Revolution #130, May 25, 2008
We Are ALL Sean Bell
We are all Sean Bell…out with friends the night before your wedding, suddenly set upon by armed men who fire 50 shots at you as you sit in your car, unarmed, frantically trying to get out of this sudden-death hell…still handcuffed to the hospital gurney as your parents come to identify your lifeless form six hours after you were killed…your uniformed killers acquitted because they say they “thought” you had a gun…we are all Sean Bell, living in a system that treats every young Black man as a potential criminal, as “fair game” for murder…
We are all Sean Bell…we who get harassed and sweated for walking down the street with a backpack or even nothing at all (50,000 times a month in NYC this year so far!)…we who must assume the position or kiss the pavement, making sure our eyes are looking down, saying “yes sir”…and sometimes even then murdered for a cellphone, a candy bar, a turn of the head, or just getting into a car at 4 in the morning on a street in Queens…we are all Sean Bell, living in a system where you get harassed, imprisoned and murdered for being “the wrong color,” or speaking “the wrong language,” or coming from “the wrong country”…
| Dehumanization and criminalization are hardly reserved for only the rebellious—on May 2, the highest ranking Black officer in the NYPD, Chief Douglas Zeigler, was pulled out of his department-issued SUV by two undercover cops with guns drawn who refused to believe he was who he said he was, even when he presented his ID. And the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a suit this month against the NYPD on behalf of Leo Blair, who was stopped, frisked and arrested in the Bronx. Police told him they were “surprised” that he was not from “the projects.” Blair has a masters degree from Columbia University and is a reporter for the New York Post newspaper. |
We are all Sean Bell…where the Black and Latino male youth in NYC hold back from protesting because nearly all of them have arrest records for bullshit in this “free country,” in this “greatest country of the world…” …where one in nine young Black men is in prison…where ICE carries out Gestapo-style raids and detention on people whose “crime” is being driven here in a desperate search for work…where torture is now legal…yes, we are all Sean Bell, living in a system where fancy talk of freedom hides a brutal reality of repression…
We are all Sean Bell…we who have inherited the legacy of the slaveship and the lynching tree, translated today into the constant shadow of the 50 shots at some friends in a car, the 41 shots in a doorway, the plunger in the stationhouse bathroom, the deadly chokehold for tossing a football in the street, the 13-year-old dead for playing with a toy gun… We are all Sean Bell, living in that system where the more they tell us things have changed, the more they’ve stayed the same—or gotten worse…
We are all Sean Bell…going to high schools where they numb our minds and treat us like prisoners and where the military recruiters prowl the grounds, trying to sign us up to kill other people in other countries…other people held down by the same damn system that holds us down…
We are all Sean Bell…told to “choose” between the thug life or looking for work in a world of dead-end jobs or no jobs at all…sent to church, where we learn to blame ourselves for the situation that millions of us have been put in…put in by that system where “choice” and “personal responsibility” means learning to bow down and live with whatever hell the system chooses to dish out…
We are all Sean Bell…where those who see the wrongs and try to change them—as teachers, as doctors, as artists, as lawyers or just everyday people who don’t want to turn their heads in the face of injustice—find ourselves thwarted at every turn…where we who want to give cannot give and we who want to live cannot live, like humans…living in a system where we can only wish we knew how it would feel to be free…
We are all Sean Bell…all needing to get out of this system and all its ways…all needing, badly, to get into REVOLUTION…
*****
Is this a society and system that is fit for human beings? NOBODY should want to live in a society where this verdict is acceptable. It cannot be allowed to go down without way more powerful mass resistance coming from all sections of society and from people from all walks of life.
Some now suggest that we “wait and see” whether the Justice Department files civil rights charges against the police. Many people already “waited” for the trial for over a year, thinking that this time, with 50 shots; when the young man killed was going to be married and there was no gun; maybe this time there would be some scrap of justice from the judge. But “waiting and seeing” did not, and will not bring justice. And waiting on the federal Justice Department will only lead away from what is needed to draw a line for this to STOP—now. This is the Justice Department that writes legal opinions justifying torture done in our name. This is the Justice Department that declared that everything was “regular” when they reviewed the case of the Jena 6, young people arrested for protesting a noose hung in front of their school. This is the Justice Department that collaborated with KKK informers in suppressing the Civil Rights movement and murdering Civil Rights activists in the South in the 1960s. This Justice Department is entirely intertwined in, and part of enforcing, the oppression and exploitation at the heart of this system.
Others wonder whether protest will do any good after seeing so many of our young people shot down, over and over, year after year. But the one reason the cops who killed Sean Bell were charged and brought to trial in the first place is not because a criminal system suddenly began to listen to reason, but because the outrage of thousands poured into the streets in the days and weeks after Sean was murdered.
All this must stop—a line must be drawn right here, right now. The verdict in the Sean Bell case cannot be considered acceptable by anyone, and it cannot be allowed to go down without being met with powerful mass resistance. Already hundreds have been arrested in civil disobedience, determined that business as usual should not continue. And hundreds of Black youth have repeatedly taken to the streets in Queens in militant protest. Much more of this is needed, and many more people of all ages, backgrounds, and races and nationalities must join the youth. It matters what we do in the face of this outrage. Powerful resistance can change the equation in a society where too many accept the unacceptable. It can give heart to those put under a constant death sentence by this verdict and it can call forth many more people to join in taking this on.
It’s way past time for a line to be drawn. This must stop. WE ARE ALL SEAN BELL! THE WHOLE DAMN SYSTEM IS GUILTY!
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