Trayvon Martin and Mark Duggan: Two Murders, Two Verdicts, One Fight for Justice

Bill Crane, 17 January 2014

When I heard about the verdict of the inquest into the killing of Mark Duggan, I had a terrible sinking feeling that was all too familiar. It was the confirmed of a feeling that I'd had for the past month as I waited for news of the verdict: that it was legal in Britain to murder black men withoutany necessary cause. I'd been both dreading and anticipating this with a kind of resignation, because it was only six months ago I went through the same thing.

Six months ago, news finally arrived from the Trayvon Martin case. His killer, George Zimmerman, walked free in July and remains at liberty today. No consequences for a man who, two years ago, saw a black boy walking along one sunny day in Sanford, Florida, who immediately concluded because of the color of his skin that he was a thug and a lowlife. No consequences for a man who proceeded to track him down and shoot him in cold blood.

Two weeks ago, to my horror but not surprise, a policeman in London walked free as well. V53, the police officer who saw Mark Duggan riding in a minicab one day two and a half years ago in Tottenham, pulled the cab over and shot him, was told at an inquest that he had "lawfully killed" a man who, it turned out, was unarmed when shot.

As an American who moved to Britain four months ago, I saw similarities between the cases of Trayvon Martin and Mark Duggan as soon as I began reading about the latter after arriving here.I read how, like Trayvon, Mark was immediately suspect – and portrayed as a gangster and thug– because of the colour of his skin. I read how Mark Duggan had been transformed from a loving father and peacekeeper in his community to a monster, a gang-banger with drug convictions and robbery convictions by a media eager to justify his murder. The media in America had transformed Trayvon Martin from a talented and popular young high-school student into a criminal and drug dealer to justify how a man who never knew him could stalk andkill him.

The narrative was sickeningly similar. The narrative: black men's lives are worth nothing, whether the city is in Britain or America. Someone who suspects them of having ill intentions is within their lawful right to kill with impunity. The equivalence between black skin and criminality in both countries is strikingly demonstrated by the Mark Duggan verdict and in the two years themedia have spent misrepresenting him.

What are the fundamental roots of this narrative, which allows black men like Trayvon and Mark to be killed with no real consequences? I am more familiar with America, where I'm from, than Britain, but the details of these cases are so similar that I suspect there are many structural similarities.

In the United States, black people are about 10% of the population. After the last major upsurge among blacks in America - the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s - formal equality

with white citizens was achieved for the first time. No longer could black people be denied a job,a place at a state-funded university, or a seat at a table in a cafeteria, based on the Jim Crow-era justification of "separate but equal" facilities. For the first time, public housing, integration of public schools, and affirmative action programs were launched by the government to address racial inequalities that at the time would have only been seen in South Africa.

The movement of the sixties was successful in providing a modicum of equality of certain opportunities to black people. It was also successful in getting some black faces into political offices and corporate boardrooms that had previously been white as snow. But after black people's greatest leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were murdered, after the Black Panthers had fallen under the savage assault of state repression, what remained was a revolution half-finished--and we know the end of that phrase.

By the 1980s, except for the most backward quarters of American life, it was no longer acceptable to be overtly racist. The accomplishment of Reagan, and of those who followed him in both major parties, was to maintain and retrench systemic racism by changing the rhetoric. Now instead of saying "n—r" publicly, politicians could talk about criminals. They could talk about violence and drugs in inner-city communities. They could talk, as Reagan did, about "welfare queens" who drove in Cadillacs to collect their checks from the state. And they could doso without acknowledging, but with everyone else understanding, exactly which kind of people they were talking about.

We can see a similar racist propaganda fest here in the UK; with the recent generation of fear about Romanians and the rapid rise of Islamophobia and xenophobia in general. People can getaway with this rhetoric in the UK as it’s not deemed racist: Islam is a religion and Romania is a country, not a skin colour, they say.

This "colourblind" rhetoric is fundamental to what American legal scholar Michelle Alexander calls "the New Jim Crow," in her justly famous book of the same name. The New Jim Crow details how whole generations of black men have lost their lives to the penal system. Drug prosecutions, which study after study show disproportionately affect black people, despite no proof that blacks deal or take drugs more than whites, can be continue. It is almost impossible to prove that the police intended to arrest or the district attorneys intended to prosecute someone for the colour of his skin.

In the US, being arrested has a massive impact on the life of a man who is targeted for the colour of his skin. A single arrest or conviction can deny this person the right to a job or to the student loans which would have given him the prospect of a job with some kind of security. Mosthave no choice but to turn to crime, or to return to the streets where their skin colour automatically makes them a suspect. Jail time has systematically wrecked black family life in America. In the inner cities there is hardly a single black person who does not have a father, a brother, a son or cousin who has been to jail. This has a very particular effect on the lives of working-class black women who step out of the traditional Western notion of femininity and haveto become both carers and providers.

Colourblind racism is mainly enforced by the police in America. The fact that Trayvon Martin's killer happened not to have a badge made no real difference. It's possible to name dozens of American black men who died by the hand of killers with badges, who then walked free: Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham... In America, hundreds of black people are killed without cause every year by the police on the streets. Scores more are convicted of a crime and executed for a crime a white person would receive an extended jail sentence for, just as blacks receive long sentences for crimes that white people routinely get away with.

Racist violence by the police and by vigilantes like Zimmerman takes on a special meaning in America. As the American sociologist Manning Marable noted perceptively in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, "Executions per se... do not in themselves foster terror among Blacks. Terror is not the product of violence alone, but is created only by the random, senseless,and even bestial use of coercion against an entire population. The coercion that takes place within a 'normal' capitalist society, the exploitation of Blacks in the workplace, is insufficient to modify and control their collective behaviour... Terror becomes real in one's mind only when a person recognizes that, at any moment and for any reason, he/she can be brutally tortured or killed... It is the random, limited and spontaneous use of coercion that tends to afflict the mind and spirit of the oppressed."

In a black community in inner-city America, being stopped and frisked by the police, being arrested for living while black or being killed in an encounter with patrolmen aims to send a message to the black community: this is not your city, this is not your country, you are not welcome here. You may be harassed, arrested or killed at any time.

I see major similarities to racism in America with everything I learn about racism in Britain. Wasn't Mark Duggan targeted by Operation Trident police intending to put an end to "violence inthe black community"? Don't the police in London have a "stop and search" program? While thissounds somewhat friendlier, is not substantially different from the program known as "stop and frisk" in New York City and elsewhere. Wasn't Mark Duggan along with countless other black men in this country convicted of a drug offence, and wasn't he suspected of carrying a gun? In both Britain and America, to be black is to be criminal.

And the similarities don't end there. Where you have the BNP and the EDL, we have the Klan, the Minutemen and the Nazis. There are many potential George Zimmermans lurking in the streets of any town in England, just as thousands of V53s patrol every American city.

In a climate in which the black communities of both America and Britain have been brought to their knees by decades of police violence, vigilante attacks and economic austerity, it will often take something particularly outrageous to spark a movement. In normal times, many people will resign themselves the killing of another black man by the police. But every so often, thousands of people will recognize that enough is enough. And here I get to the third major similarity between the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mark Duggan.

Mark Duggan's death in summer 2011 led to the Tottenham riots, when the black youth rebelled en masse against the killing of another of their own. Such an explosion of rage against the racistsystem had not been seen for years. After the riots, attention to his case continued. Thousands took to the streets on multiple occasions afterwards, and to demand justice when the inquest onhis shooting finally began. There were around a thousand at the vigil for Mark on the Saturday after the inquest verdict.

Similarly, Trayvon's murder came at a unique moment in American politics. Three years into the first term of America's first black president, black communities remained under siege in inner cities as the police conducted a failed and demonstrably racist war on drugs. They had been subjected to rounds and rounds of austerity that gutted the public-sector jobs these communitieshad relied on. After decades of such assault, with little in the way of national fightback, the murder of Trayvon Martin finally broke something in the public consciousness. There were weekly demonstrations in every major American city for a month during early 2012, and again when George Zimmerman walked free in mid-2013. Zimmerman's acquittal turned what was supposed to be a sleepy commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington last August into an event that attracted some 100,000 people of all races to demand justice for Trayvon, and an end to police brutality and killings. It called new attention to the economic devastation of the black community and for an end to racist suppression of blacks' voting rights in many states.

At the March itself, however, any radical demand on Obama or his government was absent fromthose who made speeches. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and other black leaders who spoke from the platform failed to demand a federal civil-rights prosecution against Zimmerman. Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin's mother, got one minute to speak, while Eric Holder, the attorney general who has led Obama's racist war on drugs, got plenty of time to marvel about how his own achievements as a black man were due to the civil rights movement! In the US, unfortunately, the national movement around justice for Trayvon turned out to be another of those incredibly exciting movements recently that have rose to the surface, shook the foundations of the system briefly, and then disappeared without a trace.

Considering the verdict on Mark Duggan's killers, I naturally wonder about the future of the movement that seeks to give him and his family justice. Will it have a similar fate to the one I participated in not six months ago? I hope not. I think that the recent explosion of the movementamong students in Britain for cops off campus is very encouraging in this regard. Already many students who demanded an end to police brutality are realizing that nothing will be solved if the cops leave our campuses to return to the streets where Mark Duggan and dozens of black people like him were murdered. Last month I was proud to march with student protestors to the Royal Courts of Justice in London where the inquest was being held. I have a sense that the rage of students which was on display at Millibank three and a half years ago, united with the rage of the black community against racism, can be a powerful force that is in the process of being built.

Here we might face similar problems in securing justice for Mark Duggan. We must be wary of every politician or bought-and-paid-for community leader who wants to use the struggle for justice to advance their own interests and secure a rotten compromise. We must not be satisfieduntil the uniformed killers of Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg, Christopher Adler and the hundreds like them are brought to justice.

The similarities between the murders of Trayvon Martin and Mark Duggan have convinced me that the fight for justice in both countries is fundamentally the same. In both countries, the futurelies in a broad anti-racist social movement of black people, youth and students, and the working class. Just as much in Britain as in America, the ultimate roots of racist violence are in the capitalist system. There is a role for a fresh and uncompromised socialist perspective here to help knit together the struggles against austerity and economic injustice with those against racism and all other forms of oppression.

Justice for Trayvon Martin, justice for Mark Duggan. Same struggle, same fight!