Ashok Dhillon
May 31, 20207 min
In America, some 250 plus years after the Civil War and the abolition of ‘Slavery’, Black Lives still do NOT matter. Unarmed Black American men are regularly, and oft times frequently killed by armed white men, and those in authority, without cause. America was born in racial genocide and blood, which is part of its DNA today, and manifests itself in regular internal murders of Black Americans, and externally, in the murder of innocent coloured civilians in its endless foreign wars.
In it’s very short history as a nation, it starts with the Native Americans being forcibly pushed off of their lands by White Europeans/English ‘Settlers’, and then systematically eradicated through genocidal campaigns of the newly formed ‘Authorities’, and their often murderous ‘law-enforcers’ and fledgling armies. The new ‘Laws of the Land’ were made by - and for - the new Settlers of course, and gave no consideration to those to whom the lands had actually belonged, and their rights, as the peoples that had lived on those lands since antiquity.
To the ‘Civilized and God-fearing’ White settlers, the Native People were simply ‘Savages’ and did not have any rights whatsoever, and had to give way, in every way, to all the wishes and whims of the ‘Rightful Owners’, the ones that had just sailed over from Europe and England and laid claim by guns and murder to their land. The forcibly taken virgin lands in America needed lots of workers, and African Slaves did very nicely; all work, gross exploitation, abuse, and NO human rights.
The African people, men, women and children, (approximately 26% of the ship holds were packed with children who took up less space and were therefore more profitable cargo, by the ton) were abducted forcibly from West Africa and brought over in appalling, torturous conditions in which over 15%, on average died in their iron shackles, still secured, densely packed below decks of the slow moving sailing ships, for the long voyage across the Atlantic. There was absolutely no mercy or pity shown by the European and English captors. The Black people were merely ‘Profitable Cargo’ to be packed in mercilessly. The inhumane enslavement, brutalization, gross exploitation and systemic murder of Black African people was of course expressly sanctioned and blessed by the Church and the Pope, whose authority was required by the European Nations vying for new lands, wealth and political power in the New World.
It is estimated that over 12 Million African people (the strongest and healthiest) were abducted and shipped to the colonies as slaves. Those that survived the murderous journey across the Atlantic, literally packed in ship holds like sardines for maximum numbers and profitability per voyage, were then sold in America, the Caribbean, and Latin and South America.
In those days, the slaves were so important to the fledgling American economy, especially in the Southern States where tobacco and cotton were grown, that it took a Civil War to abolish slavery in the resulting ‘United’ States of America. The official right to slavery got abolished but of course a lot of White Americans never really got over the image of African Americans as slaves, and not as equal American citizens. A lot of White Americans in the South still resent the loss of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and their hatred for Black people is obvious. But overall, in America there is still a palpable sense of deep racial contempt of African Americans that keeps them in poverty, fills the prisons, and provides endless targets for violence and murder by gun toting White American males.
A lot of Americans still consider African Americans as sub-human and treat them as such. Black Americans and ‘Black Lives’ are still of no consequence whatsoever generally, compared to the divinely ordained White privilege of the Ruling Class. And that makes it lethally unsafe for Black Americans, especially ‘Black Men’.
Amongst all the developed countries of the World, America today is still one of the most racist. It is a country where murder and brutality are perpetrated against ‘Black American Men’ regularly, by ‘White American Men’ in authority. This long tradition of brutality towards Black people and particularly Black men is obviously part of the historically developed American White culture, and is thus never-ending. In the early days of slavery, Black people could be brutally murdered and lynched at the whim of their White Masters, or even a gang of White men, strangers, just wanting to kill ‘a nigger’. And literally hundreds of years later, one finds Black men being murdered in the open, in the 21st Century, while walking, running, sitting, hanging out, or just on vague suspicions of some ‘crime’, or on the basis of unspecified fears.
In the four hundred some years of America’s history, countless unarmed Black Americans, particularly young men, have died or been brutalized at the hands of White American men and the ‘Authorities’ - with no recourse to defence, protection, considerations of any civil or human rights, and certainly no thoughts to the vaunted American ideals of:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’.
For hundreds of years, in most cases Black Americans were methodically, cold-bloodedly murdered, pleading for their lives, by stone-cold White American men who viewed them as some species of vermin to be exploited or exterminated. Of the murderers, only a minuscule fraction were ever held to account and punished, as the American Justice System was almost as discriminatory and biased as those that were committing the heinous crimes, as it was controlled by equally racially biased fellow White men (generally speaking).
On May 25th, 2020 (about a week ago), a 46 year old African American, Black man, George Floyd, was cold-bloodedly, brutally murdered in broad daylight by White policemen, in front of bystanders - pitifully begging for his breath, and his life. George Floyd was being arrested on suspicion of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 at a deli. The four police officers arresting him had him handcuffed in the back, and had him restrained, lying face down on the ground with his face pressed into the concrete gutter. According to the many bystanders that watched and recorded the arrest, George Floyd had offered no resistance during his apprehension.
One of the police officers pinning him down had his knee pressed onto George’s neck. And the bystanders capturing the arrest on their cell phones, show George pleading with the police, ‘please don’t kill me’, and after being pinned down by the officer kneeling on his neck, repeating over and over, ‘I can’t breathe’. The video shows the police officer with his knee on George’s neck ignoring George’s pleas - and keeping the knee firmly on his neck for over 8 minutes, over two minutes of which were after George had stopped moving.
It was a horrific capture of cold-blooded, inhumane indifference, and callous disregard for the life and rights of an unarmed Black African American man, posing no threat whatsoever, deliberately killed in broad daylight in front of many bystanders, with an air of total impunity and indifference, while being taped. It was the most graphic example of cold-blooded sense of White Supremacy over a Black man’s helplessness and worthlessness in today’s America.
The widely viewed murder of George Floyd, just after the equally horrific and senseless murder of 25 year old Ahmaud Arbery, unarmed, out jogging in broad daylight, and gunned down by a duo of White father and son, who were ‘suspicious’ that young Ahmaud might be a burglar, has resulted in mass and at times violent protests across the entire United States. But the outrage being expressed by so many Americans is ultimately futile.
President Trump has already made it clear that he has no remorse or empathy for the regular murders of Black men. He in fact, used the opportunity to politicize the protests as ‘Leftists’, and threatened the protesters with ‘Shootings’, ‘Vicious dogs’, the US Military, and his ‘MAGA’ supporters retaliating and confronting the protesters in open battle, in front of the White House.
It is only the fact that both the murders, of 46 year old George Floyd and 25 year old Ahmaud Arbery, were captured on camera, that the murderers of these men were even arrested and charged. Otherwise, the White men who had committed these obviously cold-blooded murders of innocent, unarmed Black men, would have been given the benefit of the doubt by the ‘System’, the ‘Authorities’ and by what is regarded as the ‘Justice System’ in America, and would not have faced any accountability whatsoever, as has been the case over Centuries of American history.
George Floyd is the most recent victim of America’s racist police force and racist culture that goes back to its founding, which has an endless history of victims that were helpless unarmed Black men that had no voice, and no chance, in front of the entitled White Master race’s hate, that saw them as sub-human and not worthy of even the modicum of fairness and Civil Rights accorded normal humans.
The stereotyping and automatic hate and revulsion felt by White American men and women towards African Americans, particularly young Black men, results in almost weekly shooting deaths of some Black man, or boy, going about his business that day, or having the police being called on them because some White woman thinks that the Black man is up to no good, and is some kind of a threat.
The racial bias against Black Americans is so strong that they are probably far safer in any other developed country in the World, than in America.
Eventually the protests and rioting will stop. But, the killing of Black men won’t.
It’s been four hundred years, and random killing still happens too often as part of daily life of Black Americans, for whom America was never safe, fair, tolerant, or even – ‘that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’.