To be black, poor and vulnerable

THERE is so much else happening around Nigeria and the rest of the world that the focus on the activities, especially failures of Nigeria’s political leaders, seems obsessive. The tendency to

concentrate on Nigeria betrays what might look like a mind-closing narcissism. But then, another look at the matter would reveal that in Nigeria so much, if not everything, is tied to politics. Even the seemingly apolitical is in the long run political. The same can be said about other places. The difference is that, in Nigeria everything seems to carry the bold sign of politics.  This makes it inevitable that when Nigerian politicians set out on their usual roll in the mud, making a mess of us all, right thinking people cannot afford to turn a blind eye. The consequence of this, that is of emphasizing the obviously political, is that one loses sight of other issues that are no less political except one is being naïve or duped by the mask thrown around such matters.

But our talking point today centres on the institutionalized racism in American police and justice system. This, in recent weeks, has led to questions being asked about the worth of black life in America if any white person in uniform can freely dispense with it. The first of the incidents in question involved an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, that was allegedly shot dead by a white police man with whomhe  had an argument. Some of the details of this incident are disputed but what nobody has been able to dispute is that Brown was unarmed when he was shot. Many accounts had it that the teenager had his hand up in a gesture of surrender and was, perhaps, running away from the white police man when the latter released lethal shots  into him. The incident happened in Ferguson, a black-dominated town in Missouri. Although most of the citizens of this town are black, the police force is almost 100% white.

The mistrust this is capable of creating among a population who believe that the police is unduly strict and hostile can only be imagined. But if the police in Ferguson, like the police in most other places, could be accused of irresponsible conduct, excessive hostility and use of force on the population it serves, better could be expected of the justice system. But this, more often than not, is not the case as a white-dominated jury discharged without cost the white police officer that murdered Michael Brown. This sparked violent confrontation between the people and the police that came out against them in the fashion of an invading army in full military gear. Neither the questions this raised had been answered nor the smoke from the riots cleared when another white-dominated jury set another killer police free in an incident that involved another black man, Eric Garner.

Garner’s case was simply pathetic and a clear evidence of the injustice that the police or any security agency (as the American Senate reports recently showed of CIA activities) that considers itself above control is capable of. In this very case, the evidence of police abuse was captured on camera for the whole world to see. Which makes it all the more mind-numbing that the jury that heard the case could come to the decision it finally reached.

As the video recording which is freely available on YouTube shows, Garner was accosted in a street by about five police men, all white. He had been accused of selling cigarettes, a charge he denied. He kept on repeating his innocence and warning the police off, saying he knew nothing of what he was being accused.

One of the officers moved in to hold his hand and he turned to ward him off. Others moved in from other sides when one of them, from behind, grabbed Garner on the throat and he was wrestled down by the others. Although asthmatic, it is clear from the video that not one of these police officers could on his own have taken on Garner who had the built of a heavyweight wrestler. But for the chokehold that eventually led to his death, not even three of the officer could have taken down Eric Garner even though they all looked well-built. But at five or six to one, with one holding tightly to his throat, they quickly brought him down.

As he went down, he could be clearly heard saying, ‘I can’t breathe’. He repeated this severally but this did not make the officer who held him in a ‘chokehold’ loosen his grip. The chokehold, as a restraining procedure, had been banned for at least ten years by the police because it led to frequent death. But here was a white police officer applying it on an unarmed black man accused of an offence that was yet to be proved.

After Garner had been held down and handcuffed, the police men still held him down, and by the time they rose from the floor the man was no longer responsive- he was dead. Forming what looked like a circle around his body on the floor, the white officers looked on as if confused. They apparently thought he was faking his own death, going by what the female paramedic who attended to him seemed to be saying. But the outrage of this scene came when the killer, Daniel Pantaleo, was seen waving at the cameras  in obvious satisfaction at his own grim handwork.

The whole thing was avoidable, and that it happened made it all so painful to see. It was terrible to see a man talking one moment and the next he is dead. The time between when he was talking and his death was captured on camera. And yet the jury that heard this case thought nothing fit than to set the killer police officer free! The image of the dead Eric Garner and the manner life was snuffed out of him would and should continue to haunt the American criminal justice system for as long as it condones the kind of impunity that would make a police officer kill a citizen without thinking twice.

The protests that the incidents in Ferguson and, especially, New York have caused hack back to the civil rights era in America. They are justified and are a reminder that the black man is yet not free in America. Eight years into the presidency of Barack Obama, it is obvious that sections of the American society are not yet ready to see the black person as an equal partner in the enterprise of sharing in and gaining from the American Dream. For this category of white America, to be black is to be vulnerable and dispensable. The world must reject this.