USA: Racial violence, an old practice of structural racism

A cry of protest is heard from the belly of the beast, from the heart of the empire, echoing around the world. The slogan is Black Lives Matter , Justice for George . On Monday, May 25 , in Minneapolis, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was detained without legal cause by four police officers. One of them, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck until he died, despite George Floyd pleading for approximately seven minutes that he couldn't breathe. Floyd, who played basketball and football and was a public figure in the local hip-hop scene, appeared in a video a few days before his murder, giving advice to young people on how to deal with racism. The world, through social media and mass media, has witnessed this massive racist act of dehumanization and humiliation, culminating in death. Across the globe, we were able to see the video of the crime, practically live. As actor Will Smith aptly put it in reaction to Floyd's murder, "Racism isn't getting worse, it's just being filmed now."

The revelation of this act of ethnocide, which occurs daily to Black people in the US and Brazil, brought to light what must be understood as the everyday reality of racially motivated murder. As the Latin American Council for Social Sciences, it is crucial that this prompts us to think critically and act in an anti-racist manner. The murder of George Floyd was not a singular event nor an isolated and particular act of ethnic-racial aggression; it is symptomatic of a profound systemic problem, a key component of the power matrix that governs the modern/colonial world-system, as Aníbal Quijano aptly argued.

The streets of Minneapolis erupted with frustration and rage, primarily from marginalized Black communities who suffer daily from racial violence expressed through police brutality, unemployment, denial of basic services (such as education, housing, and healthcare), cultural devaluation, and a lack of political power. These Minneapolis rebellions follow a long tradition of urban uprisings by Black communities in response to structural racism, one of whose main manifestations is the racist violence of police forces. In the US, these forces have a long history as bearers of racist cultures that promote the stereotype of Black men as dangerous outlaws (and who, as such, deserve to be arrested without cause and subjected to their coercive authority). Sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod, in her seminal book * Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles* , demonstrates how, throughout the 20th century, acts of police racial brutality catalyzed urban rebellions in these three American cities. The viral image of a burning police station in Minneapolis expresses the fury of popular anger and the decay of the racist regime.

In 2014, the murder of Michael Brown (also Black) in Ferguson at the hands of another white police officer, who then left him for several hours, sparked a wave of protests that resonated not only locally and nationally but also globally. From this emerged a movement called Black Lives Matter, capable not only of revitalizing radical Black activism in the United States but also of articulating diverse struggles and demands for identity (Black, feminist, LGBTQIA+, anti-imperialist, community-labor coalitions, etc. ), spearheaded primarily by Black women. The police killing of Black lives has been a normalized practice since the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slave regimes instituted slavery as a form of social death (as Orlando Patterson argues) through the dehumanization and exclusion of enslaved people. Dehumanization points to necropolitics that involve both active practices of physical and symbolic death (denial of recognition and representation of cultures, knowledge, and citizenship), as well as the invisibility and normalization of such racial violence, which, in turn, desensitizes us to it. This is why it is vital that on occasions like this, in light of the murder of George Floyd, we rigorously reflect on its implications, what it reveals about the malaise in which we live in the present, and the possibilities for building futures.

Police violence based on racial bias is a long-standing practice rooted in structural racism. A look at recent history, focusing on cases in the US since the 1980s, highlights a list of notable instances of police killings of Black people, including Michael Griffith, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Atatiana Jefferson, Aiyana Jones, Jessie Hernandez, and Tanisha Anderson. In 2014, Eric Garner was choked in a manner similar to George Floyd, and as he lay dying at the hands of the police officer, he pleaded for his life, saying he couldn't breathe. Beyond the literal meaning, both Garner and Floyd, by stating they couldn't breathe, were revealing their social death within a system that dehumanizes them daily. Their pleas resonated with Frantz Fanon's assertion that the dominant social and racial order prevents Black people and individuals from breathing.

The metaphor of being unable to breathe refers to the forms of death caused by the coronavirus pandemic, which has pushed to its limits the civilizational crisis that our Working Group is addressing. The death technologies of the imperial state are dramatically exposed by the extraordinary number of people of African descent who have perished from COVID-19 in the US, making it the fourth country with the highest death toll on the planet. As two Afro-Brazilian activists say, “ The coronavirus doesn’t choose who it will kill, but states choose who can die .” The grotesque irresponsibility and insensitivity of Bolsonaro and Trump, in the face of the lethal equation of the pandemic in Brazil and the US, which are currently its focal points, is largely due to their practice of the necropolitics of anti-Black racism.

In light of this Thanatos scenario , which in Colombia also translates into political assassinations of Afro-descendant leaders, especially in their ancestral territories but also in areas of urban marginalization, the Black movements of the Americas raise the banner of life. From Alaska to Patagonia, the systemic racism that guides the actions of the state's repressive forces finds in Afro-descendant and racialized bodies the foreign element to be annihilated. Against the logic of death that increasingly prevails in the civilizational crisis of neoliberal capitalist globalization, the Black movements of Our Afro-America advocate for the collective construction of a better world, based on ecological harmony, ethnic-racial and gender equity, respect for sexual diversity, communitarianism, collective care, human solidarity, and the just redistribution of wealth and power. These principles define us as a radical and progressive Afro-descendant movement. Taken together, these values ​​constitute a decolonial policy of liberation, an ethic of good living that in the key of Africanism we name as the principle of Ubuntu, which in several African languages ​​means I am because we are.

More than a future horizon, we build Ubuntu daily with our community practices in the Uramba festivals in the Afro-South American Pacific, in Caribbean Marronage , in Afro-diasporic Malungage , which inspire our participation in the wave of anti-systemic movements that preceded the pandemic, and which are already resurfacing in the exercise of care that guides a kind of democratization of democracy and humanization of humanity from radical black humanism, cultivating a new social contract based on collective care and solidarity, for the sake of life.

May 29th 2020
CLACSO Working Group
Civilizational crisis, reconfigurations of racism,
Afro-Latin American social movements

This statement expresses the position of the Working Group on Civilizational Crisis, Reconfigurations of Racism, Afro-Latin American Social Movements and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.