The tragic reality at this time is that there is an acute epidemic of anti-Black racism worldwide. Tragic because actual living, breathing people are being killed by government agents.
In his Washington Post article in 2020 after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, Nana Osei-Opare wrote, “Throughout the last century, the United States has projected itself as a global leader of liberty, democracy, and freedom. But on questions of race, America has consistently been on the wrong side of history — and the world has noticed.
Occupying the perch it does on the world stage, the United States is unavoidably looked at with a keener eye than other countries on the question of human rights than other powerful nations like Russia, China, Iran, etc.
It is not that people are more caustic in their criticisms of the US on human rights abuses but because of the US’s history and its continued posturing and pontificating on the issue while ignoring the glaring abuse of police violence in its own streets.
Aided by the courts’ police and their unions have become so powerful that the United States is now a veritable police state.
The standard for the use of lethal force over the last several decades has deteriorated, the bar lowered so low by the courts that the mere belief in a cop’s mind that someone may pose a danger to them is justification for killing that person gun or not.
Opare went on; the U.S. supported racist European colonial regimes like apartheid South Africa until the 1980s when domestic pressure led by African Americans pushed it to change course. Additionally, at different points in its history domestically, like apartheid South Africa, the U.S. has unleashed the state’s machinery — dogs, water hoses, batons, and rubber bullets or worse — to stymie civil rights protests, black anger, and activism against anti-black violence. Images of this police violence circulated across the globe, clearly contradicting America’s Cold War rhetoric. It showed how totalitarianism and support for white supremacy existed in the U.S.‘s own backyard.
Anti-Black racism is not confined to the United States. However, the stories of state agents blatantly abusing black people are well documented in France, London, and even in war-torn Ukraine. In the United States, as in England, France, and places in between, Police acting with the acquiescence of white racist citizens continue to use racist violence against Black people on racial grounds with devastating consequences.
In the United States, police Unions donate to the campaigns of politicians who end up in their pockets when they are elected. Worse yet, many local Mayors and prosecutors are former cops, which makes it doubly difficult for the victims of police violence to get a fair investigation, much less an indictment of killer cops. If you are wondering why we are trying to bring these events to your attention, please take a look at this incident that occurred in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Would this have happened to a white woman? You decide.