[News] If the Airport is a Police State, What is the Ghetto?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

If the Airport is a Police State, What is the Ghetto?

Tue, 11/23/2010 - 22:33 ­ Glen Ford

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/if-airport-police-state-what-ghetto

It is right to howl at the indignities inflicted 
on airline passengers – but hypocritical, if the 
howls come from folks who applaud or remain 
silent while police in big cities across the 
country subject hundreds of thousands of Black 
and Latino males to arbitrary stop and frisks. 
“As a Black male who is often perceived as Latino 
or Middle-Eastern, I expect to get stopped and 
questioned, pulled from the crowd and patted down.”

If the Airport is a Police State, What is the Ghetto?

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

“The police state has long been in effect in 
Black America – so long, it is experienced as routine.”

Critics of the Obama administration’s escalating 
intrusions on the dignity and violations of the 
privacy of air travelers are certainly correct in 
raising holy hell with the voyeurs and bullies 
that run the homeland’s security apparatus. The 
president’s men are a nasty little bunch, who 
seem to respond to every hint of danger by 
shouting “strip!” and fondling everyone within 
reach. But I must admit that I’m not personally 
overly upset at the government’s deployment of 
machinery that electronically renders one naked, 
or the prospect of more frequent and intrusive pat-downs.

As a Black male who is often perceived as Latino 
or Middle-Eastern, I expect to get stopped and 
questioned, pulled from the crowd and patted 
down. My teenage and young adult years coincided 
with the frequent hijacking of flights to Cuba. I 
fit the profile. That coincided with the war on 
drugs that never ended, a war that treated me 
like an enemy combatant, and still does. A pair 
of narcotics detectives used to stop me without 
fail, among thousands of other train passengers, 
each week, same time, same day, as I passed 
through Union Station commuting from New York to Washington.

“La Migra,” the immigration authorities, have 
challenged me in DC, all dressed up for an 
expensive business lunch at nigh noon on K 
Street, demanding to know if I was a citizen. 
I’ve been pulled off a bus full of other 
journalists on the tarmac at the airport in 
Vienna, Austria, by machinegun-toting police, for 
no other reason than my physical type. My 
hometown neighborhood is a designated drug zone – 
like every Black neighborhood in Jersey City, New 
Jersey – where anyone can be stopped and 
questioned about their reasons for being in the 
area; where one is presumed guilty until the police decide you might not be.

“If Philly were New York-sized, the cops would be 
stopping and frisking 1.2 million people on the streets each year.”

I spend much of my time in New York City, where 
about 600,000 pedestrians, the vast majority of 
them Black or Latino and male, will be accosted 
by cops, by the end of this year. There is an 
eight-block area in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, 
where 50,000 stops were made over two years, many 
if not most involving the same Black, male 
neighborhood residents over and over again.

But it gets worse. In Philadelphia, a city 
one-sixth the size of New York, at least 200,000 
mostly Black, male pedestrians are 
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33230464/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts>stopped 
each year. That means, if Philly were New 
York-sized, the cops would be stopping and 
frisking 1.2 million people on the streets each 
year, twice as many as in the Big Apple. This is 
stop-and-frisk gone wild, used as a weapon of 
racial bullying and control, and as an intake 
valve for Black mass incarceration, sending huge 
proportions of Black makes into institutions 
where they don't render you naked electronically, 
but up close and personal, at any and all times 
the prison authorities see fit, and where 
visiting family members are subject to have their bodily orifices explored.

So, Yes – federal search policies at airports are 
a sign of a growing police state. But the police 
state has long been in effect in Black America – 
so long, it is experienced as routine. I fear 
that some of those who recoil at heightened 
airport security also believe that the people in 
the Bed-Stuys of America get what they deserve.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the 
web, go to <http://www.BlackAgendaReport.com/>www.BlackAgendaReport.com.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted 
at <mailto:Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com>Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com.




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