Tuesday, June 2, 2020
It’s a Class War Now Too
by JOSHUA FRANK
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/01/its-a-class-war-now-too/
Los Angeles, California
The scene along Melrose Avenue, one of L.A’s most renowned shopping districts, is now one of vengeance. Shards of glass litter the sidewalk. Storefronts are graffitied. The smell of smoke is still fresh in the early-morning air. Here was the epicenter of the looting that took place on Saturday night, shortly before Mayor Eric Garcetti declared a city-wide emergency and an 8 PM curfew. Garcetti later called on Governor Newsom to bring in the National Guard, marking the first time the Guard has roamed L.A.’s streets since 1992, when the Rodney King verdict was released. Today, Sunday, military humvees and troops protect what remains after the weekend’s display of mass anger and hurt.
Stoking public fear, Fox News called the destruction following Saturday’s protests “violent riots.” The hometown L.A. Times made sure to make the point that there were “divisions among the protesters,” and then went on to criminalize the looters. And on Sunday morning, Trump declared that his government would designate Antifa a terrorist organization. Indeed, the protestors who descended upon the streets of Los Angeles to voice their collective anger over the murder of George Floyd, were, like Los Angeles itself, a diverse crowd with diverse intentions.
The people who became known as the looters were a fraction of those who stayed behind after the earlier protests dispersed. They are now deemed “thugs” and “thieves” by those who find it easy to write off their palpable frustration, which spread to Santa Monica and across Long Beach by Sunday evening. Writing it off, however, not only ignores America’s systemic racism, but also neglects to address our dire social stratification. As displayed this past weekend on the streets of L.A. and elsewhere, the upheaval taking place across the country is now as much about class as it is about racial injustice and police brutality.
Trump, in his own egotistical way, hoped for this outcome, stating that he desired to be a “wartime president”. Wish granted. The flames Trump has fanned since taking office have sparked America’s tinder box and the fire is burning on his doorstep. What we are now witnessing is full-fledged class warfare. No doubt, it’s been a perfect storm of events; the effects of Covid-19’s massive unemployment, some 40 million, the virus’s death disparity, the continued assault of black lives by a militarized police force along with a corporatized government that intentionally fails to protect its most vulnerable citizens.
The looting of stores is inherently a class issue, whether you look upon it favorably or not (there are always exceptions of course). The act of looting is a long-standing American tradition, dating back to the theft of Native lands and African enslavement. And today, while wealthy people don’t loot strip malls, they are adept at looting natural resources and labor, from the coalfields of West Virginia to Jeff Bezo’s Amazon warehouses. The poor, exerting their nominal power—even in a destructive and violent manner—display an entirely natural reaction to a continually powerless state of being. For them, looting is a cry for help, an expression of hopelessness.
We’ve all seen the hideous video. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in broad daylight; Floyd, suffocating, cried for his mother’s help. We’ve all watched the callous white vigilantes, one an ex-detective, hunt down the jogger Ahmaud Arbery in a pickup truck before killing him. We are all familiar with the long list of Black men shot to death by cops at a staggering rate—2.5 times greater than whites. We also know that 20% of the entire Black population, even before the Covid crisis, was living in severe poverty, some 9 million people. Conditions across the country are even worse today, and as a result, violence will continue to erupt.
Of course, both the seething acrimony among our country’s poor and the brutality perpetrated on Black people by government-sponsored gangsters predates the Trump Administration. Cornel West pointed this out Friday night on Anderson Cooper 360:
“You’ve got a neoliberal wing of the Democratic party that is now in the driver’s seat … and they really don’t know what to do because all they want to do is show more black faces—show more black faces. But often times those black faces are losing legitimacy too because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security [Secretary] and they couldn’t deliver.”
Do you think this past weekend was dreadful? Just wait. If Derek Chauvin is let off the hook for the murder of George Floyd, the recent protests will seem minor. To be sure, some of these disruptions, like the looting of minority businesses, are counterproductive, which is why the left has an obligation to organize and direct this rage at the real perpetrators, the capitalist class and their defenders.
Economic and racial oppression in America has finally reached a boiling point. Systemic change will take a systemic realignment of the economic and political structure in the United States. Despair may be driving some of these acts, from the arsons to the broken windows. Yet, it is the underlying racial and class dynamics, the consequence of being a conquered population, that will continue to fuel the rebellion—a serious and extended uprising that no imposed curfew from a city mayor will be able to curtail for very long.
All photos by Ronnie Mendoza.
Racial Domestic Terrorism and the Legacy of State Violence
by HENRY GIROUX
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/01/racial-domestic-terrorism-and-the-legacy-of-state-violence/
The sheer brutality of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a viciously violent cop symbolizes not only the unadulterated racism of a culture that looks away in the face of police violence against Black people but also a society in which a form of racialized domestic terrorism has become normalized. Floyd’s murder has to be understood as part of wider systemic politics indebted to the long legacy of a culture of racist terror that extends from slavery and Jim Crow to the scourge of racial mass incarceration and a politics of disposability. How else to explain the senseless murders of Botham Jean, Treyvon Martin and more recently Ahmaud Aubrey and Breonna Taylor. Aubrey was killed by white vigilantes while out running. Taylor was shot in her bed by the police who literally broke into her house with no previous warning. The punishing apparatuses of the racial state have become more barbaric as power is concentrated more and more in the hands of the ultra-rich, white nationalists and white supremacists who now occupy the White House. Neoliberal fascism has taken off the gloves and now resorts to outright terror to keep people of color in check. Every space in the U.S. that people of color occupy is militarized.
The ongoing murder and exercise of state terrorism against Black people is part of a White House ideology that supports the false argument that white people are the real victims, bolstered in part by white supremacist fantasies regarding the alleged nightmare of what they call the threat of white genocide. White supremacist such as Stephen Miller now set immigration policy. In this world of racist fears and conspiracy theories, it is convenient for whites to hate people of color, and subscribe to the notion that the public sphere is a space only for whites. The racist grammars of suffering, state violence and disposability have become unspeakable and removed from any sense of moral and social responsibility. America has become an armed camp and the war on black and brown people a source of pride rather than alarm. Racism has morphed into a badge of honor for the current administration. This administration trades in racist taunts, encourages violence on the part of the police, and believes that Blacks are more dangerous than right-wing terrorists, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists. People of color are viewed in the dominant discourse of white supremacy as being outside of the bounds of justice; their existence occupies a space between invisibility and terminal exclusion. Increasingly, under the Trump regime, people of color are “thugs” relegated to zones of social abandonment, lacking human rights, and unknowable as lives worthy of value.
Charles Pearce, writing in Esquire, gets it right when pointing to Trump, states: “Where there is hatred, he sows anger. Where there is injury, resentment. Where there is doubt, uncertainty. Where there is despair, poison. Where there is darkness, destruction. And where there is sadness, desperation. There’s something that feeds his soul in feeding the soul of the country to the flames. He has nothing else. He can’t conceive of another way to live. He belongs to another entirely different species of parasite.” Put differently, Trump’s administration has become a engine of social misery, a punitive machine that accelerates the death of those considered excess, valueless, and unwanted. Trump’s regime of wealth extraction, ecological violence, economic shock doctrines, ideological fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, and government of hypocrisy has turned politics, and language into a racist weapon, and state sanctioned violence against black people a signposts for rationalizing a fascist politics.
What we are witnessing in real time is a fascist politics that believes in racial purity, social Darwinism, and supports the collapse of moral and political accountability. We see evidence of this in the viciousness of Trump’s everyday language, as for instance when he criticizes a reporter for wearing mask for being politically correct, when in actuality the journalist was being socially responsible–a notion Trump despises. We also see it in its more obvious toxic forms as when he states in the aftermath of the mass protests, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” All the while echoing a racist phrase by a former Miami Police Chief Walter Headley who liked to brag that he only hired white police officers and prided himself for using violence against Black people. There is nothing new about the police killing black people. Nor is there anything new about the United State engaging in state sponsored violence by way of a racially marked mass incarceration system.
What is new is that in the digital age, these killings are now more visible; yet they have done little to reform either the violent culture of policing or the terror imposed by the racial state. Americans watched a 12-year old child, Tamir Rice, killed by the police. They watched Eric Garner strangled to death by the police for allegedly selling cigarettes on a street corner. They watched Freddie Gray dragged into back of a Baltimore police van because he had a pocket knife, only to die soon afterwards; we watched Sandra Bland get stopped for a minor traffic violation, pulled from her car, only to later to be found hanging in a police station cell. We watched Philando Castille shot by the police in front of his girlfriend and her small child; we watched George Floyd die under the knee of a cop who appeared chillingly indifferent as George’s last breathe left his body. That knee in place for nine minutes, as if it wanted to make clear that it was more than willing to stand proudly as a symbol of what Robert Shetterly called “the blunt instrument of [a racist] history. We watched as the police in almost all of these crimes, except thus far for Floyd’s death, were exonerated. We watched as almost everyone with power looked away. We watched as the public tuned into their nightly game shows. We watched as the habits of public powerlessness, apparatuses of hopelessness, and collapse of civic courage once more dethroned a viable sense of social responsibility, politics, and democracy itself.
Now we watch as the media focuses less on the historical context for such killings and more on the alleged outside radical leftists/anarchists/ running through the streets committing the alleged real violence. People running into stores taking TVs are labeled a looters when in fact as James Baldwin once said captive populations don’t loot, hedge fund manages, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, big corporations, and the rest of the ultra-rich are the real looters. People who have been robbed of everything, including their very lives don’t loot, they strike back because their very lives depend upon some form of action that will be noticed. The fires burning in our cities are unfortunate, but the real fires go unnoticed. These are the fires burning the spirits of those who suffer daily traumas, fears, police violence, and policy driven hardships are what need to be noticed, addressed, and rouse mass anger. No one talks about the roots of these problems and I do not simply mean their origins in slavery, a culture of lynching, and a deeply ingrained institutional racism, however crucial these events are. I am talking about the roots of a fascist politics in which money counts more than people, and some people count more than others. I am talking about a savage form of capitalism that is incompatible with the slightest vestige of democracy and has to be destroyed, not changed, modified, or made more compassionate. I am talking about the resurgence of fascism in an updated form in the United States–a fascism without apology.
The rage and outbursts we are witnessing throughout the United States is an act of mass street resistance against a society that believes it can kill people of color with impunity; it is an act of resistance that refuses a future defined by racial violence, massive inequality and the descent into authoritarianism. It is everybody’s fight because it is a struggle for equality, justice, and a radical democracy.
The lethal force of systemic racism is now front and center in American society, visible in the visible, needless death of black people, in the smoldering enclaves of poverty in so many cities, in the images of black men and women terrorized by police who embrace the logic of a racialized militarized society. The force of a deadly racism now occupies the highest levels of political authority in the United States, symbolized in the presence of a Donald Trump and his syncophantic party of white supremacy. Trump is the endpoint of a capitalism on steroids. He revels in the intensification of racist violence and the ethos of a fascist politics. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Trump reveals his authoritarian and militarized instincts by threatening protesters with violence, the unleashing of “vicious dogs” and ominous weapons” if they breach the White House fence. As Harvey Wasserman argues he is “our Imperial Vulture come home to roost” and he is the contemporary symbol for legitimating and implementing the violence of racial cleansing and the plague of state terrorism. He is the face of fascist terror, but only the face. What is behind that ugly brutal veneer is much worse.
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