Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Benjamin Franklin

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Michael Brown, racism and America's open casket

Justice for African Americans will remain an illusion as long as America fails to account for racism.

Al-Jazeera - 25 Nov 2014 

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.

"He was a black skin boy. So he was born to die," goes Bob Dylan's 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, Emmett's 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 Emmett's but the open casket is America's well-documented lynching history, racism, total otherisation and sub-humanness of African Americans.
America's 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.

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