https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04...s-a22.html
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PERSPECTIVE
Biden uses “systemic racism” narrative to obscure class character of police violence
Niles Niemuth@niles_niemuth
9 hours ago
In response to the guilty verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, the Biden administration and the media have pushed the narrative that police violence is the product of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”
Speaking Tuesday night, shortly after the verdict was announced, Biden declared that Floyd’s death had exposed “the systemic racism that is a stain on our nation’s soul. The knee on the neck of justice for Black Americans… The pain, the exhaustion that Black and brown Americans experience every single day.” He insisted that suppressing police killings requires “acknowledging and confronting head-on systemic racism and the racial disparities” in policing and the justice system.
Derek Chauvin as he is engaged in the killing of George Floyd (Source: Twitter)
Without exception, police violence in the United States is presented in the media and political establishment as a racial conflict. The disconnect between this narrative and the reality of police violence is staggering.
According to data collected by the Washington Post, 6,222 people have been killed by police in the US since the beginning of 2015. Nearly three times more people have been killed in encounters with police in just over six years than US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan over the last two decades.
Breaking it down by those victims who have been identified by race, 2,885 are white, 1,499 are black, 1,052 are Hispanic, 104 are Asian, 87 are Native American, and 47 are classified as other. From a standpoint of percentages, 46.4 percent are white, 24 percent black, 17 percent Hispanic, 1.7 percent Asian, 1.4 percent Native American, 0.75 percent other and 8.8 percent unidentified.
Relative to the entire population, there is a disproportionality in the number of African Americans and Native Americans killed by police, while whites, Hispanics and Asians are killed at a rate lower than their share of the population. Native Americans are killed at a rate that is seven times higher than their share of the population, while for blacks it is roughly two times higher.
There is no doubt that racism is a factor in many police killings, but it is not the racism of the entire society. It is racism in a particular segment of society, the police and military forces. The ruling class cultivates within its apparatus of repression all manner of fascistic and reactionary conceptions.
However, once the socioeconomic background of where the victims were killed—typically areas with low median household income and high rates of poverty—is factored in, most of the disparity is accounted for by economic factors.
Given the data about police killings, the exclusive focus on black victims is not only a distortion of reality, but it also vastly underestimates the scale of police brutality in the United States. Explaining this social phenomenon through a single factor, racism, leaves out a majority of the victims. The media’s presentation implies that police killings of whites and others are legitimate.
The state and mainstream media, most explicitly in the New York Times 1619 Project, have invested an enormous amount in promoting a racialist narrative of American society, that the United States is divided between “white America” and “black America.” What accounts for the effort to interpret all American history and contemporary politics through the prism of race and reinterpret all social problems as racial issues?
The alternative to a racial analysis of American society is a class analysis. By blaming “systemic racism” and “white supremacy,” the reality of capitalism and class oppression disappears. The issue of social inequality is no longer about the rich against the poor, but white against black.