File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 405


Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 18:27:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: A march against police brutality


Between 10 and 15 thousand New Yorkers protested police brutality at rally
this afternoon in City Hall park. They demanded justice for Abner
Louima--in Creole, "Jistis pou Abner Louima"--as they streamed across the
Brooklyn Bridge. The crowd was mostly Haitian, judging from the Creole
conversations I heard all about me.

Louima is the Rodney King of New York. The brutality of Los Angeles cops
was captured on amateur video. The sadism of New York's cops is documented
not by video, but by the extensive damage done to Louima's intestines and
bladder as a consequence of having been sodomized by a toilet plunger in
Brooklyn's 70th Precinct. He is in critical condition and very likely has
suffered permanent damage which will require the use of a colostomy bag.
He is suing New York City for 550 millions dollars and Johnny Cochran has
agreed to represent him.

The Haitian community has correctly blamed the Giuliani administration for
the injustice done to Louima. The cops who sodomized him taunted him in
the act: "It's Giuliani time, not Dinkins time." Dinkins, the rather
hapless former Mayor of New York City, spoke at today's rally and was
roundly booed after making the observation that most New York cops are not
racist.

Giuliani has appointed a investigatory committee that is stacked with
right-wingers. It includes Raymond Joseph, a Haitian whose newspaper
regularly attacked Aristide. Giuliani writes a weekly column in this
newspaper, the "Haiti Observateur". Giuliani himself went to Haiti in 1982
when Jean Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier was in power. He was a representative
of Reagan's Justice Department on a fact-finding mission. His conclusion?
There was no repression in Haiti and the refugees fleeing the dictator
were economic rather than political refugees.

The Haitian community in New York, especially in the borough of Brooklyn,
is immense with estimates of at least 400,000 according to an informative
column by James Ridgeway and Jean Jean-Pierre in this week's Village
Voice. Economic conditions have been deteriorating steadily in Haiti, even
after the election of Aristide and successive reform administrations. The
neoliberal agenda is being accepted by these administrations, in much the
same way that they are being accepted in South Africa or Vietnam. What is
the alternative to neoliberalism, they ask?

The Haitian community in Brooklyn is in touch with a myriad of
communications outlets that keep them informed of island and local
politics. The left-wing newspaper "Haiti Progres" vies with Raymond
Joseph's newspaper. Creole radio in New York is constantly burning up with
political discussion. There is liberal Radio Soleil, which claims a
half-million listeners to Columbia University's Sunday morning L'Heure
Haitienne. The host of this show is Lionel Legros who had set up a trip to
Haiti for me and other members of Tecnica in 1988 to work with Father
Aristide on an agronomy project. The trip was aborted after Ton-ton
Macoutes launched a reign of repression during the elections in Haiti.

The Haitian community in New York is highly politicized and
well-organized. It is in marked contrast to the African-American community
which suffers from inadequate leadership and poor morale. The economic
depression in the black community of the past 20 years or so seems to have
generated much more drug traffic and aspiring basketball players or rap
artists than political activists unfortunately. One can only hope that the
Haitian political initiatives might provide an example of how to fight
back to a beleaguered black community.

Another interesting development might be the shift in politics to the left
overall from a radicalized and organized immigrant community. There is a
precedent for this. The Communist Party of the early 1920s was made up
primarily of immigrants, Finns in particular. Nowadays, the
"globalization" phenomenon is seen as something that starts in the United
States and expands outward. Perhaps it is time to reflect on another
aspect of globalization. The misery that the United States and other
advanced capitalist countries is bringing to the underdeveloped countries
produces a reaction in the form of population shifts. Mexicans and
Haitians come to the United States, while Africans and Arabs come to
France. If current demographic trends hold up, they expect that a majority
of the work force in the United States in 2050 will not be white and male.
This should challenge many of our most deeply held shibboleths about the
conservatism of Joe Six-Pack.

Louis Proyect





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