The Garner
case hits close to home for many people, quite literally. Photograph: The
All- Nite Images / Flickr via Creative Commons
Lanre
Bakare
theguardian.com,
Saturday 6 December 2014
On
Wednesday, when a grand jury here in New York failed to find a reason to even
send to trial a white police officer who choked the life out of a black man, I
finally got it. As I sat on the subway to my new home in Brooklyn, the image of
Eric Garner stumbling after six cops dragged him to the ground – the sound of
him wheezing “I can’t breathe” – would not leave me. I got home and watched his
widow and his mother talk about the lack of humanity in the man who killed him.
I thought about Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, about Radio Raheem and how it
was disgusting that a movie based on another killing – one that took place more
than more than 20 years ago – could play out, almost frame for frame, in 2014.
I’ve been
in New York for less than a month. In that time I’ve seen protests follow a
grand jury’s failure to indict the police officer who shot an unarmed Michael
Brown in Missouri. I’ve watched the video of the police shooting a toy-carrying
12-year-old, Tamir Rice, on a playground in Ohio. I’ve read about the police
shooting of the unarmed Akai Gurley in a stairwell in Brooklyn. And then there
was Wednesday’s non-indictment in the case of Eric Garner, unarmed and choked
to death on a Staten Island street, not a mile from my new home.
From
Britain, it’s easy to look at America and President Barack Obama and think that
black people here have achieved the kind of progress we’ll never have at home:
a black man in the most powerful position in the country. But when you get
here, it’s not the progress but the lack of it for black Americans that’s
staggering.
Black men
account for nearly half America’s prison population despite African Americans
making up only around 12% of the population. I know that has its roots in drug
sentencing disparities, and that five times as many white Americans are using
drugs while black people are sent to prison at ten times the rate. There was no
surprise when I discovered that the chokehold was banned by the NYPD in 1993,
yet there have been thousands of complaints about its use over the last 21
years.
It’s one
thing to know that at a distance. It’s another thing to potentially see myself
in those statistics – or my father, or my friends.
Ta Nehisi
Coates, eloquent as ever, summed up why it’s not an option to do anything but
resist: “As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought
despite not seeing victories in their lifetime, or even their children’s
lifetimes, or even in their grandchildren’s lifetimes. So, fatalism is not an
option.”
Talking to
Americans, there can be a numbness. A seen-it-all-before, nothing’s-going-to-change
kind of attitude. I understand that. In Britain, we’ve had cases of police
violence or neglect in black communities that have shocked us, separated us,
broken down relationships between the police and black communities. Perhaps racism
in the UK is just as prevalent – Muslims have been demonised over the past
decade, and the rates of stop-and-search remain shocking – but that racism
doesn’t usually result in another dead black man.
The first
time I saw the Rodney King tape I was shocked something that could happen,
anywhere – but it was in America, thousands of miles away. Then I moved here
and it was in St Louis and then in Cleveland and then it was in the same city –
in the case of Akai Gurley, the same borough, just up the road. Then I found
out that a black man is killed by the police every 28 hours.
In
America, the death of black men at the hands of the police is a near-daily
reality. I’ve only been here a few weeks and it is exhausting to read, watch
and think about this on a daily basis. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have
known nothing but that climate.
I can’t
breathe.
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