Brooklyn, November 22 —  A crowd of angry workers formed in front of the Pink Houses project in East New York to protest the racist police killing of yet another black working-class youth.  On November 20, kkkop Peter Liang of the New York Police Department shot and killed 28-year-old Akai Gurley, an event NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton deemed a “bizarre mistake.” Gurley had just entered the building’s dark stairwell (the bosses don’t care enough to keep the lights or elevators working in these projects), and Liang shot him.
But nobody was accepting police excuses. The rally began on a poisonous note, with reactionary nationalist ideology. A black nationalist group on the bullhorn led chants: “Which people? Black people. What power? Black power!” Some protesters even questioned why white workers had shown up to the march at all!
But the Progressive Labor Party knows that destroying this backward system demands multiracial unity among all workers: Asian, Latin, black and white. With this outlook, a multiracial group of 30 PL’ers flooded the march and completely changed the tone. We raised our banners and flags, chanting, “Black cop, white cop, all the same. Racist terror is the name of the game!” Other marchers quickly adopted our chants.
At one point, police attempted to block the road with metal barricades in the hopes that the march would cease. We pushed through and stopped them, however, allowing the march to continue all the way to the police station.
Charging Liang with racist murder is important, but we must recognize that a few indictments will not change the essence of our oppressive capitalist system. The NYPD will continue to terrorize and imprison black and Latin youth, because kkkops are an integral part of the increasingly fascist U.S. As the bosses see themselves losing their ideological stranglehold on the working class, they are clamping down even harder and killing more workers. The only way to rid ourselves of racist police murders is to smash capitalism and fight for communism with PLP!