Opinion Michael Brown, racism and Americas open casket Justice for African Americans will remain an illusion as long as America fails to account for racism. Last updated: 25 Nov 2014 05:55 Hatem Bazian Hatem Bazian Hatem Bazian is co-editor and founder of the Islamophobia Studies Journal and director of the Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project, and a senior lecturer in the Departments of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at Berkeley University. RSS Email Article Print Article Share article Send Feedback Demonstrators chant hands up, dont shoot as they protest in front of the Ferguson police department [Getty] He was a black skin boy. So he was born to die, goes Bob Dylans song, The Death of Emmett Till. The lyrics are as timely today as when they were first written and performed because black skin remains a threat and the cause of death of far too many in the United States and the world. The song relates the story of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black youngster from Chicago, who was murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, by two white men because, supposedly, he flirted with a white woman. Mamie, Emmetts mother, insisted on a public funeral in Chicago with an open casket for everyone to view the brutality of racism that completely disfigured and mutilated the face of her beautiful boy. The motionless body was Emmetts but the open casket is Americas well-documented lynching history, racism, total otherisation and sub-humanness of African Americans. Americas soul continues to be burdened by the countless motionless African American bodies that pile up daily in inner city streets, alleyways and police shoot-outs. Not to leave behind the walking living bodies made motionless and numbed into a lifeless existence through racism: filling prisons, shattering dreams and creating permanent modern civilised slavery. Black life is expendable? The Michael Brown verdict is yet another reminder, if any was still needed, that racism was and always will be Americas open casket through which African American suffering and sub-humanness is on constant display. Once again, the nation and the world are numbed at the no-guilty verdict and the closing of Americas moral casket on the hopes, dreams and aspirations of Michael Brown, a young African American whose body was riddled with Americas bullets of racism and indifference to Black suffering.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 00:54:27 +0000