Trevor Noah: This is "State Racism." #BLM #StDD

The first bit of news I heard upon waking up last Tuesday morning was that John McCain was outraged. The news of the death of Otto Warmbier on Monday afternoon left Senator McCain fumingly mad and he wanted everyone and his momma to know just how incensed he was.  Kim Jung Un was a murderer and McCain wanted him to be held accountable for murdering the innocent student who had gone on a vacation to North Korea. I took a minute to give a silent applause for the good senator and then wondered why I’d never heard similar passionate outbursts from him about the innocent black and brown lives that have been snuffed out right here at home. 

Senator McCain, like almost every other office holder, has no time, no energy, no pathos to spare for the victims of police brutality. There’s no outrage from members of our government over the continued slaughter of men, women, and children by our police force. There’s no passion, no outrage from media types (with the exception of Lawrence O'Donnell and Trevor Noah) in reporting the murder of our people on a daily basis. There’s some sympathy from some quarters but really no outcry from the majority community when the judicial system refuses to hold murderous cops accountable for their murderous actions. Shoot, there was hardly any reaction at the news that two big burly white men armed to the teeth and with the full authority of the state pumped five bullets into the body of a tiny, mentally disturbed pregnant woman in front of three of her four children. 

The reason there’s no outrage or very little reaction to the continued carnage is that the system is working as it was designed to work. As Dr. WEB Dubois puts it:

“A system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect.” 

Trevor Noah hit the nail on the head in a rant taped in between segments on his show the day after the jury came back with the no guilty verdict for Jeronimo Yanez. We have been talking about the lack of respect for the black body from the police, from district attorneys, from juries, and from judges but Noah, the author of the book Born a Crime, posits that the problem is so much bigger than those actors in this macabre game. Listen as he explains that the problem is not just racism as in the cops hate black folks, but it is something that is so much more frightening:

Jay Willis wrote about Trevor’s insightful comments for GQ:

“Oftentimes in America, the conversation gets caught up in racism as it pertains to black and white. But I don’t believe that that is the conversation. I honestly don’t believe that that is the conversation. I believe that the police force is trained in such a way that it creates a state racism, which is different. It’s not a racism, like, “N-----.” It’s a very different thing.”

When a police killing happens, the debate immediately centers on whether or not that particular cop harbored racist sentiments. But this, Noah says, misses the point.

“We’ve seen countless videos of a white woman shooting at the cops, and the cops are like, “Oh, We’ll make a plan to get that gun away.” Because in their heads, they’re like, “I mean, come on. She’s a—she’s making a mistake. That’s what she’s doing. She’s not used to crime. Look at her." And then when you flip it [and the victim is black], there's almost no way to not get shot.”

In other words, it is not the fact that members of the police force harbor racist sentiment that is the crucial issue; it is that the state allows them to act out on their racist animus with impunity.

The heart of the problem is state racism and everyone knows their designated role in sustaining this grotesque status quo. Hence there will never be any outrage from John McCain and his peers about state agents terrorizing black folks and taking our lives at will. It is as it ought to be for them.

~~~~~~~~

Trevor Noah is on roll. The video below is also a must watch. It left me in tears. (For those who can’t watch the murder, you can watch the first 0.54 seconds and then skip to 1.30. Stop again at 3.14 and fast forward to 3.30.)

When the majority community gets outraged and demands a change, then and only then will these killings stop.    

Five hundred and seventy-three people have been killed by police since January 1, 2017.

What are you doing to show your anger?                        

________________________________

About Support the Dream Defenders

Members of the Daily Kos group Support the Dream Defenders launched four ongoing projects:

1. We came together to support the Dream Defenders in Floridaand their mission, our first project and the origin of our name. The Dream Defendersdefend the Dream of Martin Luther King Jr. by "develop[ing] the next generation of radical leaders to realize and exercise our independent collective power; building alternative systems and organizing to disrupt the structures that oppress our communities." Please donate here.

2. Our Michael Brown Over-Policed Rights Act, crowd-sourced at Daily Kos in the fall of 2014 after the death of Michael Brown. Our bill quickly earned endorsements from the NAACP and the ACLU. The NAACP forwarded our bill to members of Congress, and we distributed it to members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other progressive members of Congress. President Obama signed into a law a small piece of our bill in December 2014. The Department of Justice included parts of our law in their reports on Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015. Our state version of the MBOPRA is currently in committee in the Kansas legislature.

3. Our Freedom of Information Act project. Nineteen Republican governors chose to kill poor people by not expanding Medicaid. Ebola has killed about 9000 people in total; Republican governors kill 23,000 people PER YEAR by refusing federal support for Medicaid, a story ignored by traditional media. Our project forces those governors to out themselves, clapping them in a Catch 22. With the support of readers, we publicize our results through letters to the editor, press releases, and petitions.

4. Our Law Enforcement Documentation Act of 2016.

More information about STTDs here.

You can receive all future diaries of Support the Dream Defenders in your Daily Kos Stream by clicking here. Then click "Follow," which will make all STDD diaries appear in "My Stream" of your Daily Kos page.

This is a community diary. Please Join us.

You are also welcome to join us on The Porch over at the Black Kos Community group on Friday afternoons at 4 p.m. ET."​