America is built on Black pain, Black suffering, and white violence on Black bodies

By Desmond Abrams

This issue of police violence and state violence has been ongoing for the past 400 years. I was just out at a protest the other day. We were talking about the history that the police have in this country.

The police were started as slave patrols. The police were started basically to protect white wealth and at the time white property, which was enslaved African people. So, this history, this tradition has carried on all the way up until what you saw on video with George Floyd. The police basically, acting as personal protectors or the bodyguards essentially of white people and the wealthy.

So these police officers, like what we saw with Derek Chauvin and the other three murderers of George Floyd, they're just a part of a long tradition of the slave patrols basically that sort of paramilitary force which is meant to keep Black people in check, keep Black people oppressed, in our community starved of resources, starved of any type of economic prosperity. That is the main thing the police are for, and what this society has been built around.

It’s the fact that this country, this society, the way it's run, it needs to have Black people in particular at the bottom, at the very bottom [in terms of] housing, at the very bottom in terms of income and wages, at the very bottom in terms of human rights.

So at the time when you see George Floyd being choked to death for close to nine minutes, they're alleging that he was trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill. They're alleging that basically he was going to commit an economic crime. And that is at the heart of a lot of these phone calls being made to the police about Black people in ‘this or that neighborhood that they're not supposed to be in,’ and we're not supposed to be in [in this or that white/wealthy neighborhood] because we're supposed to be locked out of the economy, we're not allowed to actually flourish and thrive. We're supposed to just simply be at the bottom.

I talked about this to one of the news agencies there [in Iran] about when California needs to put out wildfires they're banking, they're literally banking on poor Black and brown bodies, in particular, to go put out those fires, because that's who their prison population is and that’s who they have going and putting out these wildfires in California.

Similarly, a lot of the work that gets done in this country is done by prison labor so when you go to school in America, whether it's kindergarten all the way up until master's program you're sitting in a desk, and there's a huge chance that that desk was made by prison labor. That's what keeps this country running, this prison industrial complex, which is basically built on Black pain, Black suffering, and white violence on Black bodies.

America is dreadful place to live if you’re not white: Black American community organizer

Black American community organizer Desmond Abrams thanks the world for standing in solidarity with the Black community.

Desmond Abrams is a Black American community organizer and anti-racist strategist. He is the founder and executive director of Brothers Doing Better, a US based racial and social justice organization. He recorded this article for Press TV website. 

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