“I can’t breathe.” These are the words that Eric Garner groaned repeatedly, yet the officer did not loosen his headlock. The officer killed Mr. Garner within a few minutes. This transpired on June 17 in New York.
Under suspicion of the illegal sale of tobacco, Mr. Garner was surrounded by four members of the NYPD while standing on the sidewalk, wrestled to the pavement, and died after repeating the words, “I can’t breathe” 11 times.
A bystander happened to record video of the entire incident and uploaded it to the Internet. It will be clear to anyone who watches the video, but Mr. Garner was unarmed. He was holding nothing in his hands. He was a gardener by trade and father to 6 children. He was also black.
On the other hand, the officer was white and is said to have prior incidents of violence toward black individuals. Despite all this, on Dec. 3, a Staten Island grand jury announced that the officer will not face indictment.
The grand jury’s deliberation was held behind closed doors and was finished within one day. Let alone murder, they didn’t even press a charge of involuntary manslaughter.
The Deeply Ingrained Racism toward Blacks in the United States; Not Just Murder by Police, but also False Accusations
Not only has the NYPD forbidden the use of strangleholds, but the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide. Further, unlike the Ferguson case, this time there is even video evidence of the entirety of the encounter — oddly, the person who uploaded the video was detained on a separate matter several days later. It’s hard to believe such things could happen in a constitutional government.
While it may not be necessary at this point to explain the Ferguson incident, in August, a black youth named Michael Brown was shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
In this case as well, the victim was unarmed, and despite having his hands up when he was shot, on Nov. 24, a grand jury elected to not indict the white officer who shot him. Since then, there has been no end to protests across the United States. Now that a grand jury has again failed to indict an officer in the strangling death of Mr. Garner, the protests have started growing larger.
Dec. 3, the day the Garner decision was released, also happened to be the burial day of a 12-year-old black boy who was shot dead by a white police officer while playing with a toy pistol in a public park in Ohio. At the funeral service, one of his teachers cried, saying, “He never missed a day of school.”**
The degree of racism toward blacks in the U.S. is unimaginable to most Japanese. President Obama said on Dec. 8 that while he has concerns about the spread of the protests, discrimination still exists in the U.S. and is something that must be tackled head-on.
Yet, this situation is still an improvement over the state of affairs of 50 years ago. “Fifty years ago” brings to mind the Tokyo Olympics, but at that time, the vast majority of black individuals didn’t even have voting rights. Black Americans would not completely win suffrage until 1971.
Here’s another shocking bit of news on racial discrimination. On Nov. 21, a black man by the name of Ricky Jackson was released from prison after serving 40 years. Forty years ago, Mr. Jackson and his brother were arrested under suspicion of murder, were deemed guilty after pleading their innocence, and Mr. Jackson had been in prison since. Mr. Jackson’s brother was released on a pardon a few years prior.
At the time, the only witness was a boy of 12 years. Now 52, his confession that he actually wasn’t at the scene of the crime led directly to Mr. Jackson’s release. He explained that he was pressured by the police to give false testimony and for 40 years has been afraid of speaking the truth out of concern that he might be arrested for doing so.
Mr. Jackson, with a gentle countenance, commented on the witness who freed him, “I bear no grudge toward him. I wish him well.”* Seeing how any individual in the U.S. with the holy trinity of “black, male, young” is considered an automatic target for the police, there must still be any number of young black males who have become victims of such false charges.
The America that Would Sentence a 10-Year-Old Boy to Life in Prison
America’s problems with the human rights of children constitute another aspect of this shocking news. There are currently only three countries that have not yet ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: Somalia, South Sudan and the United States of America.
In the United States, children are judged according to the same laws as adults, and courts get away with handing down life sentences to minors. To be perfectly honest, when I first heard these reports, I was unable to believe it. When you see a 7-year-old child bound hand and foot, dragged into a courtroom, it takes your breath away.
It’s said that these children often get placed in solitary confinement cells, and many of them end up developing mental disorders as a result. Should that come as any surprise?
For many years, there have been people who have tried with all their might to improve this situation, but there hasn’t been the slightest sense of progress. One person in a report said, “When you see these children, sometimes it just makes you want to scream.”*
Interviews were held with male and female inmates over the age of 20, who had been given life sentences around the age of 10; without exception, they were all black. For all of them, they had no prospects for amnesty.
Mistakes made in youth are not entirely the fault of the child. One’s surrounding environment exerts a large influence. What’s more, there’s the possibility a child may not even understand that what he or she did was a crime. To rob someone of their life for a crime committed before his or her personality is even fully formed is unjust, plain and simple.
Meanwhile, a few days ago, documents disclosing details on the CIA’s torture program were released. Torture became an issue during the Gulf War as well, but it seems the U.S. hasn’t changed a bit and is continuing to walk down its own path. The claim appears to be that it wasn’t torture, but rather a responsible form of interrogation.
On that note, on Dec. 16, former Vice President Dick Cheney made the following remarks on a televised panel discussion when asked about U.S prosecution of the Japanese use of waterboarding during World War II: “Not for waterboarding. They did an awful lot of other stuff. To draw some kind of moral equivalent between waterboarding judged by our Justice Department not to be torture and what the Japanese did with the Bataan Death March, with slaughter of thousands of Americans, with the rape of Nanking and all of the other crimes they committed, that’s an outrage. It’s a really cheap shot, Chuck, to even try to draw a parallel between the Japanese who were prosecuted for war crimes after World War II and what we did with waterboarding three individuals — all of whom are guilty and participated in the 9/11 attacks.“ I’m at a loss for words.
The Lingering Traces of Slavery in Western Countries
In my book, “Life in Europe: 9 Wins and 1 Loss Is a Victory for Japan,” I discuss the remaining influence of slavery in Europe today.
First, there is the slavery in which Western European nations took Slavic peoples captive and sold them to nations in the Arab world. The etymology of “slave” is in fact “Slav.” However, this practice has been so thoroughly wiped from the history books that most Europeans don’t even know about it.
The more famous case is the slavery in which individuals from the African continent were taken to America. Guns and cotton textiles from Europe would be brought to Africa and exchanged for slaves. Those slaves were taken to America and traded for sugar, coffee and raw cotton, which were then sold in Europe. This trilateral trade system was conducted mainly by Western Europeans.
It’s thought that as many as 3 million slaves were traded by England alone. Twenty percent of England’s wealthy in the Victorian era had obtained their vast riches via the slave trade. In 1833, the English government banned slave trading and paid 20 million pounds in damages to the slave owners who were disadvantaged by the new ban. The slaves received nothing.
As I argue in my book, Europe still has some traces of its slavery history that remain, but in recent years, it is America where I think the most serious aftereffects of slavery are still to be felt.
The foundation of slavery consists in taking a behavior that common sense quickly identifies as a crime and employing upon it convoluted legal sophistry, while convincing one’s conscience that enslaved humans are nothing more than chattering livestock. Since these newly employed laws will necessarily create individuals who profit from slavery, they were never intended to be fair from the start.
For me, in consideration of slavery, of colonization, I can’t help but get the feeling that people from those countries where such unfair policies were the law of the land still carry those discriminatory feelings in their hearts. It’s just that at least in Europe, people have the good sense to work on hiding those feelings. Granted, there are possibly individuals who truly do not harbor such perspectives.
In the case of Germany, I think that sense of discrimination might be least present among the former great powers of Europe. I say that because while they certainly strayed pretty far from the path in the beginning of the 20th century, they were not that aggressive in the slave trade, and were slow to join in on the acquisition of colonies.
At any rate, the U.S. remains audaciously racist. Looking at recent events, the laws themselves are beginning to look unequal. This is a country that likes to call itself the police of the world, but that’s probably just due to its superior military — its sense of morality certainly doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.
In any case, for an America that still contains so much prejudice, for an America that will steal the rights of helpless children without giving them so much as a second chance, they certainly speak too loudly when it comes to the human rights offenses of other nations. Surely, fixing your own myriad rights abuses comes first?
Before engaging in any more excessive meddling, I’ll allow myself a bit of meddling in saying the U.S. needs to, at the very least, do something about its children in prison. I bet it’d be a lot easier than trying so hard to exterminate the Islamic State.
*Editor’s note: Accurately translated, these quotes have not been verified.
**Editor’s note: This quote is not actually of the teacher but of an MSNBC article, see http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/cleveland-boy-who-was-shot-police-laid-rest.
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