Dr. Huey P. Newton was quite clear in revealing what mattered to police and the power structure they serve. Black lives did not matter to them in the mid-1960s, and they seem not to matter to them today. When Black men, women, and children gathered in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the police killing of Mike Brown, they were met by a phalanx of militarized forces, armed with weapons of war. What has really changed? Did things improve under Barack Obama? How do you think things are going to go under Donald Trump?
Have Black lives ever mattered?
HATE CRIMES
June 14, 1998
The barbaric torture and murder of James Byrd Jr. by three white men—Shawn A. Berry, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and John W. King—in the tiny Texas town of Jasper has become a summertime feast for an insatiable American media, but it is a meal that consists largely of spectacle. On June 7, 1998, Berry, King, and Brewer offered Mr. Byrd a ride home. Instead, they shackled Mr. Byrd’s feet to a chain and dragged him behind their truck for miles.7
The vigor with which the latest race murder is being covered is strikingly contrasted with the lackluster coverage of a similar case from over a year ago in Virginia, where a young Black man, in the company of a few white drinking buddies, was beaten, burned, and as he took too long to die, decapitated with an ax.
Why is one story a national firestorm, and another a local curiosity? Why is one an unquestioned hate crime, and the other merely a case of “boys being boys,” or a bad mix of liquor and bad company?
This is so because the media said it was so, and because the local police told them this.
When is a hate crime a hate crime? When it is a crime of hate, or when the police say it is? And if the cops are to be the arbiters of what is, or isn’t, a hate crime, who will judge the cops without bias?
In late April 1998, New Jersey state troopers pumped over 11 shots into a van occupied by four Black and Hispanic students who were on their way to basketball tryouts at Central University in North Carolina, seriously wounding three of the four young men. Thanks to the infamous “racial profiling” program of the New Jersey State Police, the four never made it to tryouts that day because they were found guilty of the unwritten crime of DWB—Driving While Black. Despite a rain of lies alleging that the basketball players were speeding, attempted to run the cops down, and so on, it soon became clear that the boys had done nothing—nothing except exist. Ain’t each of the 11 bullet holes evidence of a hate crime?
In Chicago a man named Carl Hardiman was shot and wounded by a city cop for refusing to drop his “weapon”—a cell phone. Ain’t that a hate crime?
New York Black Panther Shep McDaniel was brutally beaten by six cops in the Bronx as he attempted to peacefully monitor and note an altercation between police and two women. New York’s finest shouted, “He’s a crazy, fucking, nigger!” as they punched, kicked, stomped, and cuffed McDaniel. A jury later acquitted McDaniel of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. Was not his beating, brutalization, trumped-up arrest and bogus prosecution a hate crime?
On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a home in a residential Black neighborhood where 11 men, women, and children—members of the naturalist MOVE group—were incinerated and dismembered by cops. The sole adult survivor, Ramona Africa, was prosecuted, convicted, and sent to prison for seven years. Ain’t that a hate crime?
In many ways, Black America remains captive to its feverish, hateful history in a land that daily mocks the claim to being “the home of the free.” We have become conditioned by corporate mis-leaders who make a spectacle out of occasional acts of racial hatred, while ignoring the structural ones that degrade the everyday life of millions of Americans.
Why do we pay attention to the retail acts of anti-Black violence, while ignoring the wholesale? Far more dangerous than the white-robed KKK is the legalized malice of the black-robed judiciary. Far more destructive than the Aryan Nation are the local, armed, and uniformed police who are legal agents of an ancient, deadly hatred.
THE LAW AGAINST THE LAW
June 20, 1998
“If it took the White majority more than two hundred years to understand that slavery was wrong, and approximately one hundred years to realize that segregation was wrong (and many still don’t understand), how long will it take them to perceive that American criminal justice is evil?”8
—Paul Butler
As long ago as 1880, the United States Supreme Court, in Strauder v. West Virginia, ruled that the “defendant does have the right to be tried by a jury whose members are selected pursuant to nondiscriminatory criteria.” Over a century later, in 1986, the nation’s highest court reiterated this principle in Batson v. Kentucky, for although a century had passed, it remained all too common for trials to be conducted before all-white, or predominantly white, juries, in cases where it appeared as if, besides the defendant, only the judge’s robes were black. It also shows us that no matter what the Supreme Court does, the judiciary, prosecutors, and police will do what they want to with impunity, especially when Blacks are defendants. For, if Strauder was the “law” why did it need reiteration in Batson?
Strauder was ignored in U.S. courtrooms for 106 years, just as Batson is today. As any law student knows, the theory of law is vastly different from its practice. Shortly after Batson was decided in 1986, an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia gave a class to district attorney trainees, teaching them how to violate the spirit of Batson by ensuring that most Blacks would be removed from jury pools. Much time has passed since Batson, and yet cases are upheld today where a Black defendant sees Black jurors removed for bogus reasons. What is the “law”? What the Supreme Court says, or what district attorneys do? What the cases say, or what trial judges allow?
The “law” is what is allowed every day in real cases, in real courtrooms, across America, and not what is written in dry, dusty books read by hoary scholars. Seen from this perspective, Batson is still not the law, despite what books may say. And if the process is not tainted enough, what of the consequences of such a process?
Recently, the governor of a state that boasts a spate of Batson violations—Pennsylvania—signed Senate Bill 423 into law, thereby enacting a statute that forbids a death penalty appeal based on the following:
a) claims that Blacks are more likely to be executed for the same crime than whites;
b) claims that an indigent defendant is more likely to be executed than a rich one;
c) claims that a death sentence is excessive or disproportionate to the penalty imposed in similar cases.
This is, essentially, a law against the “law.” It is a proclamation of the supremacy of the political over the legal. It is a statute that explicitly enforces the value that white life matters and Black life does not. It is a law of the state that exclaims the inherent superiority of the wealthy over the poor, and that allows the basest disproportion to masquerade as “justice.”
It is a statement that reflects a hellish, unequal status quo that still has not changed no matter what the U.S. Supreme Court says, and no matter how many times it says it.
It is the law of what was, what is, and what may be.