Post by POA on May 6, 2004 16:20:01 GMT -5
This war and racism
by Norman Solomon
May 06, 2004
Among the millions of words that have appeared in the U.S. press since late April about abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, one has been notably missing:
Racism.
Overall, when it comes to racial aspects, the news coverage is quite PC -- as in Pentagon Correct. The outlook is "apple pie" egalitarian, with the media picture including high-profile officers who are African-American and Latino. Meanwhile, inside the policy arena, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are frequently in front of cameras to personify Uncle Sam in blackface.
The U.S. government doesn't drop bombs on people because of their race. Washington's geopolitical agendas lead to military actions. But racial biases make the war process easier when the people being killed and maimed aren't white people. An oversize elephant in the American media's living room is a reality that few journalists talk about in public: The USA keeps waging war on countries where the victims resemble people who often experience personal and institutional racism in the United States.
In the American media coverage of the uproar after release of the Abu Ghraib photos, one of the only references to race was fleeting and dismissive, midway through a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on May 3: "So far the alleged grotesqueries are more analogous to the nightmares that occur occasionally at American prisons, when rogue and jaded guards freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates. The crime, then, first appears not so much a product of endemic ethnic, racial, or religious hatred, as the unfortunate cargo of penal institutions, albeit exacerbated by the conditions of war, the world over."
That essay, by the Hoover Institution's Victor Davis Hanson, typifies media denial about what's happening in the hellish American cells populated so disproportionately by low-income blacks and Latinos. In the world of the Journal editorial page's convenient fantasy, guards "occasionally" choose to "freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates." In the world of prisoners' inconvenient reality, guards frequently intimidate, humiliate -- and brutalize.
Media denial lets the U.S. military -- and the U.S. incarceration industry -- off the hook. Yet it's significant that a man implicated as a ringleader in the Abu Ghraib crimes, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, "had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of Corrections," according to Seymour Hersh's article in the May 10 edition of The New Yorker. A special agent in the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division, Scott Bobeck, testified that Sgt. Frederick and a corporal apparently "were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to be run."
That knowledge came from working as guards in an American system of incarceration that now has 2,033,000 people behind bars -- 63 percent of them black or Latino. With racial minorities vastly over-represented in federal and state prisons and local jails, such numbers reflect profound institutional biases that converge at the intersection of racism and unequal justice based on economic class.
A public-interest group, The Sentencing Project, notes that "black males have a 32 percent chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17 percent chance; white males have a 6 percent chance." Most of the people sentenced to prison are poor, while the affluent and wealthy are very infrequent guests.
Conditions are often inherently abusive behind bars. Many prisoners must cope with violence and duress. At the Stop Prisoner Rape organization, executive director Lara Stemple points out: "For women, whose abusers are often corrections officers, the rates of sexual assault are as high as one in four in some facilities."
The same government that runs this prison system also conducts foreign policy that during the past four decades has resulted in bombing and invading the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq. More circumscribed Pentagon missions landed in Somalia and Haiti. In 1999, a major U.S.-led bombing campaign caused enormous suffering among civilians in Yugoslavia. Sudden missile strikes hit Libya and Sudan. And U.S.-funded military forces on several continents -- from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala to Angola to Indonesia -- took many lives.
Generally, with the exception of Serbs, the victims of Pentagon firepower have been people of color who've looked different than the USA's white majority and power structure. In the United States, racial biases have helped to grease the war machinery.
We may want to view the large number of Latino and black GIs as reassurance that U.S. warfare is race-neutral. But the decision to launch a war is hardly democratic. Soldiers, by definition, follow orders that result from a political process: skewed by the inequities of power and the effects of prejudice.
[continued in followup]