Useless reforms

There is a scene in the new film “Judas and the Black Messiah,” directed by Shaka King and produced by Ryan Coogler, in which Chairman Fred Hampton of the Illinois Black Panther Party explains to a group of Black students that just because their school was allowing them to change its name to “Malcolm X College” did not mean they were now free from oppression.

Hampton, who is played by actor Daniel Kaluuya in the film, clarified that there is a “difference between revolution and the candy-coated façade of gradual reform.” Hampton, a real-life revolutionary who was murdered by the state in 1969 at just 21 years of age, was ultimately seen as the greater danger to American society than white supremacy and racism.

Indeed “candy-coated” reform is all that most politicians have offered Black communities in America for decades. Evidence of it abounds in the form of damning statistical measures showing racial discrimination against Black Americans in health (including from the novel coronavirus), law enforcement, criminal justice, voting rights, education, employment (including during the pandemic), housing, and life expectancy before and especially during the past year.

The starkest symbol of how little the lives of Black people mean to the state are the ongoing reckless killings by police that almost always go unpunished. In one of the more recent and widely covered instances, the brutal police killing of Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York, that took place nearly a year ago as he lay naked, hooded, and handcuffed in the middle of the street, has gone unpunished after a grand jury declined to press charges.

Although a medical examiner ruled that he had died from “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint,” and the police initially refused to release the incriminating and deeply disturbing video of his last conscious minutes of life, it seems that there will be no justice for Prude.

Prude, like countless other Black people killed by police — whether they were women like Breonna Taylor, or children like Tamir Rice — are sacrifices to the altar of white supremacy. They are daily reminders of the bottom-rung status that Black people occupy in the American consciousness. Even George Floyd, whose deadly videotaped encounter with Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was so egregious and widely viewed that even Donald Trump, among some of the nation’s most vociferous white supremacists, could not immediately deny the injustice that unfolded, is yet to receive justice.

Floyd would have likely been alive today had Chauvin only been held accountable for the previous incidentsin which he attempted to use fatal force, including at least one in which he placed his knee on the neck of a Black suspect.

Meanwhile, all that is offered up in response to widespread anger over police killings are more examples of “candy-coated” reform.

Excerpted: ‘Black Lives Still Don’t Matter in America’

Counterpunch.org