PHOTOS: Sarah Lewison & indybay.com/wecopwatch
The ruling class is fomenting racism to break growing protest
Police are killing working-class youth in America.
In Santa Rosa, Calif., 13-year-old Andy Lopez (Latino), walking to a friend’s house with a BB-gun, is shot seven times by a sheriff’s deputy, as he turns to see why the deputy is yelling at him.
In Salt Lake City, Utah, 20-year-old Dillon Taylor (Anglo), walking out of a 7-Eleven listening to music on his headphones, dies in the parking lot after being shot by police as they shout contradictory commands.
In Ferguson, Mo., 18-year-old recent high-school graduate Michael Brown (African-American) is shot repeatedly by an officer who had ordered him not to walk in the street.
The full list includes hundreds more. In Sonoma County, Calif., where Andy was killed, more than 65 people have died at the hands of the police—or in police custody—since 2000. In Albuquerque, N.M., there have been 37 police killings since 2010.
In Ferguson, of course, the police’s tanks-and-tear-gas response to protests caused an uprising, and the governor called out the National Guard.
Indeed, the paramilitary mobilization against protestors in Ferguson—and the unwillingness of people there to back down—was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Coast-to-coast anger and revulsion have put demilitarizing the police on the national agenda.
President Barack Obama himself raised the issue, and the U.S. Congress has also taken it up.
But their sudden concern is simply an attempt to quiet the waters. As millionaire legislators for the Wall Street oligarchy—the 1 percent—they have a lot to lose. They are aware that the killings are unifying the country against the oligarchy’s growing rule by force, not democracy.
That unification is new for most Americans. Black, Latino, Anglo, and Asian alike are having their young people—and others as well—cut down by police bullets backed up by virtual tanks and heavily armed SWAT teams.
Threatened by their anger and concern, the oligarchy is attempting to tar the victims with being criminals and drug addicts—or just stupid fools—as a reason for people to think they brought on their own death.
And it is mounting its tried-and-true tactic for dividing the working class in the United States—fomenting racism.
That’s why the media played up the uprising in Ferguson as a race riot, though they had portrayed a similar week of largely Anglo street demonstrations in Albuquerque in March as simply protests.
As well, the media are reporting the shootings racially—Latino boy killed by white cop (Lopez), white youth killed by black cop (Taylor), black teen killed by white cop (Brown).
To be sure, racism is alive and well in America. It is undoubtedly a factor in police forces that include members of white-supremacy organizations.
But what unifies these killings—and unifies increasing numbers of Americans against them—is that they are police violence against working-class youth across the board, at a time when young people are on the front line of attack in the oligarchy’s economic war against the 99 percent.
Increasingly, the old divide-and-conquer racism isn’t working anymore. Instead, a new unity is developing—class unity—and with it a chance to build a brave new world of, by and for the 99 percent.
