The Assassination of Sandra Bland and the Struggle Against State Repression
The Assassination of Sandra Bland and the Struggle Against State Repression
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Protesters march from Waller County Jail to the Waller County Courthouse, Friday, July 17, 2015, in Hempstead as they questioned the death of Sandra Bland, who was found hanging in a jail cell by a plastic trash bag on Monday, three days after being arrested during a traffic stop near Prairie View A&M University. (Photo: Melissa Phillip/Houston Chronicle)
During the struggle in South Africa black activists who were captured by the state had a strange habit of jumping to their deaths from the windows of jails and court houses whenever the authorities would turn their backs. In the U.S. the method of suicide black prisoners appear to choose is death by hanging, that is when they are unable to pull a gun from an officer and shoot themselves in the chest while handcuffed behind their backs.
In Waller County, Texas, Sandra Bland, a young black woman from Illinois, an activist with black lives matter, who was, according to friends and family, excited about her new job in Texas is stopped for a minor traffic, beaten, jailed and found dead two days later in her cell. Her death labeled a suicide by the Waller County Sheriff Glen Smith.
Because Sandra Bland was an activist who advised others about their rights and the proper way to handle a police encounter, no one is accepting the official explanation that she took her own life. And even if any evidence emerges that after being isolated for three days and subjected to the kind of treatment that Texas racists have been known to melt out to uppity black folks and she may have taken her own life in a moment of acute depression, those state officials are still guilty of murder because she should have never been in that cell.
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Coming right before the Black Lives Matter Movement gathering in Cleveland, Sandra’s murder dramatically drives home the ever present dangers of not just being black in a culture of normalized anti-blackness, but the vulnerabilities associated with being a black activist and especially a black woman activist. Historically the tyranny of white power has always had its most dehumanized expressions in relationship to black women. The unrestrained and unlimited power of white supremacist domination converged on the captive bodies of black women during slavery and has symbolically and literally continued during the post-enslavement period of capitalist/colonialist subordination of black people in the U.S.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/22/assassination-sandra-bland-and-struggle-against-state-repression
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