Lesson from 2020: Abolish the police – and the system they serve!
www.workers.org
May 27 marked the third anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, which sparked a massive upsurge. But three years later the wave of racist killings has not subsided. Nearly two years ago, on June 25, 2021, Derek Chauvin, the white police officer convicted of lynching 46-year-old Geor

As Moorehead wrote in 2021: “Nothing has changed before or after the Chauvin conviction and sentencing, in terms of Black and Brown people being racially targeted by the police. Nothing has changed for the families of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Shantel Davis, Elijah McClain, Walter Wallace Jr. and countless others calling for any kind of justice, whether these deaths were videotaped or not.

“As an act of solidarity, it is important to defend the right of the victims’ families and oppressed communities under constant police occupation to demand that accountability be arrests, convictions and jail time for killer cops. However, it is just as important for revolutionaries and socialists to call for the abolition of not only the police and other repressive arms like ICE but for the abolition of capitalism, a system that puts the profits of the superrich before the needs of the people. One cannot exist without the other.”

    • Black AOCEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      It certainly seems so. The same arguments are still bandied about left organizations. The same paternalist settler commentary that ‘there is no race issue, just a class issue’. I will allow-- bail funds mobilize a LOT faster when one of ours gets jammed up; but… The atmosphere around police hasn’t changed, the amount of people that still bootlick police hasn’t changed, the same “well he/she/they must’ve done something to deserve it/was no angel” still gets bandied about.

      And to make matters worse, the only really serious armed formation of colonized people in Amerika(even though they have a WHOLE LOT OF IDEOLOGICAL FAULTS, and I can’t really cosign anything but their macro aims) had its leader jammed up on federal arms charges a few months back; maybe a year or so, and the group appears to have been Thanos-snapped from existence from the lack of movement I’m hearing about.

      I wouldn’t say nothing has changed overall… But precious little has, not enough to move the needle. If it spurred greater class consciousness, I haven’t seen it coalesce yet.

  • Shrike502English
    1·
    1 year ago

    Gotta ask something as an outsider: since my only source of information regarding the USA protests is the media (internet included), it had seemed that the protests rather quickly died down after Biden got elected (naturally raising the question how organic they were in the first place). However I understand that this could be just media manipulation - artificial silence and pretending nothing is happening, as part of the crafted narrative. So which one is it?