Eight Minutes and Forty Six Seconds

What an earth is going on in America? How can the racism there be so endemic, so institutionalised?

A man strangled slowly by three policemen in front of people and cameras both.

We hear of the story of the black man who must always take his walk with his daughter in the nice neighbourhood where he lives, not so he can protect her, but so that she can protect him. We see the black child who carries the sign that asks ‘When will you stop thinking of me as ‘cute’ and start thinking of me as ‘a threat’?’ I hear this week of a black man who wanted to buy a car off my friend in Texas but was frightened to drive it without having the car-papers in his name. We’ve all heard the quote of ‘driving while black’.

Minorities: blacks, coloureds, homosexuals, Jews, Muslims and women (together, that’s way over half the population), walking much of the time in fear. Fear of the white-man, the black-man, the predator, the rapist, the knife-man.  The police-man.

To paraphrase Chris Rock, there are certain professions where you can’t have bad apples. Airplane pilots for one. The police for another.

Here’s Arnold Schwarzenegger in a brief 2017 video called ‘Let’s terminate hate’ (it was made following the the Charlottsville riots wiki) . He says ‘the only way to beat the loud angry voices of hate is to meet them with louder, more reasonable voices’.

Where there's strife, there's often hope

Now Mr Trump wants martial law, terrorist charges against all and sundry: a ‘you loot, we shoot’ mentality that only widens still further the divide. How on earth can such a modern country be so archaic in its race-relations? Is it right to blame Trump for this situation? Forbes says that ‘Most Americans Think Trump Is Racist, Poll Finds’. El Periodico reports that ‘Trump entrenches himself impassively in the White House as the US burns’. Now the president has declared the mythical ‘Antifa’ (here) to be a domestic terrorist organisation.

Well, maybe that’s what you get when you chose populists over politicians. 

Manuel Castells, the University Minister, said on Canal Sur that ‘It is a human drama, because the murder was carried out in the sight of everyone’. 

And in Spain, as we look aghast at the casual American racism, there are those who watch what Trump does and find it good. From the official Twitter account of Vox here: ‘Our support for Trump and the Americans who are seeing their Nation attacked by street terrorists sheltered by progressive millionaires. #SpainSupportsTrump’.

It’s a trifle odd that Vox supports law and order in the USA, yet believes in promoting anti-government demonstrations in Spain (here).

‘Vox stokes racism’ says El Nacional here, concerned about the new ‘minimum basic income’. ‘Podemos supports the Antifa’, says Vox’s spokesperson Iván Espinosa de los Monteros in his daily idiocy. ‘We have terrorists here too’, says Santiago Abascal, echoing his lieutenant, ‘they’re in the government’. Iglesias is ‘the son of a terrorist’ says the spokesperson for the PP Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo in parliament with no basis beyond a discredited story from a Vox MEP which cost him 17,000€ in a fine for libel in 2017.

As Rodney King once asked, ‘Can’t we all just get along?’