In the US, the president is Black. In Baltimore, the mayor is Black and the police chief as well. In fact, 63% of Baltimore population is Black. But that did not prevent another young black man from being killed at the hands of the American police, which unleashed a new wave of anti-racist protests.
Since last weekend, this city in Maryland, 40 kilometers from Washington DC, with about 600,000 inhabitants, lives a war scenario. The government decreed a state of emergency and curfew. Buildings and cars were burned. The first surveys speak of fifteen buildings and 144 cars set on fire. There are dozens of wounded and hundreds arrested.
The trigger of the new racial tension in the case of the young Black man Freddie Gray, 25, arrested on April 12. Accused of carrying a knife, videos recorded by witnesses show that he was thrown to the ground during detention and cried out in pain when placed inside a police car. The young man was in a coma for seven days and died in hospital due to a serious spinal injury. Six police officers, all white, were dismissed.
Inequality and racism
The inequality in the city is one of the most striking in the United States. 23.8% of people live below the poverty level, according to the US Census Bureau. Gray lived in one of the poorest areas of Baltimore, in Sandtown neighborhood.
In this neighborhood, more than half of the families earn less than $ 25,000 per year and over 20% of the adult population is unemployed, according to an official report released by the Baltimore City Health Department in 2011.
In the protests that move the country there is a feeling of indignation and anger about a situation that has been repeated in recent years in the heart of world imperialism.
Other cases of murders of blacks, always by white police officers, as Michael Brown, Tony Robinson and Walter Scott, demonstrate that the US police acts in a racist and extremely violent manner. The use of totally inappropriate detention techniques and weapons calls everyone’s attention.
The fact is that the wave of protests across the United States shows how the country ruled by Barack Obama is still a racist country, where Black people are seen as potential criminals and police targets.
“The United States enriched with slavery and is stained with Black segregation in much of their history,” said the president of the PSTU of São José dos Campos and substitute congressman, Toninho Ferreira.
“The US imperialist policy, which promotes plunder and exploitation of other countries, also has its application within the country, excluding Blacks, immigrants and the poor. Thus it is a junction of inequality and racism that causes increasing stress,” says Ferreira.
In the face of the recent civil unrest in Baltimore, Obama, the rulers and the press try to divide the protesters in “peaceful” and “vandals”. But Martin Luther King, whose assassination nearly 50 years ago (April 1968) caused, according to Time, a “shock wave of looting, arson and outrage” in cities across the country, which included Baltimore, said: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
Baltimore protests in 1968
We are all Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Tony Robinson, Walter Scott and many others killed by racism and capitalist barbarism.
