Revolution #149, November 30, 2008
Two Memorials—One Criminal System
At Notre Dame High School in Riverside, California, outside L.A., the football team paused before their final game with rival Rubidoux High on November 7 to release balloons into the air in remembrance of Julian Alexander. Julian, an outstanding linebacker and beloved former teammate, had been murdered outside his home by the Anaheim police October 28. A week after the remembrance for Julian Alexander, the football team at another Los Angeles high school paused to remember their teammate Jamiel Shaw Jr. Jamiel, another star football player, had been shot and killed outside his home last March.
The first commemoration was not covered by a single newspaper. But the second earned a huge photo and caption on the front page of the “California” news section of the Los Angeles. Times. You see, Jamiel wasn’t killed by the police. He was allegedly killed by an undocumented 19-year-old Latino youth, believed to be in the 18th Street gang.
Sadness and grief, and anger and outrage at the senseless loss of two young lives full of promise, has touched the family and friends of both young Black men—and everyone else who’s learned of them. And the reality is that responsibility for both lies at the feet of this bloody system. But while murders at the hands of the police are routinely dropping from sight, Jamiel’s killing has been made into a nationwide cause, whipped up into an ugly reactionary frenzy by the anti-immigrant rantings of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, CNN’s Lou Dobbs and more.
These and other media reactionaries have seized on Jamiel’s death in an effort to promote a hate-filled, pogromist movement demanding a change in the laws that will lead to even more brutal treatment of undocumented immigrants by the police. On one show O’Reilly angrily demanded to know, from a member of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, why “there’s nobody in the street, there’s nobody marching on the mayor’s office, nobody’s doing anything!” As a part of this, O’Reilly, Dobbs and others have targeted L.A.’s largely Latino political structure, with O’Reilly accusing the mayor and members of the city council of running a “sanctuary city” for undocumented immigrants and “pandering to the open border people.”
The specific goal of this reactionary “movement” is to take away a fundamental legal right from millions of Latinos in L.A. They want to amend “Special Order 40,” that now states that police officers cannot stop people for the sole purpose of asking about immigration status. If these reactionaries get their way, SO-40 will be changed to allow any LAPD cop to demand proof of legal residency from any Latino they think might be a member of a gang. They are calling this, “Jamiel’s law.”
Regrettably, Jamiel Shaw Jr.’s family and friends are allowing themselves to be usedby these reactionaries, and the system they’re fronting for, siding with them against other oppressed people. The same right-wing forces now championing “Jamiel’s law” have also worked for passage of 3-strikes laws, demanded that juveniles be tried as adults, and worked to create the situation where one in nine Black youth are rotting in prison. We recently saw the same method of playing oppressed people against each other used to take away the fundamental right of gay couples to marry in California. Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs care one bit about Black people? What a sick joke. Then why aren’t they calling for passage of a “Julian Alexander” law, or a “Sean Bell” law to put every murdering cop behind bars?
The masses of Black people, as well as Latinos, are filled with frustration and anger at seeing their youth grow up in urban wastelands that literally resemble war zones, so often becoming its victims that living to age 18 is cause for celebration. At the same time the powers-that-be blame them for the conditions that this system has created. And they use this to promote a sense of fear and “danger” among the rest of society toward these youth—and toward Black and Latino people in general—that makes any level of police brutality legitimate, and excuses every bloody murder they commit.
There is a way to break out of this. But not by fighting and blaming each other, or ourselves. The only hope for this generation, and for the vast majority of people, is to confront the real cause of the problems that are killing people, and to struggle against the system that is responsible for all this suffering and death.
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