Hyderabad: "When a black man confronts the police, it is inevitable that he or she will lose their life or freedom" - This was the emotional message an Afro-American had shared on Twitter in July 2016.
Barack Obama, who the President then, condemned the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Sterling and Castile, both black Americans, were victims of police brutality.
Current President Donald Trump, who had sympathized with the victims' families as a Republican candidate at that time, is now threatening that he would call in the army to suppress agitations, when the US is recovering from the shock of a similar crime today.
In the violence that erupted after the assassination of human rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, many cities were involved in conflict for the same sensitive reason. Even before the autopsy confirmed that George Floyd, 46, had been murdered - the entire world watched the policeman who brutally crushed his neck with his knee on a pavement and killed him.
In the wake of the arrest of a black man named Eric Garner in July 2014, when the New York City police apprehended him to the point of suffocation, Erik yelled and breathed his last saying that he cannot breathe (‘I can't breathe’). Since Floyd's last words today were also the same, 'I can't Breathe' has become a slogan, a war cry, and violence is erupting not only in America, but also in London, and Berlin.
Trump's racist tendency in accusing the protesters of being thugs and looters and threatening that bullets will answer for the crimes, is adding fuel to the riots.
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For nearly two and a half centuries, the Declaration of Independence of the United States has asserted that all human beings are equal. Even after 53 years of martyrdom of Martin Luther King, who declared that ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’, and fought against racial discrimination tooth and nail and laid his life, abuse against blacks is still being perpetrated again and again.
When Obama entered the White House in 2009, asserting a 'change' in American society, which grew up on the foundations of white supremacy, the hearts of blacks erupted with joy. But the social discrimination never subsided. Obama had said that the police are 30 per cent more likely to obstruct Afro-Americans' vehicles and check them three times more as compared to white people.
The coronavirus pandemic has claimed over one lakh lives in the United States - the death toll among the black community being three times more than the white! By subjecting blacks to ‘last in hiring and first in firing’, America is a living example of racial discrimination.
Blacks, who constitute 13.4 per cent of the more than 40 million American population, have been living without a hue or cry in the face of economic depression, loss of employment and the menace of the coronavirus pandemic. True to the words of Martin Luther King: “A riot is the language of the unheard”, the superpower is now boiling under violence and Trump's inciting words are adding fuel to it.
Trump's tendency to renegotiate the election on the tide of racial hatred and come to power the second time is shocking. He seems to be confident that the lower and middle class whites will put him in power as they did the last time.
Joe Biden says he will work to solve the problem of organized racism within the first hundred days of his coming to power. If racism becomes the raw material for politics, will America ever recover from racism?
Read: Cop in Floyd case got medals for valor and drew complaints
