{"id":76361,"date":"2020-06-05T18:32:57","date_gmt":"2020-06-05T23:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/?p=76361"},"modified":"2020-06-05T18:32:57","modified_gmt":"2020-06-05T23:32:57","slug":"police-brutality-protests-highlight-racial-disparities-in-challenging-injustice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/76361\/opinion\/police-brutality-protests-highlight-racial-disparities-in-challenging-injustice\/","title":{"rendered":"Police Brutality Protests Highlight Racial Disparities in Challenging Injustice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those that condemn the nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd as riots destroying law, property and order demonstrate the continuing application of a great contraction established before American independence: that two people of different races, black and white, have a fundamentally different and unequal capacity to challenge injustices levied against them. This contradiction establishes an invisible apartheid, an \u201c<\/span>existential deviation<\/span><\/a>,\u201d in the words of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, that structurally inhibits injustices against the black community to be remedied with the same tools which the white community employ. <\/span> To John Adams, the Boston massacre \u2014 in which eight British soldiers fired into a harassing mob \u2014 was where \u201c<\/span>the foundation of independence was laid<\/span><\/a>.\u201d The injustice of British soldiers firing into a mob triggered the riots, regardless of whether the British were physically provoked. A mob of 1,000 people rioted violently for a day. In order to ease tensions, all soldiers involved with the shooting were arrested and British soldiers evacuated the city. Violent protest against police brutality was celebrated, immortalized and propagated throughout the colonies to spark revolution. However, this is not the complete story. While the massacre was lionized by patriots trying to incite rebellion, one victim of the massacre was being smeared in court. John Adams <\/span>blamed the whole event on<\/span><\/a> the half-black, half-Native American Crispus Attucks, the first casualty of the massacre, whose \u201cvery look was enough to terrify any person\u201d and to whose \u201cmad behavior, in all probability, the dreadful carnage of the night is chiefly to be described.\u201d Adams was defending the British soldiers in court and, with this racially charged defense, acquitted six of the eight soldiers. Attucks \u2014 the first casualty \u2014 was blamed for inciting the violence of the night. Christopher Monk, a white man merely wounded in the massacre, became representative of the revolutionary zeitgeist: violent resistance against British occupation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The signers of the <\/span>Declaration of Independence<\/span><\/a> resolved that \u201cit is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government\u201d that produces \u201ca long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism.\u201d What actions did they take to resolve their grievances, to alleviate the injustices they felt subjugated to? They tarred and feathered tax officials and those informing on colonial smugglers, sanctioning torture in protest of British injustice. Britain\u2019s reaction \u2014 attempting to promote law and order by instituting the Intolerable Acts \u2014 marks the moment in which the colonies deemed it their moral duty to declare independence. It was common sense, as <\/span>Thomas Paine described<\/span><\/a>, that \u201cviolence which is done and threatened to our persons \u2026 conscientiously qualifies the use of arms,\u201d regardless of whether the colonists were the first to use violence.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Shays\u2019 Rebellion, occurring in a newly independent America in 1787, reaffirmed the inherent right to violence in pursuit of justice. Angered by taxation, white farmers rebelled in western Massachusetts in a violent attempt to overthrow the government. After Massachusetts suppressed the rebellion, Shays was pardoned. <\/span>Thomas Jefferson wrote<\/span><\/a> that no other rebellion was \u201cso honorably conducted.\u201d Jefferson continued that \u201cthe tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jefferson\u2019s enthused support for violent insurrection against injustice remained conspicuously absent during the Haitian Revolution, Gabriel\u2019s rebellion and Denmark Vesey\u2019s rebellion. Through his silence, Jefferson set a precedent that denied moral legitimacy to violent black rebellions fighting much clearer injustices than any white America had to face, a precedent reinforced throughout American history.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Battle of the Alamo has long been enshrined in American culture as a heroic stand of individual liberty against Mexican oppression. Heroes such as Davy Crockett sacrificed themselves for the cause. Never mind most of the fighters at the Alamo were illegal American immigrants. Never mind these Americans were invariably southern slave owners. Never mind that the antagonists of the Texan Revolution were the laws of April 6, 1830, Mexico\u2019s attempts to outlaw slavery in Texas. Never mind that. The Alamo remains in the American consciousness today, reinforced by museums, monuments and United States stamps celebrating American heroism in defending slavery.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1854, while serving as ambassador to Great Britain, James Buchanan hosted a party for Italian revolutionaries Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi, along with other European revolutionaries. Mazzini and Garibaldi advocated for and eventually led a violent rebellion to achieve Italian unification. Buchanan <\/span>declared as president<\/span><\/a> that the \u201cgreat object\u201d of his administration would be to \u201carrest, if possible, the agitation of the slavery question.\u201d What difference was there in the struggle for liberty between the Italian intelligentsia and the American slaves? The oppressed in Italy were white, while the American slaves were black. Never mind the Italians were still free while black Americans were enslaved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

An ignorant critic might protest that these actions were in the remote past and that no such paradox exists today. Did the Civil Rights movement succeed in eradicating the dichotomy between remedies available to the white and black persecuted? I say no. The great strides advanced by the black community during the Civil Rights movement were not achieved by using the instruments proven by America\u2019s founders for fighting white injustice. These instruments \u2014 violent protest and armed insurrection \u2014 remained and remain to this day unavailable to the black community. Instead, civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. created a form of protest alien to the United States and Western thought: nonviolent civil disobedience. Nonviolent protest, whose modern form was first articulated by Gandhi \u2014 inspired by Leo Tolstoy and Eastern thought \u2014 had not been seen before in the United States. Denied the tool of violence America\u2019s founders used to rectify injustice, Martin Luther King had no choice but to adopt nonviolent protest, which was designed to overthrow the tyrannical minority through the power of the oppressed majority. Therein lies the weakness in the Civil Rights movement. Denied a majority, nonviolent protest can never fully succeed unless the majority \u2014 the beneficiary of whatever injustice is occurring \u2014 agrees to voluntarily give up their benefits to alleviate the suffering of the minority.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots. <\/span>The commission concluded that<\/span><\/a> \u201cour nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white\u2014separate and unequal.\u201d The commission continued that \u201cwhat white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget\u2014is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.\u201d This report was promptly ignored. We have continued in our path toward two societies\u00a0 \u2014 two societies separated socially, economically and politically. But even worse, one society refuses the other the instruments needed to bridge this separation. We must now ask ourselves whether white society will continue to be blind to the cruel radiance of the<\/span> racial disparities of civil discontent.<\/span><\/p>\n

Matthew Biedermann, FCRH \u201822, is an international political economy major from Bedford, N.H.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those that condemn the nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd as riots destroying law, property and order demonstrate the continuing application of a great contraction established before American independence: that two people of different races, black and white, have a fundamentally different and unequal capacity to challenge injustices levied against them. This…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":76364,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[53,12],"tags":[4596,7815,2224,2227,2377,2408],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76361"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76361"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76366,"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76361\/revisions\/76366"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fordhamram.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}