By Ian Ortega
I used to parrot the same lines that were always rehashed out for me. I kept on thinking that blacks in America had themselves to blame. And with America cropping up examples of successful blacks, not forgetting the first Black President, I was convinced that the long days of racism were over. That if for anything, blacks should take responsibility and stop playing victims.
Little did I know that this gave more credence to the systematic racism that has become of America. The US Criminal Justice System has time and again proven itself to be racist in nature.
Videos crop up every day; fellow blacks share stories of being constantly stopped and searched by Police for no reason except the colour of their skins. Reading the mainstream news, one would think the Ugandan Police is more violent than the US Police. In reality, the American Police is more violent. A 2013 study found out that 313 African Americans had been killed by Police and other security agents in 2012. That brings the number to one black person being killed every 28 hours in America. That’s not all; China with a bigger population and land size recorded a total of 12 killings by its law enforcers in 2014. That implies, one person murdered in China is an equivalent of 26 African-Americans murdered in the US.
For a country whose black citizenry is 13.1% of the nation’s population to make up 40% of the prison population is simply absurd and should make us raise more questions.
Is it true that indeed blacks use more drugs than whites? A 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference). Yet, blacks are buttonholed more by the Police. More blacks have been incarcerated for drugs related crimes than their white counterparts.
If the War on Drugs has succeeded in anything, it is to prove that a nation can afford to be perpetually at war with its own people and still have the full support of human rights activists around the world.
For most Ugandans back home, America is the self-righteous god of gods, the country of perfection. It is the baseline upon which we compare our own systems. We compare our Ugandan Police to the American Police. If one were to take a random survey, majority Ugandans would think the Ugandan Police was more brutal, and committed many human rights crimes which is not the case.
The election of Barack Obama as American President didn’t signify the end of racism in America; it signified a re-brand and redesign of that racism. By choosing to target black men through the war on drugs (which has failed of course), America has succeeded in reducing a section of its citizens to second-class.
In the words of Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow”
““In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
America has played us by the politics of responsibility. The mass incarceration has achieved more than what slavery achieved in the past. Nothing has succeeded more than this systemic racism.
We can continue to think that the Martin Luther Dream is now a reality or awaken to the fact that it’s still a mirage. We can go ahead and crop up examples of the blacks that have made it (cream rises to the top) and use that to blind ourselves to the US criminal system as we denigrate the systems back home.
After all, America is ever right even when it’s wrong. When we are searching for the definition of what’s right and what’s wrong, or what’s the best course and what’s virtue, America, has promised, it will offer us the answers.
Alternatively, the Ugandans in the self-flagellation of their systems and institutions could choose to stop looking to America for answers. Its results don’t suggest evidence that they have those answers. In awakening, we can turn our heads of Ayatollah Khomeini, the protagonist in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. For he saw America and the West for what it was. He always said; “they’re never going to accept us no matter what we do, so we might as well just do our own thing and be proud of who we are.”
Taking that alternative is choosing to burn the bridge on worship upon which we’ve marched while singing in unison; “In America we trust.