Police brutality in the US and the long history of systemic racism that undergirds it can be seen as a more concentrated and flagrant version of violence that the global north has meted out against Africans for over 500 years.
Black people dying at the hands of their supposed protectors is not isolated from slavery, imperialism, religious subjugation and the destruction of the very fabric of black peoples’ identities through colonialism. It cannot be separated from the near-extermination of the native people of Australia and the Americas, or the British violent suppression of Ghana’s Ashante kingdom, the exile of Bunyoro’s Kabalega or Cetshwayo’s internment in London until his Zulu kingdom had been smashed, just to list but a few. It is this violent occupation of native lands by Europeans and the violence of the slave trade and slavery before it, that gave white people the world over their sense of superiority and black people the image of disposability.
Contemporary violence against people of colour in Europe and North America is not the preserve of the police. It permeates all aspects of black life everywhere in the world, if only more pointed in the more deeply divided racial societies like the US, the UK and Brazil, for example. The police simply find themselves at the frontlines executing that which is a pernicious desire by bigoted policy makers and their supporters who are defending that sense of superiority and tradition.
This is not to let the police off the hook in the case of the US. It is simply to say that police violence is rooted in the very foundation upon which these countries are built, that the very idea of the state is to pit people against a behemoth entity, such that if that entity finds itself in the hands of people who happened to be callous about human life, be this in imperial countries in the north or the former colonies in the south, the police get seized by ideas of superiority that are written into the laws of these countries. Take for example, the impunity with which the American police officers can kill and not be required to account for their actions in the justice system, where victims and survivors cannot sue the police. How hard is that to change in the face of countless atrocities that have taken place against innocent blacks since Civil Rights Act of 1964, when America decided that it would become a more equitable country?
SLAP ON THE WRIST
Why did it take more than half a century for anger to explode on the US streets the way we have witnessed over the last several weeks? There has been an intense debate since the 1992 Rodney King incident in Los Angeles, all around reforms, possible defunding of the police, making police officers subject to legal suits by victims, spending more in social services that prevent crime or changing the judicial system so as to cease being so biased in sentencing young black men to longer jail terms for transgressions that only earn white people a slap on the wrist. There was a series of murders spanning several weeks, including the taped murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, the vicious shooting of Breonna Taylor by the Louisville police and the killing of Tony McDade, a black trans man, by police officers in Tallahassee. These cases were ignored until the murder of George Floyd while in custody of a Minneapolis police officer triggered public outcry and forced the nation to pay attention to what has otherwise been part of American body politics.
As a dark-skinned black man from Africa myself living in America, it has never escaped me that I would be the first to get shot unasked if I were to find myself in a circumstance where a racist cop was going about trying to fulfil his mission. The events of recent weeks have sharpened my view about the interconnectedness between global historical trajectories, seeing that the violent extraction of African resources since 1600s, be that human or material resources, was the prelude to colonisation, a process that killed countless Africans, and how that long history continues to kill Africans through a variety of direct and indirect ways to this day, all of it driven by that sense of superiority presumed by colonial officers, defended by that militarist image of the empire and entrenched within post-colonial Africa by its legacy.
DEMOLITION OF STATUES
Although these multi-racial anti-racism protests are not demanding the same things, they seem united on what they must do in order to be heard. There has been demolition of statues, from New Mexico’s Conquistadors to Confederate generals in the Southern US to slave owners in Bristol and London in the UK, all of which the protestors see as traumatic reminders of that history of violence and grounding the continued contemporary violence.
Will Africans have to protest against European and American racism in order for the deadly injustices that they have brought upon Africans to become topics of conversations in the same way that police killing of Black Americans has triggered mass protest in the US and around the globe to demand reforms? Or do these protests put Africans in a bind, especially the youth, sometimes seeing the US as a glorious place to aspire to live and work but are now turn off of it by the videos of police brutality? To what extent are protests in the US seen in Africa as just anti-racism or also anti-autocracy, in which case the African youth might find commonalities with American protestors beyond race and racism?
As we reflect on the history of violence by the global north against people in the global south, it is important to keep in mind that we live in the age of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro. What we confront from these men is not even their resistance to reforms in justice and law enforcement but continued racist disdain, what with “shithole countries” ala Trump, or UK Prime Minister’s push back on the demands to remove controversial statues of slavers and British colonialists in the UK, saying that colonialism in Africa should not have ended. Johnson also made light of the role of Britain in the slave trade, adding that the “problem [with Africa] is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore.” These are people who downplay well-documented histories, who cannot speak truth and who cannot make up their minds between making their countries “better again” in isolation, even as the world aspires for more closeness, multilateralism and trading networks. To think that these are the men under whose leadership reforms are being sought is a tall order indeed.
The approach that these men of power are deploying to defeat the protests so that their countries can continue with their racist policies is to focus on crimes that have taken place during the peaceful protests, ending with none issues taking the centre stage. The sporadic violence that has accompanied the protests is now the perfect excuse for racist officials to bury the actual conditions that lead to the protests in the first place. Among the protesters themselves, there seems to be less and less awareness of how the imagery of the protests as violent and the debate about removal of statues are drowning out the demands for real reforms.
