All of us know that police
brutality is a universal phenomenon. Whether it’s South Africa, Australia,
Brazil, Canada, USA, South Sudan, Kenya; police brutality is a known fact.
However, police brutality in
the United States of America, Brazil (and sometimes Canada) has a twisted
racio-historical paradigm that makes it unsettlingly pernicious with it racial profiling and preconceived badness of outgroup races.
Young African-American men that
are routinely killed by police fall within a theoretical psycho-social,
ethno-economic space created for them by centuries of racial degradation.
European-American police officers are themselves victims of their upbringing. They
are mentally tortured souls through years of home race schooling. With brutal
efficiency, they are fed with the pernicious falsehood that African-American
young men are violent ‘good-for-nothing’ animals. This is a reality no one
should explain to African-Americans because they know it better. Ironically, racists are deadly people who
need help to see the inevitable and irreversible social and historical changes.
America is a racially confused and lost nation imprisoned by its own creation.
As a South Sudanese, I have my
own share of racial degradation; however; the paradigms though not the same,
are not that markedly different. South Sudanese were subjected to centuries of
slave raids by Arab merchants; and South Sudanese we treated like second class
citizens in their own country because of their religio-racial realities. Villages were razed to the ground, millions of
women and children either killed or displaced from their homes…all in the name
of racial and religious inferiority.
The saddest thing about the
problem in the United States is the manner in which young men try to defy
people who have a robotic perception of them. European-American police officers
with years of false indoctrination have little sympathy for people they see as
menace to society. And their perceptive falsehood should be seen as the tip of
the iceberg in what Margaret Cannon calls an ‘invisible empire.’
It’s very crucial for parents,
community leaders and activists, city councillors, legislators, church leaders
and other stakeholders, to teach kids that resisting police is not a show of manhood
or virility but a suicide mission. Submission to police is not weakness but a cognitive necessity to have one live another day to learn and contribute towards changing the police and
European-American mindset.
Some of these police officers
have been brought up to think in a prejudicial manner and to get rid of their mindset,
if they are really ready to let it go, would take years of unlearning.
America is theoretically
desegregated but practically it’s not. And this segregation is both
historically racial and contemporarily economical. American is a psychological prison as a function of race.
While police academies are
taking cultural and racial sensitivities into consideration, it’s crucial to
embark on preventative programs of education and simple instructions on how to
handle police and their brutality. There are of course bigoted European-American police officers
who’d kill African-Americans and lie about it; however, there are some whose
perception of African-Americans is a naïve function of their upbringing and
they need a lot of help to unlearn such fatal and hateful falsehood.
While this might appear like
blaming the victims, it’s a pragmatic message to the living to avoid racial
onslaught of the bigoted European-American police.
Let our kids live another day!
