — it’s their job to keep this imbalance in place.
We should be clear that Sterling was not killed because he was selling CDs or because he had a gun. The manner of his death came instead because of where he lived: in a country built and maintained by racism. His death — like Philando Castile’s, like too many others’ before either of them — encapsulates the result of a collision between this kind of racism, the slow strangulation of public space, and the chipping away of the right to a democratic culture. They are inextricably linked.
The rules dictating who gets to use public space, when they get to use it, and for what purpose springs organically from persistent structural racism. Jim Crow’s “whites only” signs may have been taken down, but our geography has been privatized and reshaped to help keep these types of restrictions roughly in effect.
Examples range from the subtle to the brazen to the shameless. City squares are designed to encourage visitors to rush through them rather than linger. Public parks, funded by the people’s taxes, become not-so-public when certain gatherings take place in them, as former Occupiers remember well. Benches and concrete slabs are transformed by “defensive architecture” to prevent those experiencing homelessness from lying down.
This also limits arts and culture. Busking and sidewalk performance have been heavily restricted in most big cities, requiring performers to purchase expensive permits for the privilege of presenting their craft. Graffiti laws arbitrarily and undemocratically decide what’s art and what’s vandalism. (Israel Hernandez’s death poignantly illustrates the consequences of this kind of line in the sand.)
While Sterling wasn’t a cultural producer, he was engaged in the cultural industry. Street CD salespeople sell both legitimate and bootleg music. Often, if they’re serious collectors themselves — as many of them are — they’ll have rarities or mixes long out of print that you can’t find anywhere else. Those who frequented Sterling’s table recall that if he didn’t have a specific release one week, they would come back the next and discover he had gone out of his way to find it.
CD men and women engage in commodity exchange, of course. But on a basic level, even though (and in some ways because) they exist outside the music industry’s “official” avenues of commerce, they keep alive the notion that the city is a site for the exchange of ideas and culture. They are also — like graffiti artists, street performers, and homeless individuals — subject to hassling and harassment by police in the revanchist city.
But there is a darker and more tragic side to these city mainstays: many of them are excluded from the so-called straight economy because of their contact with the criminal-justice system. Sterling had a record, and the New Jim Crow ensures that convicted felons and ex-cons have a much harder time finding “legitimate” employment after they are released.
The informal economy, in its semi-legal status, is often the only thing preventing people like Sterling from participating in the illegal economy and risking going back inside. How many of those hawking CDs or DVDs or used books do so not because they love it but because they have no other choice?
All of this leads to an unsettling conclusion: black Americans’ equal economic and cultural participation isn’t only frowned upon, but outright threatening to a large swath of the country, particularly if people of color set the terms of their participation. Further, the estrangement of the urban commons from working people — the denial of the right to the city — depends on racism to endure.
It is stunning to think that eight years after America’s first black president was elected, hip-hop clothing and music still make many Americans nervous. Even as Janelle Monae and Kendrick Lamar entertain the Obamas on the Fourth of July, their music’s politics seem to point to a contradiction they themselves cannot resolve.
After Davis was murdered, proud gun owner Dunn dismissed blame of the “Stand Your Ground” laws and instead pointed the finger at “the violence and lifestyle that the ‘Gangsta Rap’ music and the ‘thug life’ promote.” Dallas police underhandedly pointed to Micah Johnson’s so-called connection to Public Enemy’s Professor Griff. City politicians seriously entertain legislating the sagginess of someone’s pants. It is little wonder why, in the dialectical interplay between culture and society, African-American subcultures have so frequently become a style of opposition.
This is nothing new. The 1940s zoot suits — entwined as they were in big band and bebop — represented both one of the first cultural manifestations of the changing cosmopolitan experience after the Great Migration and a threat to the American way of life. Robin D.G. Kelley illustrates this while painting the backdrop of Malcolm X’s time as a zoot:
While the suit itself was not meant as a direct political statement, the social context in which it was created and worn rendered it so. The language and culture of zoot suiters represented a subversive refusal to be subservient. Young black males created a fast-paced, improvisational language which sharply contrasted with the passive stereotype of the stuttering, tongue-tied Sambo: in a world where whites commonly addressed them as “boy,” zoot suiters made a fetish of calling each other “man.”
How zoot-suit culture directly opposed perceptions of black Americans helps explain why the Black Lives Matter movement — and many contemporary movements for that matter — have focused on the seizure of public space. These actions bring racialized usage to its unavoidable head in hopes of uprooting it.
When protesters block highways, they draw attention to how urban infrastructure aids in modern segregation. The wave of graffiti that swept across Confederate memorials last summer highlights the persistence of legal racism. Both make clear that black human beings have less claim to public space, less permission to participate in the cultural commons. And they’ve also made it clear that although African Americans’ second-class citizenship is now often harder to identify, it is no more acceptable today than it was fifty or a hundred years ago.
What is at stake in Alton Sterling’s death isn’t just the right to distribute music unmolested — though that is worth fighting for. What’s at stake is the right to the city, and the radical idea that space and culture should belong to those who actually produce them.
Source: Jacobin.
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Editor's Note
What have we let ourselves be chivied into that people living in a "free and democratic" nation can allow people to be pulled aside as possible "terrorists" for reading a book? Is it time to demand that the British (and all other "western" governments and their allies) provide for us their lists of FORBIDDEN reading. Should we not know when we look at or purchase a particular book that it is going to place us on some kind of watch list or worse? What are the words we are supposed not to speak, the websites we are not to visit, the people we are not to associate with, the pictures we should not look at - or even worse take ourselves, or have other take pictures of us in certain places?
When these types of events happen, it should send a chill down the back of every citizen (and visitor), for the very foundation of a free and open society has just been taken from us. - rw
“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.” (“George Orwell” – Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950.)
The UK it seems, has joined the US in it’s authorities and government developing a collective form of acute paranoia. A mildly deviant act by any petty criminal or a soul with mental health problems is immediately labeled a potential terrorist act before investigations have even begun.
“We are fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” was the George W. Bush mantra. Anyone with half a brain was commenting after Afghanistan and Iraq that no American or British citizen would be safe anywhere on earth after the devastation their countries had wrought on nations which posed them not the slightest threat – mass murders, some would say genocides, based on illegalities and lies.
Not only have the actions of governments given rise to retaliation in the West, but governments’ own paranoia are threatening their own citizens.
For example in the UK, on 25th July, a situation arose which Orwell surely could not have devised in his gloomiest forbodings.
Faizah Shaheen, a psychotherapist working in the National Health Service in the UK’s northern city of Leeds, returning from her honeymoon in Turkey was apprehended and interrogated by police officers at Doncaster airport, under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, which provides for police detaining without grounds, on suspicion of involvement in criminal activities, including terrorism.
Her crime? Reading a book.
The book in question is “Syria Speaks – Art and Culture from the Frontline” (1): “Syria Speaks is a celebration of a people determined to reclaim their dignity, freedom and self-expression. It showcases the work of over fifty artists and writers who are challenging the culture of violence in Syria. Their literature, poems and songs, cartoons, political posters and photographs document and interpret the momentous changes that have shifted the frame of reality so drastically in Syria.”
“Syria Speaks”, published 2014 by Saqi Books was: “supported by the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development; CKU, the Danish Centre for Culture and Development, English PEN Promotes!; Arts Council England, the Arab British Centre and Reel Festivals.”
Glowing reviews appeared in publications including the Times Literary Supplement, the Independent, Independent on Sunday and the New York Review of Books.
Ms Shaheen was, it seems reported to the security services for travelling whilst being a Muslim and reading a book with “Syria” on the cover, by a Thompson Airways member of staff, who had spotted her carrying the book on her outbound flight two weeks earlier.
Whilst Turkey has been a staging post for wannabe “moderate” head choppers travelling from the UK to Syria it is hardly likely even they would carry a book advertising the fact and anyone who would – especially such a book – simply interested in the culture of part of the “Cradle of Civilization.”
Ironically Shaheen’s work includes working with the young with mental health problems to prevent radicalization. She also has a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts. She said of the incident: “I do question if … it would be different if it was someone who wasn’t Muslim.” Quite.
Her treatment also begs another question, Syria has become the fourteenth majority Muslim country the US has bombed since 1980 – usually enjoined by the UK, so how have Muslims become the suspects and not the victims?
Glen Greenwald (2) writes: “Let’s tick them off: Iran (1980, 1987-1988), Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011), Lebanon (1983), Kuwait (1991), Iraq (1991-2011, 2014-), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007-), Bosnia (1995), Saudi Arabia (1991, 1996), Afghanistan (1998, 2001-), Sudan (1998), Kosovo (1999), Yemen (2000, 2002-) Pakistan (2004-) and now Syria. Whew.”
Zaher Omareen, co-author of Syria Speaks told the Guardian: “Judging individuals and even taking measures against them based on their race, their looks, their language, or the printed words they carry is unacceptable and unjustifiable. It was enough to carry a book which includes the word ‘Syria’ in its title for its owner to be under suspicion as a potential terrorist. I would like to remind the people and the government that Syria must not be reduced to the politicised and power-constructed soundbites carrying simplistic messages of violence and horror.” (3)
On Ms Shaheen’s Facebook page, a friend wrote of the reports of the incident: “I cannot believe what I’m reading.
“Faizah is one of the most respectable people I have ever met and a genuinely amazing person. She has supported many campaigns I’ve been on and stood beside me and my friends to challenge racism, Islamaphobia, hate, detention of children and so much more.
“She was in Turkey celebrating her honeymoon when the coup attempt happened and still tried her best to enjoy her first moments with her husband.
“Now to be subjected to this bullshit … Honestly, words now fail me.”
Faith Shaheen wrote: “The flight services need a better procedure as I am left in tears returning from my honeymoon. I will be making an official complaint as this is simply not acceptable!
“The book in question: ‘A wise, courageous, imaginative, and beautiful response to all that is ugly in human behaviour’ – The ugly human behaviour which I experienced today.” She is quoting multiple Award winning writer, A.L. Kennedy’s review of “Syria Speaks.” Kennedy concludes: “The people shown living, dreaming and speaking here are far more than victims and only silent if we refuse to hear them.”
It seems its is not not refusing to hear them that is the problem, but being allowed to hear them without being apprehended.
Will the thought police soon come banging on the door of anyone with a collection of books on the Middle East and majority Muslim countries, owning volumes of the haunting poems of Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Ali Ahmed Said and so many others? Or is it only Muslims who are targeted for their books and their liberty?
It was Ali Ahmed Said who wrote a requiem for the last century, “A Mirror for the Twentieth Century”:
A coffin bearing the face of a boy
A book
Written on the belly of a crow
A wild beast hidden in a flower
A rock
Breathing with the lungs of a lunatic:
This is it
This is the Twentieth Century.
It seems it is also the Twenty First Century.
It was George Orwell who wrote:
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
- http://www.saqibooks.co.uk/book/syria-speaks/
- https://theintercept.com/2014/11/06/many-countries-islamic-world-u-s-bombed-occupied-since-1980/
- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/04/british-woman-held-after-being-seen-reading-book-about-syria-on-plane
About the author
Paying the Price — Killing the Children of Iraq, which investigated the devastating effect of United Nations sanctions on people of Iraq.[1] Ms. Arbuthnot is a dedicated pacificist, and her work proves the adage that "the pen is mightier than the sword."
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PAUL JAY, TRNN EDITOR IN CHIEF
Retired police Neill Franklin and Michael Woods Jr. join new TRNN producer Kwame Rose and Paul Jay to discuss the recent killings of unarmed black men and police officers
Sherif Clarke: The voice of neo-collaborationist blacks, siding with the master. Packaged by the media and politicians of all stripes, as “the voice of reason.”
On Monday night at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the face of American policing as presented by the Republican Party was Sheriff David Clarke. He’s the sheriff of Milwaukee County. Here’s a little bit of what he had to say there.
DAVID CLARKE: What we witnessed in Ferguson and Baltimore and Baton Rouge was a collapse of the social order. So many of the actions of the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter transcends peaceful protest, and violates the code of conduct we rely on. I call it anarchy.
Also joining us from Baltimore is Neill Franklin. Neill’s the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, otherwise known as LEAP. He’s a 33-year-old police veteran who led multi-jurisdictional, anti-narcotics task forces for the Maryland state police, and ran training centers for the Baltimore police department and the Maryland state police.
And also in Baltimore joining us is Kwame Rose. Kwame has been an activist. He’s a defendant now in a First Amendment trial against the Baltimore sheriff department, and he’s just begun as a producer at the Real News Network. Thanks so much for joining us.
Now, Neill, let me start with you. First of all, before we get started, let me show you one more clip of David Clarke being interviewed on CNN. Let’s roll that.
CLARKE: That law enforcement officers treat black males different than white males in policing in these urban centers.
SPEAKER: There is data that supports it.
CLARKE: There is not data.
JAY: So, Neill, do you think that Sheriff Clarke is speaking for a broad section of police public opinion? And what do you make of the remark?
I don’t know, maybe I’ve been asleep over the past few decades or whatever, but I’ve never known policing in this country to be anything other than treating blacks different than white. And here’s my point. Historically in this country we’ve had a problem with policing and race. I mean, you only have to go back as far as the 1950s and ’60s, and internally in policing black people couldn’t even drive police cars. You know, you couldn’t even get jobs in some police departments. And it’s only been recent that we’ve been able to do that.
Internally in policing we still have a lot of racial issues and concerns, to where black embers of policing had to form their own organizations in order to feel like they were getting a fair shake, and in many cases had to sue police departments. If we’re having these problems internally in policing, I mean, how can he sit there and say we’re not having them in our communities, which we are? Blacks are arrested at higher rates, convicted at higher rates, and sentenced at higher rates than their white counterparts. And there’s plenty of data to indicate that.
And I’ll end my initial comment with this, Paul. One piece of data that needs to be collected and analyzed, which we haven’t done yet, at least not to my knowledge, is the times that plainclothes black police officers are either fired upon or mistreated–but I say mainly fired upon, and in many cases, unfortunately, killed by their counterparts. New York City has had this problem. We’ve had it here in Baltimore City. And when–and I can’t remember recently any cases involving white plainclothes officers who were killed by friendly fire. I know there are probably one or two out there. But when you compare that number to the number of black plainclothes police officers that are either fired upon, friendly fire by their counterparts compared to whites–I mean, it is a significant difference. And we need to collect that data and analyze that data. That way people cannot say that, well, it was criminal activity going on, or this person was doing this, that, and the other. It’s one of your counterparts. And I guarantee that data’s going to show something very important.
Even in the Nixon administration, John Ehrlichman spoke about this. John was one of Nixon’s closest aides, and when he got out of prison for Watergate he spoke about this, that it was a plan for the Nixon administration in dealing with the Vietnam War protesters and in dealing with the civil rights movement, to vilify them by using, for instance, the war on drugs. You can’t go after the protesters for the First Amendment rights, you can’t go after the civil rights folks for being black anymore. So we go after them for what they do, hence the war on drugs. And we’ll vilify them on late night TV. And that’s what we’ve done in this country, and that’s why we have some of the problems that we have.
And then to go on to say that the only people in this country that truly care about black lives are the police. It’s not the victims, it’s not–it’s not the people that feel like they’re under tyrannical pressure from an oppressive police regime. It’s the cops that actually do it. The ones that retort with blue lives matter, and have disproportionate killing of black men. I don’t know, why people can even take him seriously is completely preposterous. I don’t even like the idea of giving his statements any credibility. There’s no science, there’s no data, there’s no nothing that’s coming out of him other than rhetoric because that’s what gets him elected in a racist white neighborhood. [Say it.]
JAY: But his reaction that this is an unfair vilification of police, that they do go into very dangerous situations and that to target police as the problem is creating an atmosphere that somehow justifies these attacks on cops, what do you make of that?
So like, what he’s saying is completely without merit. It’s like, he may as well be arguing that the Earth is flat. I don’t know, how do you have a logical argument with somebody with such a position?
We know those things to be true. They’ve been true for a long time. We know it. Police, you know it. Protesters, you know it. You know how dangerous some of the communities where these police officers serve are. We pretend as if there’s no context. These things we know to be true. And if we cannot even talk about these things, if we cannot talk honestly and openly, not just in the comfort of our own service, but with those who look different than us, or bring a different perspective, then we will never break this dangerous cycle.
In the end, it’s not about finding policies that work. It’s about forging consensus. And fighting cynicism. And finding the will to make change.
And what’s very, very frightening is that a lot of police officers feel a certain type of way that reflects what Sheriff Clarke said. You don’t have enough police officers speaking up saying that what we have done in the past is wrong. What happened to the victims of police brutality that have led to people marching in the street, that was wrong. Not enough police officers have stood up. But what you do have is a lot of police officers standing up and saying, well, y’all shouldn’t be protesting us because we’re all not bad, when you won’t speak up yourself against the bad individuals.
But I think there’s another piece to this which Obama doesn’t say, which is that it’s the police, police within the set of a legal framework, that reinforces the chronic poverty that creates such a dangerous situation. And when, at the end when he says it’s not about policies that work, it’s about just having the will, well, no. It is about policies in whose interest. And if you have economic policies that don’t do anything to alleviate the poverty, then this is just a question of some psychological hangup everybody has, and if they could just get over it.
And so, I don’t think Obama ever addresses the fact that you have to have effective solutions and ulterior methods of investment into these communities, which ultimately will limit police violence, police brutality. Because the more opportunity individuals inside of communities where poverty is high, the more opportunity is presented to those individuals, the less crime actually happens, the less of a need there is for police.
But it seems to me the, our society, and certainly the elites that have power in our society, they need and want police forces with a culture that will use force, and lethal force, if necessary, because they don’t really want to do anything about the fundamental social conditions. So you gotta, you gotta contain it.
We had someone working at the Real News whose father was a cop, and we had this discussion with him once. And he said, you know, you’ve got a choice. You want your police forces to hand out flowers, or you want them to be a hammer? And it’s pretty clear we’re being told to be the hammer. So I mean–the culture of this use of force that, yes, sometimes goes too far–but the culture itself, isn’t that what police departments are actually being asked to be?
But the things that we’re seeing–and this is even related to the policy piece–and what we’re asking our police officers to do is culturally putting them in a place of being offensive. Of taking a posture of, which appears to be, I’m going to shoot first. You know, my life is more important, so I’m going to be offensive in order to survive. But that’s not, at least where I was in training and what I was doing with the Maryland state police and Baltimore City, again, we were teaching folks how to make good judgment decisions. And we were integrating them, doing our best to integrate them with the community. Because we were bringing so many people from outside of the community, which is also extremely important.
But let me end with this: that that policy piece, when you referred to the president, you know, him saying it’s not about so much about the policy. It’s about the will for consensus and to work. The policy is central to this, because the policies regarding economics and dire conditions within poor communities–economics, health, education, and that whole long list of policies–including policies like the war on drugs drug prohibition that creates this conflict among the citizens who are poor and trying to make money by selling drugs and becoming a member of this crew or that crew or that gang, which leads to conflict and shootings and then retaliation from there. Making our communities more dangerous.
It is so much about all of these policies that separate us, preventing the consensus from occurring, and literally draining the will out of people to move in a better direction and position. So it is so much about policy, I say first and foremost, before we can get to a place of consensus-building and instilling the will in people to move in the right direction on all sides of this.
But he–and he’s still an active cop. He was feeling very defensive about the critique coming from Black Lives Matter, from the point of view that it is about the social conditions. It is about the chronic poverty. It’s about who runs the society and who has real power. And to have so much focus on the police as the enemy, which in his opinion was happening in the city he’s in. That was unfair, and it was kind of, you know–he was even arguing that the number, you know, with the number of cases police have to deal with every year, you know, the tens of thousands of cases, that the number of people that get shot or killed is actually a small number. The number of killings that we’ve seen that seem completely unjustified, these killings that we see on videotape from time to time, while completely unacceptable, he would argue, is still a rather small number.
And even he’s feeling defensive about this sort of broad–what he sees attack on cops. What do you make of that?
But I have to go back real quick to what President Obama said. I didn’t hear that before, and I found that really striking. His statement to keep those neighborhoods in check sounds a hell of a lot like bring them to heel. I don’t see the difference in that. And then he’s acting like we should–the answer is to protect the cops more, instead of actually solving the problems that make a dangerous community. That doesn’t make any sense. And the policy issue–I am not the only scholar that works on policy issue day in and day out on how to solve these problems. There’s tons of scholars working on policy issues.
And like Neill was just saying, the drug war is a primary one. It’s what got us into this problem, so it takes policy to get us out. As a manager one thing that I say is I’m concerned with human behaviors. So I can’t control what people think. I’m not going to be able to solve racism, and I’m not going to be able to change our culture, but I am going to be able to put in policies that regulate and put checks and balances on what is implicit bias and human nature and things like that that we have to address.
This other officer–. There’s a saying that when your paycheck depends on it, like, your willful ignorance is hard to break, and your cognitive dissonance. And maybe there’s a level of Stockholm syndrome, because officers are getting pressure from command to do these type of things. They’re being told from somebody to go into these communities and be an occupying force to lock somebody up for the very same thing that President Obama doesn’t change the policies to fix that he did himself. So he’s locking up tons of black males through policies that make that officer the enemy.
So he has to understand that it feels odd, and he has power on the streets, but he’s no more than a pawn in this system. The problem is is that that pawn has incredible amounts of power. So when they are acting out that power, our oath and what makes us heroes and courageous is to stand up for what is right for those neighborhoods, to protect those neighborhoods. And that’s protection from policy, that we’ve got to look inside ourselves and take a real moral stand on what we think service means.
Because I don’t think that police brutality is just the root cause of the problems and living conditions of black people in this country. And I don’t think that Black Lives Matter–that is what got us into the street to protest, that is what the media talks about–but it’s not the one focus of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter as a movement, it’s not a monolithic movement.
So even if you have individuals gathered for protesting the death of Philando Castile, it’s also about protesting the neighborhood protesting the living conditions in which he might have grown up in. You know, Freddie Gray had a long rap sheet. He was killed by the police. But his long rap sheet was because he wasn’t afforded the same opportunity to go to, to have adequate education, adequate health, adequate access to being able to live and go to work from 9-5.
And so I think that, no, I don’t think that we’re all just focusing on police brutality. I just think that the other actions of other activists just don’t get as much attention.
JAY: All right. Well, this clearly is just the beginning of the conversation, and I hope to have all three of you back soon. Thanks for joining us.
And thank you for joining us on the Real news Network.
End
DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
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