Stephon Clark Killed Twice by U.S. imperialism

Danny Haiphong, BAR contributor

13 Mar 2019

The world’s most ambitious predators -- candidates for US president, like Clinton and Biden -- are also the most likely to condemn young Black men as “predators,” and to wreak mass death, worldwide.

“Guaido and his lynch mob forces are not afraid to create their own Stephon Clarks or Emmit Tills.”

Stephon Clark was twenty-two when he was murdered by Sacramento police in March of 2018. Clark was shot six times in the back and eight times overall for brandishing his cell-phone. Not a year later, the police have once again been exonerated. Clark, however, has been criminalized over and over by the U.S. corporate media. His corpse has been demonized as a thief, a batterer, and someone who was mentally unstable at the time of the murder. Clark has been effectively killed twice by U.S. imperialism and its white supremacist war on Black America.

The corporate media repeats ad nauseum how Black Americans deserve their premature deaths at the hands of the police. Yet the corporate media never makes the argument that the police deserve to be punished for their propensity to kill Black Americans, especially Black men and boys. Black men and boys make up the vast majority of Black Americans killed by the police. Of the 997 Americans murdered by the police in 2018, 229 identified as Black American. And of the 229 Black Americans murdered by the police, 219 identified as Black males. The mass elimination of Black men and boys is the fruit of the super predator ideology, aptly called New Age racism by former Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown.

“The mass elimination of Black men and boys is the fruit of the super predator ideology.”

US imperialism is structurally designed to condemn Clarke as a super predator needing to be “brought to heel” as Hillary Clinton remarkedtwo decades ago. To feed the profits of the monopolies and the banks, Black life must be thrown into cages, graveyards, and unemployment lines.This requires that Black Americans remain sub-human and devoid of the right to exist. The life of poor Black American males such as Stephon Clarke is treated as redundant and thus an inherent threat to the white ruling class, its police-state, and the majority of white America. Police officers are now a protected classin the United States not because of their supposed mission to “protect and serve” the general population but because they require protection by the state to continue to fulfill their mission to lynch the super predator; the Black male assigned to an early death.

U.S. imperialism is the super predator ideology personified in a global system of plunder and profiteering. The super predator ideology that killed Clark twice does so with just as much enthusiasm in non-white nations around the planet. In Korea, the millions that were murdered in the so-called “Korean War” to snuff out socialism continue to face the threat of mass murder under the guise of the Orientalism deployed by U.S. imperialism’s post-armistice arrangement. After the Kim-Trump Summit ended prematurely, the New York Times’ front-page sported an article that slammed president Trump for trusting Kim Jung-Un’s assertions that white American Otto Warmbier’s death was neither Kim nor the DPRK’s responsibility. Since Warmbier mysteriously died of illness in DPRK custody three years ago, U.S. imperialism has used his deserving white corpse as a prime of example of Oriental barbarism and the lust for murder on the part of the DPRK.

“To feed the profits of the monopolies and the banks, Black life must be thrown into cages, graveyards, and unemployment lines.”

Here, the DPRK is the super predator that U.S. imperialism wants to bring to heel. Warmbier is the innocent victim of savage brutality, even though no evidence exists that the DPRK shares any responsibilityin his untimely death. However, evidence is of no concern to the lords of imperialist warfare and capitalist plunder. The threat of peace in Korea is far too grave. The lords of capital have used any excuse possible to undermine peace in the Korean peninsula, including the racist howls against the DPRK by the Warmbier family and the U.S. political establishment. Wambier is white and thus innocent of any wrongdoing. It matters not that the United States remains at war with the DPRK and maintains tens of thousands of troops in South Korea alone and over 100,000 troops armed for war in Japan, Guam, and Hawaii. U.S. imperialism refuses to lift illegal sanctions against the DPRK because its ruling class believes the Korean people deserve the premature death assigned to the super predator.

The Black, Indigenous, and Mestizo populations of Venezuela are facing the same super predator treatment from the barbarous imperialist system as Blacks in America and Koreans in the DPRK. Juan Guaido, the white oligarch appointed by the U.S. to serve as the commander in chief of a coup government, is the latest face of U.S imperial plunder against the socialist country of Venezuela. The U.S. has robbed Venezuela of over 20 billion USD worth of its own assets and threatens even more sanctions to starve working-class Black, indigenous, and Mestizo Venezuelans. The lives of these Venezuelans are collateral damage to a system that sees Venezuela as a vast oil pit and its government as an impediment to looting that oil for its own private corporations. Guaido and his lynch mob forces are not afraid to create their own Stephon Clarks or Emmit Tills, as has been proven time and time againsince the death of Hugo Chavez.

“The lords of capital have used any excuse possible to undermine peace in the Korean peninsula.”

Unlike in Venezuela or the DPRK, Black America is currently without leaders such as Nicolas Maduro or Kim Jung-Un. These leaders have been elevated by revolutionary struggles that have overthrown (as in the DPRK) or severely restrained the power of (as in Venezuela) the rich racist elite that once ruled over the people. Despite facing crippling sanctions and never-ending threats of war, the condition of the poor has vastly improved in the DPRK and Venezuela since their respective revolutions. In the United States, the rise of the Black misleadership class has produced the opposite effect. Black Americans experience higher rates of poverty, unemployment, police violence, infant mortality, premature death, and incarceration than any other group in the United States. Leadership from the likes of Kamala Harris, John Lewis, and the Congressional Black Caucus has done little but promote policies that ensure that Black America is no better off economically than it was in 1965 after the Voting Rights Act was passed.

Bernie Sanders is currently receiving the most hostile treatment from the corporate media for his inability to speak directly to “race” or “gender” early in his campaign trail. Sanders has specifically received criticisms for his responses to questions about reparations. It is no mistake that Sanders is strategically ignoring the issue of reparations for Black Americans. He has no interest in fully challenging the super predator ethos by advocating for the redistribution of stolen wealth back into the hands of Black Americans. Instead, he maintains a racist, color-blind ideology for U.S. electoral purposes. However, the so-called champions of reparations on venues such as The Viewor The Breakfast Clubare nothing but frauds. While they claim to defend “reparations” in the form of a “check,” they say nothing about how it was the Democratic Party that wrote the policies of mass Black incarceration. Mass Black incarceration has played the defining role in the destruction of Black wealth through the repression of the Black left movement. The dismantling of mass Black incarceration is a requirement, an imperative, in the development of a society where wealth is distributed back to those who built the economic infrastructure of U.S. society.

“The so-called champions of reparations on venues such as The View or The Breakfast Club are nothing but frauds.”

Expect the U.S. ruling class to continue killing Black Americans and the people of the world with the same ferocity. In this way, Stephon Clark is one of millions who have been lynched by a system of imperial domination that requires Black corpses to maintain the riches of the white ruling class and their Black compradors. Democratic Party politicians mediate this reality for the benefit for their paymasters. The Congressional Black Caucus and even figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are bound by their positions in the Democratic Party apparatus to remain silent on the plight of poor and working-class Blacks in the U.S. or around the world. Their silence on Stephon Clark lays bare the task at hand; which is to develop the people’s movement capable of destroying imperialism before imperialism destroys us.

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He and Roberto Sirvent are co-authors of the forthcoming book entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Skyhorse Publishing, Release Date: April 2nd, 2019) . He can be reached at [email protected].

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