The “Stand Your Ground” Murder of Markeis McGlockton and the Epidemic of White Supremacist Assaults on Black People Sweeping America

August 6, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On July 19, Markeis McGlockton, a 28-year-old Black man and his five-year-old son were in a convenience store in Clearwater, Florida, when he heard his girlfriend Britany Jacobs and two other young children were being accosted in their car parked outside. Michael Drejka, an older white man, was aggressively berating Jacobs for being in a handicapped parking place.

Markeis came out, saw what was going on, and shoved Drejka, who fell down. Drejka was unhurt, and Markeis was moving away and clearly didn’t have a weapon, but Drejka pulled a gun and shot Markeis dead. Pinellas County police refused to press charges against Drejka because they claimed Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law gave him the right to “defend” himself—never mind this white fuck is a racist who’d previously threatened to kill a Black truck driver over the parking spot.

Watch the video, and if your blood isn’t boiling, watch it again.

There’s the insult of “justifiable homicide,” and now “it’s not about race, it’s about self-defense” when it’s plain for anyone with eyes to see that “stand your ground” shit is about giving white people a license to murder Black people. Does anyone think Black people with guns are treated the same as white people with guns?

What other law makes the killer’s self-described “state of mind” determine guilt or innocence? Well, there’s one other place—when pigs murder someone and then claim they “feared for their lives.” This went down—yet again—in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on July 23: A 31-year-old Black man, Thurman Blevins, was murdered by police as he was running away, fearing for his life, begging the cops not to kill him. A week later, the prosecutor announced the pigs wouldn’t be charged.

The National Epidemic of White Supremacist Assaults on Black People

These are but two examples of the epidemic of official and unofficial white violence against Black and Brown people sweeping America.

On July 23, two young sisters, Nia and Letifah Wilson, were stabbed for no apparent reason, other than being Black, by a white man outside a BART station in Oakland, California. Nia, 18 years old, had her throat slit and died.

On July 9, Crystle Galloway, a 30-year-old Black woman, died of a stroke five days after Hillsborough County, Florida, paramedics refused to take her by ambulance to a hospital (or check her vital signs) because they said she couldn’t afford it.

A recently released video from October 2017 shows Louisiana police strangling Armando Frank, a 44-year-old Black man, to death—simply for asking to see an arrest warrant before they took him into custody!

Then there are the countless examples of everyday racist assaults, confrontations, and siccing pigs on Black people. Just to name some of these, and just from the past month:

• On July 4, Jasmine Edwards was swimming in her own residential neighborhood pool in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, when a white man called police on her for supposedly not belonging there.
• On July 24, Charles Lovett was followed to his home in Columbus, Ohio, by a white man who claimed he’d been cut off in traffic and then parked in Lovett’s driveway shouting racist abuse at him.
• On July 25, Darsell Obregon ducked into the entryway of a Brooklyn building to avoid the rain while she waited for a car service, only to have one of the residents call the cops on her because she looked “suspicious.”
• On July 29, Erika Martin, a young Black woman, was giving food to a homeless man in a Safeway parking lot in Mountain View, California, when employees called the pigs, accusing her of shoplifting—even though she hadn’t even been inside the store.
• On July 31, Oumou Kanoute was eating lunch at Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts, where she’s a student; an employee called police because she supposedly looked like a “suspicious black male” who was “out of place.” “All I did was be Black,” Kanoute said.

This violent white supremacy is being openly celebrated—and further organized—by “alt-right” Nazis and white supremacists who held rallies in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, August 4 and Berkeley, California, on Sunday to commemorate the one-year anniversary of their murderous fascist rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia. Both protests were marked by the fascists being greatly outnumbered by a wide range of anti-fascist, anti-racist protesters—including in the Bay Area from Revolution Books and Refuse Fascism—and by the police protecting the Nazis and attacking protesters!

Last year’s “Unite the Right” gathering in Charlottesville was an outrage during which anti-Nazi/white supremacist protestor Heather Heyer was murdered and dozens of other courageous protesters were assaulted by these Nazis. The fact that these fascists are celebrating this now shows they are deadly serious about spreading fascism and violently assaulting those who stand in their way.

And the fact that Trump continues to incite hate-filled white supremacy—through racist tweets, KKKampaign rallies, and official actions—and has refused to ever directly condemn the alt-right/Nazi crimes at Charlottesville shows that all this putrid, dangerous white-supremacist shit is being backed up from the highest offices of the land.

None of this can be allowed to stand!