POLICE TERROR--RACIST ARROW TIP LAUNCHED AGAINST ALL WORKERS
by Dr. Nayvin Gordon
February 7, 2023
Ask yourself why is it that the police kill over 1,000 people in the US every year, and the majority is white, but their brutalization, torture, and murder hardly ever make major national news. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database When there is a news report, the word white rarely appears in the report. https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/10917/In%20Black%20and%20White%2C%20Morgan%20K.%20Johnson.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
How is it possible that the police kill at least one white person daily, and this fact almost never makes the major news reports of the day? This is also true for Native Americans who are killed at the highest proportion of any group in the US.
But we do read and see regularly the police brutally killing Black people. How do we explain the deaths of some 500 white people occurring every year at the hands of the cops, but we rarely if ever see this fact reported in the major corporate news media? How likely is this to be an accident or some oversight? Who remembers the name of the last Native American or white man who was brutalized by the police? Who recalls the last video of police killing a white person? The news media report, almost exclusively, the deaths and brutality directed at Black people who are three times more likely to be killed.
One has to ask; why is this happening. Such a conspicuous absence of newsworthiness has continued for decades. Noam Chomsky would call this “manipulating the news…and deliberately diverting the attention from other news.”(Manufacturing Consent)
The Federal Government does not even bother to keep records of police killings.
Below are a few examples of news that is not fit to be printed or recorded by the corporate media or the Federal Government.
1) Captured on video: The brutal torture, hog tying, and murder of a white man---in Tennessee days BEFORE the murder of George Floyd.
2) Captured on video which went largely unreported in the mainstream media, was the killing of Jerod Draper. A white man, died inside a Harrison County Indiana jail after he was tortured and Tased multiple times, according to a December 2021 investigation by the IndyStar.
3) Amy Goodman's report on the killings of Native Americans “that no one is talking about”.
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/19/the_police_killings_no_one_is
4) Police murder Betty Francois, a 91 year old white woman in San Bernadino County
https://www.sbsun.com/2021/01/11/deputy-fatally-shoots-armed-91-year-old-victorville-woman
5) Police murder Judson Albahm , a 17 year old white teenager in Syracuse, New York https://www.syracuse.com/crime/2022/03/family-of-jamesville-teen-shot-and-killed-by-4-cops-files-claim-against-new-york-state.html
The myth that police only brutalize and murder black people has captured the mind of Reverend Al Sharpton who said on 2/1/23, when speaking about the police assault and killing of Tyre Nichols on January 7th,2023: “If that man would have been white you wouldn’t have beat him like that.” Sharpton, like many, has become a victim of mass media propaganda that paints police killings as only about race.
One has to ask—why are the billionaire owners of the mass media absolutely and deliberately manipulating the news and diverting our attention? Why is the corporate media perpetuating a false appearance, and keeping the population ignorant about police murders, diverting attention from the reality that the police murder mostly poor and working-class people of EVERY race, color, nationality, and religion?
The true reason that the media create the illusion that the police are the friends of white people is made crystal clear in the New York Times opinion page on 2/06/23.
"Sometimes citizens don't really care if other communities routinely experience no-knock raids and other manifestations of aggression as long as they consider their own communities to be safe."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/05/opinion/memphis-police-academia-partisanship.html
The corporate mass media does not want us to be conscious of the well-documented fact that Police killings are BOTH racist AND working-class murder. This reality is well established in black-and-white printed reports, and in the blood-red-soaked sidewalks, streets, and jailhouse floors of America. The propaganda industry seeks to divide and rule by manipulating, distorting, and distracting us from what we all have in common. We the 99% who work for the 1%, are much more alike than we are different.
The corporate media do not want us to understand that police murder is a crime against ALL of us. Mass propaganda is designed to keep people from joining together in a multiracial, nationwide, mass, militant movement against police terror with the potential to organize protests, demonstrations, marches, and strikes across the country.
2/7/23
Dr. Nayvin Gordon gordonnayvin@yahoo.com
Dr. Gordon is a California Family Physician who writes about health and politics. He has been published on various platforms including The Mercury News, Counterpunch, Z magazine, Countercurrents, Scoop Independent News, Anderson Valley Advertiser, Socialist Viewpoint, Multiracial Unity Blog, Scientific American, The Oakland Tribune, The Journal of Family Practice, American Family Physician and Dissident Voice, and others.