The recent killing of Michael Brown, a young black boy of eighteen is the latest in a series of killings and murders by the police establishment of America. As soon as the killing of another young black person Travyon Martin, who was shot last year by the police started to die down, another is shot cold blooded in the streets with no arms to defend himself whatsoever. It has become a norm in that part of the world to label people of another race as a threat just because of the pigment of their skins.
America always had a problem with blackness. The political establishment had always given the toughest of times to the black man and woman. It all started when Africans where forcibly taken from their lands and taken into the Americas to serve as slaves in the vast plantations of their new masters.
Therefore, the story of the black man’s presence in that part of the world started with misery and lack of fundamental freedoms and rights and the descendants of those slaves had to struggle for their basic humanity to be respected and recognised. Segregation was very much a reality as late as the ’60s and ’70s. Those who dared to stand up and fight, like Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X were murdered in cold blood and the powers that be never did any constructive investigation to bring their real killers to justice.
But America cannot go on like this. A country that claims to stand as a shining light and beacon of democracy and human rights around the world cannot possibly claim that honorific title when there is such great injustice in its own backyard. The hypocritical nature of a state that kills its own bona fide citizens will then become apparent, thereby losing all respect as champions of democracy and the equal rights of man. The constitution of the US is a document of hope for people of all times and places.
The police establishment that killed an innocent Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers and destroyed the dreams and desires of George Jackson while still in prison, is the same brutal entity that is gunning down young, black people. Ultimately, the police have become another oppressive group, instead of protecting the lives and properties of all Americans.
The greatness of America doesn’t lay in its military prowess and might but in the richness of its diversity and the hope it is supposed to represent for billions of people around the world. Therefore, it can only maintain its greatness and glory by respecting its own people – all of them.
]]>
