|
By: Daniel Hamidi June 3, 2020
The recent police murder of George Floyd has led communities across the United States and the planet to contend with questions of institutional anti-Blackness and state violence. For 8 minutes and 46 seconds, a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee against Floyd’s neck, ruthlessly ignoring Floyd’s insistence that he could not breathe, leading to his heartbreaking death. How do we make sense of the law enforcement arm of United States, a country that proclaims liberty and justice for all, gratuitously ending precious Black life in broad daylight? George Floyd caught the global spotlight, but police killing is a devastatingly common feature of American life, including the recent killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman EMT who died this past March when police officers barged into her Louisville apartment under the false impression that a suspect of a drug crime kept drugs or money at her home, shooting more than 20 rounds of bullets that fatally struck Taylor eight times. According to MappingPoliceViolence.org, in 2019 alone, U.S. police killed 1,098 people, with Black people constituting 24% of deaths despite being only 13% of the overall population. What must we do to put a halt to police brutality once and for all? What would a system of public safety and accountability that serves everyone look like?
Importantly, police brutality is one component of a broader picture of U.S. state violence, frequently animated by white supremacy. There is the closely interconnected jail and prison system, which currently incarcerates about 2.3 million people, more than any other nation, including China, whose overall population is more than four times greater than that of the United States. This includes over 555,000 people who have not been convicted of a crime—people who are legally innocent awaiting trial—most of whom remain in jail due to an inability to afford exorbitant bail costs. In other words, hundreds of thousands of people are incarcerated in U.S. jails simply as a result of their socioeconomic status. Crucially, the incarcerated population is disproportionately Black and Brown. The national incarceration rate for Black people is 5.12 times greater than that of white people. For indigenous people, it is 2.87 times greater, and for Latinx people it is 1.85 times greater. Mass incarceration wreaks havoc on Black and Brown communities, separating families, leaving children without parents, inflicting intergenerational harm. Given the harsh, punitive (as opposed to restorative) approach of the U.S. criminal justice system, incarceration traumatizes inmates, decreasing their ability to reintegrate into society upon release. Moreover, formerly incarcerated people face major barriers toward housing and employment and often lose their voting rights.
In addition to domestic state violence, the U.S. engages in a violent migration policy. In 2019, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported more than 267,000 people from the U.S., many of whom were seeking refuge from urgent conditions such as gang violence in their home countries but did not qualify for asylum by current legal standards. In addition to separating families, often keeping undocumented parents from their citizen children, deportations frequently lead to death when migrants flee gangs, as gangs engage in retaliatory killings to intimidate other people from emigrating from their home countries. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 138 people deported to El Salvador from 2013 to 2019 were murdered, and at least 70 were sexually assaulted, extorted, or tortured. The U.S.’s policy of exclusion toward Black and Brown Latin American migrants stands in stark contrast to its centuries-long inclusive approach toward white Europeans fleeing famine, poverty, and violence.
There is also the issue of U.S. foreign policy violence, centrally relevant to Iranians. The United States military currently occupies Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, regularly killing civilians, treating them as collateral damage. Consider the case of the illegal 2003 American invasion and occupation of Iraq, which U.S. oil companies continue to profit from. According to Brown University’s Cost of War Project, at least 268,000 people died from the American occupation of Iraq, including at least 182,000 Iraqi civilians. Like police murders, these deaths are analogous to 21st century lynching, a historically white nation terrorizing and ending the lives of Black and Brown people without any meaningful sense of accountability. In the case of Yemen, the U.S. military continues to support the Saudi dictator’s proxy war with Iran there, which brutalizes Yeminis. In August 2018, a U.S. bomb murdered 40 children in a Yemeni school bus.
As Iranians, we are all too aware of the destructive impact of racialized U.S. foreign policy. After a history of monarchy and dictatorship, Iranians began reaching secular democracy in the twentieth century, culminating in the prime ministership of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1951. To promote Iranian economic prosperity and autonomy, Mosaddegh’s government nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which had hoarded oil profits in the hands of British investors. As a result, British intelligence and the U.S. CIA co-sponsored a coup d’etat of Mossadegh’s democracy in 1953, giving Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Shah totalitarian control over Iran. These two powerful, historically white nations seized executive authority over the destinies of the Black and Brown Iranian people, parallel to the way police, prisons, and ICE all-too-often determine Black and Brown people’s fates.
Today, Iranians face oppression at the hands of two governments, the Islamic Republic and the U.S., with the latter collectively punishing Iranians for the actions of the former. U.S. sanctions continue to devalue the rial and raise Iran’s cost of living, starving the Iranian poor and working-class. In November 2019, Iranians took to the streets to protest inflation, leading to the Islamic Republic’s brutal massacre of at least 180 protestors. Sadly, Iranians are all too familiar with state violence, being under the control of a government which disrespects human rights and disregards the value of human life. In addition to sanctions, there is ongoing threat of war between the U.S. and Iran, especially given the January 2020 U.S. drone killing of Islamic Republic General Qasem Soleimani. While those of us who are not Black do not experience the full force of anti-Blackness, Iranians are intimately aware of what it means for our lives to be at the mercy of an overreaching government’s power, both in the context of the Islamic Republic and the U.S. Given Trump’s recent travel ban on Iranians and longstanding barriers toward Iranian emigration, it can be said that the borders of Iran function as prison, entrapping people who want to leave Iran to remain under the control of the Islamic Republic, denying them the human right to freedom of movement, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps this mirrors mass incarceration of Black and Brown people in the United States.
As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wisely posited in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All [humans] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” Let us stand with our Black siblings and fellow siblings of color facing state violence and build solidarity across communities, for all of our liberations are intertwined.
|