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Ferguson and beyond

Ahmad Ibrahim
IN a recent edition of The Colbert Report, the President Barack Obama, made an appearance in an effort to promote Obamacare. In an eventful seven minutes, the president went on to mock the Republican Party and indulge in carefully scripted self-deprecating humour. The skit was successful in appealing to its target demography of the youth. However, what really stood out in that instance of political plugging is the fact that Barack Obama referred to himself as 'the leader of the free world'. The epicentre of this 'free world', the USA, is no doubt the new world Jerusalem- if you are a white, heterosexual male. The fact is that the 'free world' remains one of the most racially segregated countries that still manages to call itself a First World country. The fact is that being black makes you 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than if you were white. The fact is that unless you belong to the historically oppressive Caucasian ethnicity, this is by no means a 'free world'.
On the24th of November, a St. Louis grand jury decided to not indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of unarmed black teenager Mike Brown. On the 3rd of December a Staten Island grand jury decided to not indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for choking unarmed black man Eric Gamer to death in broad daylight, with video footage to back it up. At this moment, protests have been spreading across the country like wildfire, demanding justice for the way in which black people have been treated in this country for centuries - demanding an end to both the institutions that function as instruments of exclusion and the imperialism that has projected this white-centric, black-phobic culture to the entire world. For many people in the USA, it has been difficult to grasp the depth of the protests- this is not a protest against particular incidences of law enforcement or judiciary malfunction. This is a protest against the very institutions of law enforcement and judiciary bodies. Many have come to realise that this country was built on a foundation of oppression and white supremacy (read: the systematic cleansing of Native Americans and hundreds of years of slavery). The collective conscious of America is slowly waking up to the fact that the system in its entirety is guilty of oppression. The United States accounts for 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison population (58% of which is African-American and Hispanic). The amount of facts is too great for any sane person to actually say this country does not discriminate based on race.
This, of course, is part of a bigger problem that has to do with how the USA portrays itself and projects that self-righteous image in a bombardment (pun intended) of imperialism. Contemporary US culture and the corporate media are steeped in racist rhetoric. By association it gives black males the image of intimidating, violent 'thugs' and black women the image of 'loudmouthed sass'. The most pervasive kind of oppression is the one we do not recognise and that is the case for most unassumingly racist people of USA. And that is also the case for USA itself in its dealings in the diplomatic corridor. The by-product of a culture of oppression that legitimises itself through subconscious practice is the 'God complex’ that is afforded to the people in positions
of privilege (i.e. rich, white men) whereby each of their decisions and interactions is validated by others in the same demography, creating for them a bubble in which it is inconceivable to be wrong. As a result, the moral of this lopsided story becomes: if Uncle Sam comes calling with the promise of democracy, you better want it and thank them for it, too.
The US needs to start acknowledging the fact that they are no longer in a position of economic privilege that will allow them to run amok with the lives of minorities in the country and people all over the world. They need to realise that no longer can they function with the white supremacist modus operand!; that their rampant neo-liberal exploitations have placed the world and themselves at the precipice of disaster. The protests that kicked off from the events in Ferguson do not, thus, target one instance of injustice They are attempting to target the rotten skeleton of this capitalist machine that thrives on slavery and subjugation and attempts to concentrate power by consecrating wealth. The protests are against the way in which the USA has disseminated racist and sexist thoughts both inside and outside the country, against the way in which the 'wealthy whites' have exploited people of colour and have driven them to sweat blood and tears and gotten rich off that money, against the way in which they have polluted the air we breathe in. The time when citizens of the "Third World' would sit and pray for the 'God of Democracy' to deliver them from evil is long gone.
Ferguson may have been the epicentre of the movement but it has spread across the country, in the hopes that it will soon spread across the globe and shut down corporate and imperial profiteering for good. There needs to be a greater awakening of our collective conscious for that to happen. Let the tragic deaths of Mike Brown, Eric Gamer, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and countless others be the sparks that finally ignite a global movement against the oppression of the powers that be.
The writer is a student at Knox College, USA.