On Sunday, April 8, the Detroit Workers’ Voice Discussion Group discussed the Trayvon Martin murder and the movement that arose to condemn this racist crime. The following article is from the invitation to the meeting.
We will be discussing the details of the event
itself — the murder of the 17-year-old black youth Trayvon by the
neighborhood watch guard George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida,
February 26th. We will dissect the lies put forth by Zimmerman and his
supporters, who claim that he acted in self-defense, and show that the
incident was indeed a murder.
We will discuss the refusal of the Sanford police
department to arrest Zimmerman [he was finally arrested on April 11]
and show that this illustrates the institutional racism that lies
behind, encourages, and abets racist murders like these. We will
discuss the Florida “stand your ground” law which allows the use of
deadly force on the slightest pretext. We will show how it is part of
the growing repressive apparatus of US capitalism, and also how this
apparatus is connected to continuing racism and chauvinism against
black people and other minorities.
We will discuss how the murder of Trayvon Martin has
swiftly called forth an outburst of protest across the country.
Beginning with declarations from Trayvon’s family, the movement has
escalated into rallies and marches in Sanford, and elsewhere in
Florida, and spreading around the country, nearly every day since the
event. People everywhere have worn hoodies as symbols of solidarity. In
the social media many similar cases of racist abuse and murder are
being exposed and attacked, both current and from the past. This is an
important development, which is part of the incipient resistance of the
working class to the capitalist attacks that are escalating during the
economic crisis.
The murder of Trayvon Martin is both a racist
atrocity and a sign of the repressive atmosphere in the US, in which
liberal mayors ordered the police to throw the Occupy movement of its
encampments, while the conservatives are busy demonizing blacks,
immigrants, Islamic people, and others. Overall, the US now jails a
higher percentage of its population than any other country in the
world. While the US has only 5% of the world’s population, it has 25%
of the world’s prisoners. At the same time, black males are imprisoned
disproportionally, and there are now more black males in the grips of
the criminal justice system (in jail, on probation, or on parole) than
there were slaves prior to the Civil War.
Finally, we will discuss how the Trayvon murder, and
the mass protests against it, raise not only the question of how to
build the struggle against these atrocities, but also of why the civil
rights movement and the black rebellions which capped it, though
resulting in definite progress, were unable to eliminate racism and
white supremacy. Today these evils are taking outrageous forms, both
familiar ones and new ones. Activists, especially black activists, are
asking, “why do we still have to fight this?” They are saying that “now
we even have a black president, yet we are still shot down like dogs!
Now, over 150 years after the abolition of slavery, we have to counsel
our children how to avoid being murdered by white racists. What’s up
with this?”
There may be a black president, but the capitalist
class still rules the US, and it is on the rampage against both the
working class and various minorities. The Obama administration has only
feigned sympathy to some of the victims of racism, while doing nothing
to stop the growing wave of repression and racism. Worse, the Obama
administration is continuing the reactionary and chauvinist campaign
started by then-President Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001; it
is adding more and more police-state measures, carrying out more and
more anti-immigrant raids, and giving the police more and more powers.
Obama’s stand is symptomatic not only of the reactionary stand of the
American bourgeoisie as a whole, but of the deepening class divide in
the black community between the bourgeois black leadership, which has
joined the oppressors, and the black working and unemployed masses,
whose conditions of life degenerate by the day.
Lenin said that imperialism is “reaction all along
the line”. This truth is revealed once again by the racist murders in
the U.S. today, and the high rates of imprisonment in major imperialist
countries like the US and Russia (the first and second most
enthusiastic jailers of their own population). Not only is the
capitalist class seeking to slash living standards of the working
masses in the economic crisis, but it is introducing one repressive
measure after another and singling out blacks, immigrants, and other
minorities as special targets of attack. Help build the struggle
against racist murders and the growing apparatus of anti-working class
repression! <>
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