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About the extrajudicial execution of a teenager
Last Wednesday, writes our colleague Tita Barahona - in the corridor of a juvenile courtroom in the city of Columbus (Ohio, USA), the plaintiff, Joseph Heynes, 16, was shot dead in the abdomen by one of the policemen present in the room. The boy did not carry weapons. This, which would have been treated as an extraordinary, regrettable and condemnable event of having occurred in another American or European country, in the US is routine (...).By TITA BARAHONA FOR CANARIAS-SEMANAL.ORG.-
As usual, of what happened to the young Heynes there are two versions: the one from the police department, which is the one that transmits the great media (ABC News, Fox News, CNN, The Washington Post, among others) and the one of the witnesses face-to-face sessions that, in this case, are familiar to the victim (his mother and grandmother) and a lawyer who was able to record the scene after the shot.
The police note maintains that when the judge ordered the accused and his family to leave, a scrape with the family was armed during which the young man shot the police on the ground and the gun was fired fatally.
The grandmother's version is that the police ordered the mother to leave the room without letting them pick up their belongings, what the mother protested, the agent pushed her violently against the wall and it was then when the young man screamed "let me mother, "grabbed the agent by the shoulder, this one turned around, threw the boy to the ground and shot him.
As on other occasions, the agent in question has been sent home (suspended from employment but not on salary), while an investigation is being opened.
This palpable reality means that the great media systematically hide it; but the media are also qualified as progressive and / or independent, because they are more interested in "identity policies", in which the social class does not enter or, if it does, it is evident. It turns out that the young Joseph Heynes, problematic like so many other children of his age, in addition to belonging to a working class family, was blanquísimo and blond mane.
This circumstance has not made him eligible to become a media owner such as Democracy Now, a flagship of North American progress, who has directly ignored the news, even though he has a section dedicated to police brutality.
Because in this section only the victims that belong to racial and LGBT minorities are fit.
The death of young Haynes does not derive from racism (the policeman who also killed him is white), neither of homophobia, nor of sexism; therefore, not interested.
Another 16-year-old boy, Kalief Browder, in 2010 was falsely accused of stealing a backpack. He paid very expensive not to want to accept the treatment of pleading guilty, preferring to go to trial.
He was sent to Rikers Island's adult prison, known for torture inflicted on prisoners.
They put him in isolation for two years. He received beatings from the guardians and the same prisoners.
He spent three years in this hell for a backpack.
In 2013 a judge filed the case, the young man was released, undergoing psychiatric treatment, and committed suicide at age 22. The mother passed away shortly after. The case of Kalief made headlines in Democracy Now and had a broad follow-up, undoubtedly deserved. He was poor, like Joseph Heynes, but he was an Afro-American Bronx boy: that was the difference, the identity that had to stand out above any other.
It can not be denied that the USA is a racist country, and with high rates of violence against women who overcome those of police brutality. But if the black or Latino woman is a poor laborer, she has almost all the papers to be humiliated by any representative of the State, exploited until exhaustion, beaten by the police even if she is pregnant (recently a woman has aborted in a commissioner after being paralyzed with a taser), sexually abused, incarcerated or deprived of the guardianship of their children.
We have said it elsewhere: race, sex, class make up a deep explosive cocktail in the USA that radiates the entire capitalist world. This is the model of class attack that lately we are seeing is being revived in our latitudes also, with the so-called gag laws, with the attack on the right to strike and other cattle with our struggle.
Like others, the feminist movement must be careful not to fall into the trap of the liberal policies of identity, which, in short, work to perpetuate the capitalist system by washing its face, the system that also reproduces with our oppression as women.
The best means to overcome this danger is to keep in mind that we are living in a class society, that the class struggle exists and has been growing again, that women workers, most of the women in the world, are also targets of this attack; that our liberation struggle is internationalist (without borders of nation, culture, race, sex or age) and we are against all forms of exploitation and oppression, overwhelms, men, children, adults, whites or blacks.
References:
- The number of deaths due to police brutality, at http://killedbypolice.net/
- The declaration of the grandmother of Heynes, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSRMiMKylW4
- The news about Kalief Browder on Democracy Now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd6hCmgmj44
- The case of the woman who aborted after being attacked with a taser, at
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/woman-20-suffered-miscarriage-jail-11650121
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