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HERRIN, IL — Tamir Rice, 12 years old, was shot and killed by police within seconds after police arrived at a park in Cleveland, Ohio. Deven Guilford, 17, was shot seven times and killed within six minutes after a traffic stop by a sheriff’s deputy in Eaton County, Michigan. More recently a teenage girl was brutally attacked by a resource officer in a South Carolina school for refusing to leave class. All three incidents were caught on camera. Tamir Rice was Black, as is the teenage girl. Deven Guilford was white.
The public has been debating the particulars of these incidents while authorities have attempted to justify the officers’ actions in each case. But the question we should be discussing is WHY are the forces of the corporate state brutalizing and killing our children?
The children of the wealthy attend private schools and live in gated communities protected by police. On the other hand, our children, the children of workers, are viewed as threats that must be thwarted by heavy handed policing. Heavily policed schools and communities are the harbingers of a brutal fascist police state.
The police were created to protect the private property first of the slave owners and then the industrialists early on in America. In the industrial North, police were used to break organizing strikes of the workers killing men, women and children. Today the police are in the direct service of the giant corporations that have taken over the government and nation.
Post WWII expansion allowed the capitalists to “bribe” a section of workers with a higher standard of living. In turn, they helped bind the working class to the rulers. Now, a new electronic-driven economy is expelling workers from production, cheapening the value of our labor power as we are forced to compete with robots and globalized production. Under this system, the future our children have in store for them is one of poverty and destitution. As more of us are pulled into activity to get what we need to survive, we are confronted by a corporate police state designed to protect the wealth and privilege of the few over the needs of the many.
Increasingly, it is not only working class children of color brutalized and killed by police and thrown into juvenile prisons. Given American history it starts there. If this brutality becomes accepted by the majority it is inevitably used against everyone. Already, working class children who are white are targeted. The film “Cash for Kids” depicts the plight of school kids in Luzerne County, PA sent to juvenile prisons for minor infractions while two judges accepted huge cash payouts from private prison corporations.
Workers historically have striven to better the lives of their families. To maintain control, the ruling class has channeled this striving into identity politics, keeping us from uniting around our common interests. Today it is urgently necessary to join together to stop a complete fascist police takeover of the country. In fighting every instance of police violence we need to recognize that the entire working class is under attack. The wellbeing of each worker depends on the wellbeing of all workers.
Cathy Talbott is a former telephone operator, a job lost to automation. She was a homeless mother of two and fights for welfare rights. A former co-host of a weekly community radio program out of Carbondale, IL, “Occupy the Airwaves,” Cathy is the Environmental Desk for the People’s Tribune.
