alternet | Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It
is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the
judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or
professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss
issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political
systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling
apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No
discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and
class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed
reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to
murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.
More
training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more
minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more
equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or
reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our
capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor
people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in
the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this
predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially
people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the
streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in
prison cages.
