A white man with a gun. An unarmed African American teen shot dead. Assessments regarding class, race and violence clearly classify the execution of Jordan Davis as a lynching. On February 15, 2014 a diverse Florida jury found Michael Dunn, accused of shooting an unarmed teenager to death during a dispute over loud music, guilty of four charges, but the jury was unable to reach a decision on the top count, first-degree murder. And there is the rub. In this instance, it is not hard to see it was Florida and this racial murder was a "lynching." A lynching is defined as an extralegal murder in service to honor, race, or tradition. Finally, the bogus law of "stand your ground" in Florida is little more than the state legalizing vigilante murder such as occurred in the Trayvon Martin tragedy and now in the Jordan Davis case.
The verdict, that included a mistrial on the count of First Degree Murder, was a major failure of the criminal justice system to deliver full justice in the United States. It reflects how the American legal system is corrupted by white racial animosity toward people of color and the poor. The blockbuster by Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, documents the racial failure of the present-day criminal justice system that devalues Black life. Michael Dunn's behavior following the shooting and Davis's death also devalues Black life. He dined on pizza before driving home and did not call the police until the next morning. His smugness and narcissism revealed his version of the "myth of superior virtue" often adopted by evil agents who believe that they have the high moral ground. Now I understand the meaning of journalist Joan Walsh's book: What's the Matter with White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America.
Walsh argues that the biggest divide in America today is based not on party or ideology but on two competing explanations for why middle-class stability has been shaken since the 1970s. One side sees an America that has spent the last forty years bankrupting the country by providing benefits for the underachieving, the immoral, and the undeserving-no matter the cost to the "majority" of Americans. The other side sees an America that has spent the last forty years catering to the wealthy while allowing only a nominal measure of progress for the downtrodden. Using her extended Irish-Catholic working-class family as a case in point and explaining her own political coming-of-age, Walsh shows how liberals unwittingly collaborated in the "us versus them" narrative and how the GOP's renewed culture war now scapegoats segments of its own white demographic. Such is the result of the association of "liberalism" with "welfare", which in this view, takes away from the "white majority" to provide subsidies to people of color who are responsible for their own poverty.
Florida's resort to lynch law in the 21st century reflects the state's roots in the antebellum American South. During the 19th century Americans in the North and other areas of the country (as well as Europeans) imagined the state as little more than a southern frontier area. To them, the mention of "Florida" conjured up images of alligators and swamps, palms, palmettos, cypress, and canebrakes. In reality, on the other hand, the "Sunshine State" was an Old South slave state that seceded from the Union after Lincoln's election along with the rest of the Deep South. The widely accepted prewar social habit of brutalizing and intimidating African-Americans carried over into the 20th and 21st centuries. In fact, when the Reconstruction Grant administration did try to suppress the KKK, northern Florida became a safe haven for many Klansmen fleeing from federal authority. In the 21st century, white terror against African Americans has not ended in Florida.
In light of these circumstances, a Marxist theory of lynching looks deeply into social stratification in Florida and the South. From the antebellum slave patrols to the draftees of the Confederate Army to many rank and file Klansmen, poor whites have always been recruited by their exploiters to maim and kill Blacks and other enemies of those exploiters. Class lines, even today, along with the powerful influence of white privilege, engender ongoing contention and strife between the races.
To maintain white dominance and all the advantages that went with it, some whites, such as Michael Dunn, assumed a posture of permanent, unceasing wariness and alertness, standing ready to punish any perceived Black infractions. In the post-WWII period, white supremacists murdered NAACP state leader Harry T. Moore. It was comforting to economic elites that the races were focused on their differences instead of common class interests.
We need social room and social space for Black anger and rage over these two examples of executing black young men. The Communist Party USA was the first national political party to sincerely fight for racial equality, the first to put an African American candidate on the presidential ticket, to take up the fight for legal justice for the Scottsboro defendants in Alabama, to condemn American prisons as obsolete, and to propose a sophisticated theoretical analysis of white genocide.
Recent academic scholarship exposes the dynamics of white racial violence against African American males in the nation. Perhaps the best of this new scholarship is represented by The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad . Dr. Muhammad is today the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, the leading research center/library of African-American history and culture in the U.S.
Dr. Muhammad's study has received well deserved praise from several highly regarded sources. One reviewer describes this study as "[A] brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us" (Darryl Pinckney in the New York Review of Books May 5, 2012). Another commentator stated: "This rich and absorbing history forcefully reveals how putatively objective social knowledge created tight links between color and criminality. Thoughtfully comparing representations of white immigrants and African Americans, Muhammad vividly establishes how a racial, and racist, 'scientific' discourse combined with the misuse of statistics to influence the patterning of blame, promote white fear, justify uneven policing and discriminatory justice, and block recognition of the deep structural roots of poverty and crime." (Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America). And David Levering Lewis, the leading biographer of W.E.B. DuBois, wrote that "Muhammad's book renders an incalculable service to civil rights scholarship by disrupting one of the nation's most insidious, convenient, and resilient explanatory loops: whites commit crimes, but black males are criminals. With uncommon interpretive clarity and resourceful accumulation of data, the author disentangles crime as a fact of the urban experience from crime as a theory of race in American history. This is a mandatory read."
Others have agreed. "The mass incarceration of poorly educated Black and Hispanic men has become a principal instrument of social policy in the United States in recent decades. In this exquisitely argued book, Muhammad illuminates the social, political, and cultural roots of this phenomenon. In my opinion, this is the most significant work in the study of race and American society to have appeared in the past decade." (Glenn C. Loury, author of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality). Finally, one evaluator states: "a dazzling study that illuminates a great deal about the social construction of Black criminality. Muhammad does a superb job of explicating the role that social scientists, journalists, and reformers played in creating the idea of the Black criminal and sustaining racial inequality. This important book is a vital contribution to our understanding of the role of racism in American society." (Aldon D. Morris, author of The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement). This scholarship goes far in helping to expose the dynamic underlying the growth of the "prison-industrial complex" in recent decades.
Dunn was charged with first-degree murder, three counts of attempted second-degree murder and one count of firing into a vehicle in the Nov. 23, 2012, shooting. The jury couldn't reach a decision on the first-degree murder charge, but convicted on the other four.
Dunn contended he acted in self-defense. Prosecutors suggested that Dunn, 47, was angry because he was being disrespected by a young black man. Dunn was remanded to the custody of authorities. The proceedings are the latest in a series of murder cases with claims of self-defense that have roiled Florida and garnered national attention. George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering an unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, during a confrontation on Feb. 26, 2012. As in the Zimmerman case, race has been more than a subtext in the Dunn trial. Prosecutors maintained that Dunn repeatedly shot at the black teenagers because they were playing their hip-hop music too loudly.
"This defendant was disrespected by a 17-year-old teenager, and he lost it. He wasn't happy with Jordan Davis' attitude. What was his response? 'You're not going to talk to me like that,' " Assistant State Atty. Erin Wolfson said. "He took these actions because it was premeditated. It was not self-defense."
According to Jacksonville Police, Dunn fled with his fiancée and drove south more than two hours to his home and never called them. They arrested him the next day after tracking him down through his license plate number. Dunn told officers that Davis threatened him and he thought he saw someone point a shotgun at him from inside the SUV or maybe it was a stick to make him think it was a gun. Under Florida's self-defense law, Dunn could fire if he believed his life was in danger. But police recovered no weapon from the crime scene, and witnesses said they never saw a weapon. There was no surveillance video taken outside the store.
One of Dunn's attorneys stated that his client "feels that he was the victim of a political system pressured to appease a certain body of constituents.... It has been a very long and tenuous year for my client, spent in isolation in the Duval County jail. Mr. Dunn has been continually threatened, harassed and tormented by inmates for over a year now, and has received almost no mental health counseling by staff."
The church-going Davis was a good student, had never been arrested or in trouble and was thinking about going into the military, his parents said. He loved being with his parents - roller skating with his mom in Atlanta and swimming with his father on Jacksonville Beach. His mother, who lives in Atlanta, homeschooled him as a boy.
The persistence of white racism and white privilege in American society benefits the capitalist class, the class of owners and investors. "White privilege" is, in reality, capitalist privilege that reduces the real incomes and living standards and holds back the progress of the overwhelming majority of Americans, including "white Americans" as the long history of the American South-and the rest of our nation--shows.
Photo Rally for "Justice for Trayvon Martin" University of Minnesota March 2012, one of many held throughout the US creative commons 2.0
