Thanks again professor for your tireless efforts and insights in fighting for democracy and justice. And Happy Juneteenth.
That’s some excellent questioning, and (unfortunately) some great details that should all the normalized depravity leading up to that crime. In such a historical background of text and other actions, it makes it feel that the violence of the beating was an inevitability, not a “one-off.” The sheriff won’t cooperate though. One big problem I recognized is the illusion of a national ability to enforce the laws and hold criminal-cops to account. Garland has some power, for now, in using the “Civil Right Law”. But that federal power is arbitrary and secondary, a distraction for what is not being done on the statewide level, which is the responsibility of the governor—the state government and local government. They have been under white conservative America First control since the state was founded, making reform impossible. They have continually expressed their complete resistance to change. We see how it makes a difference getting a different liberal governor. In Maryland, the new black American Governor exonerated or pardoned over a hundred thousand “criminals”, many of them probably black Americans, who shouldn’t have been “criminalized” in the first place for such a petty crime, which isn’t even a crime in many states anymore.
That wouldn’t happen in Mississippi, nor will a full accounting for justice. This national civil rights law is limiting and will disappear under Trump when he decides—again—not to enforce it, sending out a clear signal to white conservative elected authorities in that and other historically white repressive states that they won’t be held accountable and can keep on with their police practices of violating the “civil rights” of black Americans disproportionately—meaning not punishing them for obvious criminal activity and discussions on texts. That is what “State’s rights” mean—the inability of the federal government, when controlled by the oppositional party to the American First wing now in the Republican Party after 1964. It means: Leave us alone you liberal whites, we control “our states” and “WE” control the law and order in our white states. The federal government has little or radically diminished power in those conservative-controlled confederate states still infect with White Resistance to democracy, a deadly virus for black Americans.
