By Saurav Sarkar
“Democracy Now!” reported on September 22 on multiple separate incidents of state violence by the US government against people of color. In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers are accused of operating a warehouse as a black site to torture people they deemed crime suspects. And along the U.S.-Mexico riverine border on the Rio Grande, a three-year-old child was found dead near floating barriers known as “border buoys” that Texas has installed to prevent migrants from crossing into the U.S. without proper documents.
Despite massive marches for racial justice and immigrant rights in 2020 and 2006 respectively, the U.S. has continued to subject working-class people of color to disproportionate state violence. According to a study by the medical journal The Lancet, Black and Latino people are most likely to have been killed by the police in the U.S. between 1980 and 2018. Black people are significantly more likely to be incarcerated in state prisons than whites are, according to the Sentencing Project. The United States also notoriously invaded and occupied multiple countries in the 21st century whose citizenry is predominantly people of color as part of what has been labeled its “Forever War.”
Saurav Sarkar is a freelance writer and editor who covers political activism and labor movements. They live in Long Island, New York, and have also lived in New York City, New Delhi, London, and Washington, D.C. Follow them on Twitter @sauravthewriter and at sauravsarkar.com.
from the Globetrotter News Service