“I personally don’t think that race was a factor in the incident involved in this tragic death” (AM News) said NYC police commissioner Bill Bratton, referring to the murder of Eric Garner, a black father and grandfather.
Racism is so intricately woven within the fabric of capitalism that the untrained eye could easily overlook its repeating patterns as merely loose stitches within the system or within flawed individuals.
The murder of Eric Garner, like the attacks on thousands of working-class black and Latin workers and youth in the U.S., is in fact racist, not only because cop Daniel Pantaleo was white (Shantel Davis’s murderer was a black cop); it is racist because police are trained to target poor working-class neighborhoods, where the population is predominately black and Latin.
The ruling class uses violence to maintain control over the working class and to intimidate impoverished workers to accept their conditions. They use the police force to carry this out. Black cop, white cop all the same — racist terror is the name of the game.
Bill Bratton, whose policing philosophy isn’t much different from that of former commissioner Ray Kelly, has escalated the possibility of these racist attacks. His “broken windows” policy — which claims that punishing small infractions, such as vandalism, or jumping a subway turnstile ­— will deter more serious crimes is ineffectual and only creates a longer thread of injustice in these low-income areas. The fact that Bratton promises to “correct” the police department’s damaged relationship with these communities, while applying the “broken windows” theory, is a blatant contradiction.
 Many people in our class believed that when Mayor DeBlasio was elected, he would work to put an end to police brutality because of his stance against stop-and-frisk. However, when DeBlasio selected Bratton, who is well-known for his racist policies, it showed that this mayor, like all the others, serves the interests of the ruling class: to keep the working class divided in order to maintain power. Systemic racism will continue as long as capitalism exists.
Racism means we’ve got to FIGHT BACK! Police murder means we’ve got to FIGHT BACK! Allegedly, Eric Garner sold cigarettes that were not being taxed. Somebody was losing their profits and in the rulers’ minds that was reason enough for Garner to lose his life. Profits over people: that’s capitalism.
To see the videos and hear this man repeatedly crying out, “I can’t breathe!” to no avail, showed the callousness of the police. The same lack of compassion was shown to Kyam Livingston who called out in pain for seven hours only to die because of the lack of medical attention. And again, a few days after the murder of Eric Garner, a young man was choked and punched by a cop at a subway in Harlem as he was trying to take him into custody.
Capitalism means we’ve got to FIGHT BACK!
A Comrade