Killing Black People In The US Is Normal – OpEd

The Killing of Tyre Nichols once again rekindled the memory of George Floyd across America. Another black person died due to American police brutality. The cruelty and violence of the police shocked the world. The continuation of the widespread wave of police violence and brutality and disregard for the civil rights of people of color in the United States indicates that the murder of black people has been accepted as a black tragedy in the American political structure.

The fact that the killing of blacks has become normal for white American citizens is a repetition of the story of the crimes of the black apartheid era in South Africa, where the killing of blacks became normal and many people became indifferent to the crimes that happened next to them every day. This was primarily because they were led to believe that if you do not protest, these things are not going to happen to them, and they were happy that they and their families are not included in these horrible crimes.

About two and a half years after the brutal killing of George Floyd by several police officers, another crime took place. This time, the victim was Tyr Nichols, a 29-year-old man from Memphis, Tennessee, and the father of a four-year-old, who was violently pulled out of the car and brutally beaten to death by five officers.

Tyre was punched and kicked by the police while lying on the ground when he was only a few meters away from his mother’s house. Tyre was taken to the hospital after being brutally beaten and died after three days. Although the Memphis police immediately fired the five guilty officers and the state prosecutor prosecuted them shortly afterward, this tragedy has left another wound on the body of American society, especially immigrants and people of color.

In fact, the support of the law and the legislators’ unfair treatment of people of color has led to the intensification of the culture of racism in America and has given the police the audacity to deal with black people violently. If the government had the will and determination to prevent the brutal behavior of the police, they would have stopped it by now.  

The unprovoked killings of black people in the United States by the police stem from the fact that white police have been given the right to kill black suspects. This is a demonstration of the fall of morality and humanity. It is a show of hatred and cruelty towards black people and a show of what the American political establishment has in mind to whiten the United States, and in this process, black Americans are still the most important issue of racism and judicial discrimination in the United States. Statistics also show that the punishment for black students is three times more than that for white students, and the distribution of wealth is 10 times greater for white students than for black students. There are now more wanted black prisoners in the United States than there were slaves in the 1850s.

In fact, the brutality of the police in the US, which is in line with the return of white apartheid or the whitening of the US, has fueled the preference of some nationalities and races over other ones. This follows the same policy that leads to the separation of children from their mothers and Donald Trump’s satisfaction with the death of children on Christmas Eve.

George Floyd and Tyre Nichols will not be the last victims of the US terrorizing system, and the racial divides, inequality, and even the naked racism of American society will systematically lead to more such murders. This is because the society and the political structure of the United States value white people more than people of color. In fact, this belief exists even among colored policemen, and American society has repeatedly witnessed black officers behave cruelly, an example of which is the murder of Tyr Nichols. He was killed simply because of his skin color. 

Now, when Joe Biden, as the president of the United States, in such a situation and with such a dark police record, talks about the expansion of democracy in the international community and the alignment of democratic countries against autocratic governments, it can be hypocritical at best. How can a country introduce itself as the leader of democracy in the world when it is facing serious problems like this? Even in the statistics of the Center for the Study of Countries in terms of the level of democratic freedoms, known as the “House of Freedom”, the freedom index for the United States has decreased from 89 in 2017 to 83 in 2022, which is a great concern and shame for a country that promotes democracy in the world.

The world has not forgotten that Biden claimed during the so-called “Summit for Democracy” that “history and common sense prove to us that “freedom, opportunity, and justice have the opportunity to emerge only in democracy, not in a dictatorship”. But democracy with the US formula has been declining rapidly in recent years, and the countries for which the United States was once considered an ideal model, are now looking at it with suspicion.

In fact, racial discrimination and political polarization in the United States have brought this country on the verge of multiple ruptures, a clear example of which was the attack on Capitol Hill. In other words, the myth of the exceptionality of liberal democracy in the United States, which is no longer sacred even for the Americans themselves, with deep problems in the political structure and deep social divisions, no longer has the necessary qualifications for an ideal democracy and cannot be a model for the free world.