US abuse of black men a prelude to scandalPage 2 of 2 -- While looking at the photos of Iraqi prisoners bound, wired, and beaten, one must not forget that in 1992, not even the videotape that showed King's beating, in which he received a fractured skull, was enough to shock sense into the jury in Simi Valley, Calif. The jury acquitted the police officers on almost all charges. That jury had no African-Americans on it.
This humiliation, it should be clear, grew under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Federal drug laws that treated black offenders far more harshly than white offenders began during the Reagan and elder Bush years, but President Clinton did little to change the laws in his eight years. No one even talks about black prisoners under the younger Bush. African-American prisoners, it turns out, were a prelude to Iraq. Congress and the White House said they needed to wage a war on drugs, the weapon of mass destruction in inner cities. After lots of hard police work and community activism, violence in the streets has been significantly "pacified" on the surface. But how long the streets stay peaceful is unknown as the nation continues, through its wild spending on defense and tax cuts to the rich, to turn its back on education for working-class and low-income communities. All it does is throw mandatory tests at ill-prepared, easily discouraged youth. Black men are criminalized to the point where one out of every three African-American boys faces the prospect of jail at some point in his life. Black men can't even drive without facing a significantly higher chance of being stopped by police. Black men can count on innocent people being periodically brutalized. Who can forget the 41 bullets New York police pumped into the unarmed Amadou Diallo? Or the retired black minister, Accelyne Williams, who was literally scared to death by Boston police in a botched drug raid? Or the New York police sodomizing of Abner Louima? Or the shootings, beatings, and stranglings that barely make the papers and end up as justifiable homicides? The Iraq abuse scandal shows how America keeps forgetting its mistakes at home. Rumsfeld says the abuse was un-American. African-American men remain the proof that abuse is an American pastime.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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