Killing African Americans

Police and Vigilante Violence as a Racial Control Mechanism

Noel A. Cazenave

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429016134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Diskriminierung & Rassenbeziehungen

Killing African Americans examines the pervasive, disproportionate, and persistent police and vigilante killings of African Americans in the United States as a racial control mechanism that sustains the racial control system of systemic racism. Noel A. Cazenave's well-researched and conceptualized historical sociological study is one of the first books to focus exclusively on those killings and to treat them as political violence. Few issues have received as much conventional and social media attention in the United States over the past few years or have, for decades now, sparked so many protests and so often strained race relations to a near breaking point. Because of both its timely and its enduring relevance, Killing African Americans can reach a large audience composed not only of students and scholars, but also of Movement for Black Lives activists, politicians, public policy analysts, concerned police officers and other criminal justice professionals, and anyone else eager to better understand this American nightmare and its solutions from a progressive and informed African American perspective.

11

THE POLICE AND VIGILANTE KILLINGS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Around midnight on February 4, 1999, as the world contemplated the coming of a new millennium—one in which America might finally cross the “color line” that W.E.B. DuBois had warned would be its great challenge of the twentieth century—reality raised its ugly head for all to see. Amadou Diallo, a street vendor from Guinea, was shot nineteen times by four plainclothes New York City Police (NYPD) officers who, after mistaking him for a suspected rapist, fired a barrage of forty-one bullets as he stood in front of his apartment door in the Bronx holding a wallet in his hand, which they mistook for a gun. His killers were all “members of the NYPD’s cocky Street Crime Unit, whose macho motto was ‘We own the night.’” For African Americans in the nation’s largest city, on that night and many others, they certainly did.¹

Killing African Americans: Past, Present, and Future

That appalling slaughter of an unarmed and hardworking young immigrant who was here seeking the American dream, only to end up enveloped in its racial nightmare, shocked not only this nation but much of the world. There was a profound sense that something was fundamentally wrong in the way the police treated dark-skinned people in the United States and that surely things could not now simply return 2to normal. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened as a verdict was read that cleared all four police officers of any wrongdoing, and an administrative review by the NYPD concluded that the officers had, in fact, acted consistently with departmental guidelines. Although the City of New York later settled a civil suit with Diallo’s family for three million dollars, that criminal trial verdict and the administrative ruling did more than spare those officers any punishment for their reckless actions; they reaffirmed for all to see that American police officers could kill with impunity those they deemed to be “black” and “dangerous.” The slaying of Amadou Diallo was but one of many racially charged acts of police violence that decade in the United States’ premier city, during the racially intense era of the Rudolph Giuliani administration, against men such as Anthony Baez, Abner Louima, Antoine Reid, and Patrick Dorismond. Such violence was so pervasive and routine, not just in New York City but throughout the United States, that it supported historian Manning Marable’s conclusion that “the central civil rights issue of the 1990s was racism within all aspects of the U.S. criminal justice system.”²

From Outrageous to Routine

Unfortunately, for many African Americans, the public outrage over the killing of Amadou Diallo toward the end of that decade seemed to have been snuffed out by a much more powerful and enduring state-issued license to kill on the part of the police: one which makes little if any distinction between the will, the right, and the need to do so. That incident, and its business-as-usual outcome, confirmed that it was indeed possible that there could be no act of police violence so egregious and morally reprehensible that it would force politicians to reform the criminal justice system they build and maintain. Instead, they seemed to echo the ruling articulated by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s determination in the 1857 Dred Scott case that African Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The resilience of such violence and of such an apparent attitude was evident early into the twenty-first century, just two years later, in Cincinnati, Ohio.³

3Timothy Thomas (2001): Racial Tensions Explode in Cincinnati

On April 7, 2001, a European American police officer killed an unarmed African American teenager in Cincinnati’s impoverished Over-the-Rhine neighborhood as he fled arrest for various minor misdemeanors, like his failure to fasten his seat belt. Timothy Thomas was the fifteenth African American male who was shot to death by a Cincinnati police officer over the six-year period from 1995 to 2001. Most of those men were unarmed, and the problem appeared to be escalating. Indeed, Thomas was just the latest of five African Americans killed by the police since September of the previous year.⁴

That shooting did not go over well with the city’s African American residents and their leaders. Peaceful protests were soon overshadowed by violence. During three nights of violent unrest, “dozens of people were injured and more than 800 were arrested before a citywide curfew was imposed” and more than two dozen windows were broken at City Hall—an obvious symbol of white power and aggression. Although, unlike in so many other cases, the officer who killed Thomas—Stephen Roach—was tried, as usual when there is a trial, he was acquitted. Long after the violent protests died down, local African American leaders continued their economic boycott against the city—a boycott they vowed not to end until Cincinnati’s city government settled lawsuits brought against its police for their use of excessive force in handling the unrest that followed Thomas’ killing. The city settled those lawsuits for four and a half million dollars.⁵

Back to the Future: America’s Legacy of Police Killings and Racial Unrest

Such violent protests against what many African Americans see as state-sanctioned repression by the police should have come as no surprise. They were merely a repeat of much larger and more destructive racial rebellions such as those in Watts in 1965, in Newark and Detroit in 1967, in Miami in 1980, and in Los Angeles in 1992, as well as an omen of what was to come in places such as Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and Baltimore the following year. In each case, the violent unrest was 4sparked by an incident of perceived police misconduct and fueled by a long history of unresolved grievances against the local police. They all fit the finding of the 1968 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders report that there was “a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a ‘double standard’ of justice and protection—one for Negroes and one for whites.” That document, which came to be known as the Kerner report, included the results of a survey of a sample of the scores of cities that experienced civil unrest, in which African Americans ranked “police practices” first among their grievances. It concluded that as a nation, the United States was splitting into “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Fast forward to nearly a half-century later, when the author of a highly publicized book on racial inequality in the criminal justice system in the United States has asserted that the appropriate metaphor to describe current race relations in that country is “a colony in a nation,” in which European American citizens of the “nation” receive all of the rights and protections of “law” while the African American residents of its occupied racial “colony” receive only the often violent imposition of its racially repressive “order.”⁶

In the minds of many African Americans, such fatal police violence is closely related to recent vigilante killings that have sparked similar levels of outrage, and have thus become so central to what has evolved into the Movement for Black Lives. For that reason, I have included in this book, as appropriate, examinations of some of the most highly publicized and outrageous cases of vigilante killings of African Americans. I have, however, decided to keep my primary focus on the police killings, for the following reasons. First, there are many more highly publicized police killings as compared to vigilante killings. Second, it is those police killings that are carried out in the name of the state that are most likely to go unpunished. Finally, because they are state-sanctioned and happen with impunity, it is police killings that most effectively reinforce the racist ideology of “black criminality” used to justify still more violence and other forms of racial oppression. However, as the history of the Movement for Black Lives makes clear, African Americans see both police and vigilante violence as racially targeted acts of political violence, 5not as separate and unrelated phenomena. Let’s take a closer look at a few of those vigilante killings that, like their cousin the police killings, continue to terrorize African Americans.

Trayvon Martin (February 2012): American Vigilantism and the New Emmett Till

The best known and most infamous of those vigilante killings, the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, has become as significant to the history of the African American struggle against racial violence in the twenty-first century as the lynching of Emmett Till was in the twentieth century. It is within this socio-historical context that we can best understand the dramatic impact that the killing of seventeen-year-old Martin by a Neighborhood Watch captain of European and Latino descent, George Zimmerman, had and continues to have on American race relations and the collective consciousness and memory of African Americans.⁷

Although vigilante killings in the United States are not officially sanctioned by the state, and the perpetrators are not afforded the same degree of protection as police officers, there is often a strong measure of governmental and popular support. In Florida, they are backed by the state’s highly racialized “Stand Your Ground” law, which empowers gun owners to shoot those who they can then argue presented a threat—even when they have the option of simply removing themselves from harm’s way. To many of them, that “threat” has a color, and that color is black. It was within this environment that—despite the many questions raised about Zimmerman’s “self-defense” account of the shooting, including his need to follow and confront Martin, who wore a hoodie over his head that night to protect himself from the rain—no charges were initially brought. Indeed, it was not until after more than six weeks of both local and national protests that Zimmerman was indicted. Those protests included social media postings of photographs of prominent middle-class and middle-aged African Americans expressing solidarity with Martin by wearing hoodies—the stereotypical image, for many European Americans, of “black” youth criminality.⁸

Nationwide, African Americans found themselves in a state of shock, less than six months after President Obama was inaugurated for his 6second term as the nation’s first African American president, when the jury—which included only one person of color, and which was given instructions on the state’s racially charged Stand Your Ground law, which they discussed during their deliberation, even though Zimmerman did not actually use that defense—acquitted Zimmerman of all charges. No other act of violence had provoked as much outrage among African Americans since the savage and also unpunished murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, nearly six decades earlier. One response by a frustrated, but determined, young African American woman by the name of Alicia Garza was the posting of a message of love for African American people that soon evolved into the twitter hashtag #blacklivesmatter. It is such collective consciousness and memory, and its periodic refueling by still more horrific images of violence against African Americans, that must be understood if we are to comprehend the growth, persistence, and intensity of what came to be known as the Black Lives Matter movement, and more recently the Movement for Black Lives.⁹

When acts of horrific violence go unpunished they have an impact that extends way beyond any particular incident. They create a climate of terror that has resulted in the all too often told story of an African American mother who tightly holds and kisses her teenage son before he leaves home each morning with the knowledge that due to the actions of the police, or today’s lone vigilantes, she may never see him again. And there is yet another consequence of such violence happening with apparent impunity: it may encourage others to take similar actions.

Jordan Davis (November 2012) and Renisha McBride (November 2013): Two More Vigilante Killings, But with Different Endings

In that same state of Florida, nine months after Trayvon Martin was killed, Michael Dunn,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The Police and Vigilante Killings of African Americans in the Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 2: Making Sense of the Killings: Theoretical Insights, Conceptual Framework, and My Racial Control Argument
• Chapter 3: Violence-Centered Racial Control Systems and Mechanisms in U.S. History
• Chapter 4: Police and Vigilante Killings of African Americans as a Racial Control Mechanism
• Chapter 5: Viewing the Killings Through an Economic Lens: Hypercapitalism and the Growth of the American Police State
• Chapter 6: Ground Zero: The Vicious Cycle of Fatal Dominative Encounters
• Chapter 7: Making Black Lives Matter: Lessons Learned and Unfinished Business
• Index
• About the Author