I am too frustrated to write about our troubles here at home this week.
I started to write about the fact that the Government is dithering around and seemingly taking delight in keeping us waiting instead of bringing the Budget but then I thought that is nothing new, it is part of the modus operandi of this administration.
I thought of writing about the disgraceful picture in the NATION newspaper recently of children having to step gingerly over piles of garbage to get to their destination. I was particularly embarrassed by this because I had to been Johannesburg in South Africa recently and had often commented to colleagues about how dirty the country was. Clearly, I had temporary amnesia about the state of my own country.
I was also toying with the idea of writing about the fact we seem to have acquired one of the largest reserves of oil imports in the world. While the retail price of petroleum products have been dropping worldwide for months now, the diligence of whoever is responsible for our oil imports has made sure that while consumers elsewhere rejoice over the good fortune we continue to pay high prices.
We all, however, should be ever so grateful for the five cent reduction in gasoline recently; this really made such a tremendous difference for many of us I am very sure.
I am, however, not writing about any of those things this week. I want instead to look to the north.
I cannot help but watch in fascination at what has been happening in America. It is mesmerising to watch the great bastion and defender of democracy and freedom for the entire world struggle through its own internal tensions. If you have been watching what has been happening in America over the past few years then you know that this moment has been brewing for some time. Does anyone remember the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012?
In that same year I also wrote about the reported Facebook comments of policemen in New York who were tasked to do crowd control at the annual Labour Day parade. In that article, I noted that the Trayvon Martin case struck a chord with me because the reported Facebook comments by New York police officers about people participating in the annual Labour Day parade on Eastern Parkway (mostly West Indians) were still fresh in my mind.
While I agree and note that Facebook can be manipulated, there appeared to be sufficient evidence to suggest that police officers in casual conversations had referred to the participants of the parade as “savages” and “animals”. It was reported that one comment said “drop a bomb and wipe them all out”. The raw, almost primal, sentiments expressed highlighted how tenuous social cohesion in America is.
While the Trayvon Martin incident and previous incidents like it might have been forgotten, the underbelly of America’s institutionalised racism is refusing to stay silent and is exposing itself daily for all to see. This is the nature of institutionalised wrongs like racism. At some point they attain a level of normalcy so that they begin to emerge from within their established confines, in this case, the confines of endemic racial profiling within the American police force and the entrenched discrimination which is part of the cultural make-up of the country.
The incident in Ferguson and the death of Eric Garner have shown just how dangerous institutionalised racism can be. Please understand me when I say that I honestly believe that none of the policemen involved in any of these acts fully understand what drove them to respond in the specific way that they did.
However, if it were just the police force it would not be enough to say that it was institutionalised across America but clearly there are also some fundamental questions to be asked of the justice system and the media as well. Is it not interesting how in every one of the cases the tide eventually turns to some specific unsavoury element of the victim’s behaviour?
It is clear that each case had a different twist with what appears to be an unfortunate theme – a black man ends up dead. This is not at all to suggest that the American police or the entire police force or the entire justice system has some conscious agenda against black people.
It does suggest, however, that America can no longer ignore this issue; it can longer to point its fingers at others without first attending to now festering and exposed wounds. Nothing that I have said, however, should be taken as gloating or finger-pointing.
It seems that the more strides we make in technology, in science, in making wealth and all of the other trappings of so called economic growth, the more the social fabric of our societies become vulnerable. Whether it is disease, social ills or crime or security, it is clear that something is fundamentally wrong in how our societies are treating to social issues. The situation in America suggests that we should all look long hard at the social issues that have been brewing and are barely suppressed in our own society before they to rear their ugly heads.
Shantal Munro-Knight is a development specialist and executive coordinator at the Caribbean Policy Development Centre.