Fighting racism

This year’s annual White House protest on January 11 featured something not felt in years: hope that Guantánamo might actually close. In 2014, the Obama administration released 28 men from the prison – the most since Obama took office. Years of advocacy was at last bearing real fruit.
Something else bolstered the protesters’ spirits: the recent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. With it came both an obligation and an opportunity to again deepen the analysis of state power, connect more dots and link struggles.
The starting point is a chilling parallel, delivered by the collision of news cycles. From the failure on December 3 of a grand jury to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner, countless Americans concluded that there is no justice for black and brown people. The rule of law stands broken because laws are not enforced equally. Just days later, the Senate released its report on CIA interrogations, which plainly revealed violations of law. But no one involved with the torture programme will face any legal consequence. White police may get away with murder, just as the national security establishment may get away with torture.
Race and even religion have had only a muted place in the rhetoric of the domestic opposition to Guantánamo and torture. Arguments about damage to the nation’s laws, values and security typically lead. But Guantánamo is unique as a place for the indefinite detention of exclusively Muslim men. The detainees – only a tiny fraction of whom may be described as radical jihadis – certainly see themselves as victims of racial-religious anti-Muslim persecution. And some make connections between their treatment and racism in the United States.
Their conversations suggest final parallels. Behind so much racial profiling lies the equation of blackness with criminality. Islamophobia, at root, marks all Muslims as potential terrorists. Supporting both prejudices is the assumption that the lives, dignity and rights of some people are more worth defending than those of others.
In dialogue with diverse voices, Witness Against Torture pieced together this skeletal analysis linking Ferguson and Guantánamo. The next step was to take it into the streets, the US Capitol and the DC jail. The group decided not to speak out on behalf of an abstract, universal humanity, even as it invoked universal rights. Instead, it chose to acknowledge its status as a mostly white group working to break white silence and to invite other whites to do the same.
This effort to link issues and movements comes with familiar risks. One is a real or perceived opportunism, wherein partisans of a particular cause enter into coalitions primarily to enhance the prestige of their ‘own issue’. Another is that making connections between oppressions can blur important, qualitative distinctions between them, diminishing the autonomy of individual struggles.
Related to this, viewing all problems as horribly systemic can lead to the conclusion that the whole system must come down for anything to be solved. The push for sensible goals and urgent imperatives (like grand jury reform or the speedy release of more men from Guantánamo, whatever the final disposition of the prison), recedes behind the cosmic goal. Finally, white protestations of anti-racism can easily become mawkish displays of self-righteousness serving to elevate whites.
Aware of these perils, the anti-torture activists making trouble on a rainy January day in Washington, DC, did not feel stopped by them. Singing as they marched through the city, the protesters shifted from the lyrics memorialising victims of police violence to those of another of Luke Nephew’s songs: “We’re gonna build a nation/That don’t torture no one/But it’s gonna take courage/for that change to come.”
Excerpted from: ‘Fighting Racism and Torture from Ferguson to Guantánamo’.
Courtesy” Commondreams.org