We are Sandra Bland

Sandra Bland in her car (Photo: AFP)

During the worst years of apartheid in South Africa, it was not uncommon for a person, usually Black and poor, to be arrested by police and then just disappear — never to be heard from or seen again. Suicide while in police custody, especially by hanging, was often listed as the official cause of such deaths.

Not even the well-known Black Consciousness Movement leader Steve Biko was exempt from police abuse. Biko, South African police said, had died of a “hunger strike” at age 30 while in jail in September 1977; it came out much later that he had died after being tortured by the country’s notorious security police and then refused the proper medical treatment. A cover-up of Biko’s death had taken place all the way to the top of the South African government. Biko’s crime? Being caught out of his designated “banning area” after curfew one night.

In the case of Ms. Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African-American citizen, the “crime” was a much simpler and thus more insidious one: a very minor traffic violation in Texas in July that led to her being arrested on a major felony charge. She was found to have killed herself by hanging in her jail cell three days later. Bland’s surviving family members do not believe the official ruling that she took her own life while behind bars, and neither do I. Looking closely at all the facts in the case, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that an official police cover-up of some kind was (and still is) in place.

The family has recently filed a lawsuit seeking justice in the case, and I hope they get it. Her death did not need to happen; indeed, she should have never been cited for any traffic violation at all, let alone violently threatened, manhandled and arrested by a white police officer. But in apartheid USA, as in the apartheid state of South Africa, that is the reality that people of color are facing today.

My blood boils whenever I read about or see videos of American police officers abusing otherwise innocent U.S. citizens at gunpoint, especially African-American citizens, often killing them on the spot regardless of whether or not they obey the police officer’s barked commands. And how many fathers among us do not seethe in rage when we see scenes of Black children being pushed, shoved, grabbed at, cursed at or even shot and killed at point-blank range by a white public servant in a police uniform? Any one of those abused kids could be our own kids, and if we are not angry about that fact alone, then there something is wrong with us.

The case of Sandra Bland, as sad and unnecessary as it was, is reportedly only part of a larger trend of rising suicide rates in U.S. jails in recent years. Do those rising rates reflect actual prisoner suicides while in detention — or deaths that were successfully covered up as “suicide” by police? Either way, we can see it as part of a much bigger societal problem that seems vastly underreported by the U.S. corporate-owned news media.

Other countries’ media seem to be doing a better job of putting all the U.S. police violence in the proper context of a growing American military-police state. The Guardian newspaper of Britain, for one, has been chronicling all deaths at the hands of police in the U.S. this year in an interactive database titled “The Counted”. If you want to see what apartheid America really looks like in these early decades of the 21st century, this is a good place to start.

If it can happen in South Africa, it can happen in the United States of America: police harassment, unnecessary or illegal arrests, deaths in detention, “suicide” of prisoners while behind bars, tainted investigations. And it’s going to keep on happening until people, in great numbers in the United States, look this bureaucratic beast in the eye and come together to stop it before one more innocent Black life is taken.

U.S. leaders, President Barack Obama included, have been too busy in the past wagging their finger at the other “naughty” nations of the world about their human rights records to do anything at home about the corruption that is endemic to police agencies nationwide in the USA. But the countries that make up the United Nations have no such illusion or hesitation. The UN Human Rights Council recently released a scathing report condemning the U.S. for its violence at home and abroad, for racial discrimination and for police violence against Black men.

Change only happens when people band together in very large numbers to raise hell and say “Enough is enough”. History has shown us that countless times. Sandra Bland, from what little we do know about her tragic case, at least did not go down quietly. And we shouldn’t either. We are all Sandra Bland — I am, and you are too — and when we get to that point where we can connect the circumstances surrounding her precious life and heartbreaking death to our own existence, then this corrupt system we call “America” may possibly be changed for the better.

But if we just sit back and watch like some helpless spectators at a Roman lion’s den, then the suspicious suicides while in police custody will continue on and on. If a minor traffic violation in apartheid USA is all it takes nowadays to “disappear” into the jail system and never be seen alive again, as it was with Sandra Bland, then watch out: The next traffic ticket that any one of us, whether U.S. or foreign citizen, receives from some so-called peace officer in the U.S. could easily be our last.

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