The United States Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel stands in solidarity with Baltimore protestors against police brutality and state violence directed against African Americans.
The murder of 25 year-old Freddie Gray by Baltimore Police is only the latest outrage in a long history of rampant racism and violence endured by disproportionately poor, working-class African Americans of Baltimore.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, from 2010 to 2014, 31 peopled died in Baltimore after encounters with the police. 70 percent were Black. Since 2011, the city has paid out more than $5 million in court settlements against allegations of police misconduct.
USACBI also rejects the Maryland governor’s exclusive condemnation of the riots, which are a symptom of long-standing oppression and dehumanization, as opposed to the causes of that oppression and dehumanization.
Indeed the Black Lives Matter Movement in the U.S. has helped to make clear that these conditions recur across the United States. Baltimore is only the most recent example of how police terror and repression is used to intimidate and brutalize African Americans.
As USACBI wrote in November, 2014, after a Missouri court failed to indict Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who killed unarmed 18 year-old African American Michael Brown:
“This is part of a long history and present of centuries of state-sponsored racist police and other sanctioned violence, repression and killing directed against Black people in the United States.
It is also unsurprising in the face of the official repression directed against oppressed communities and other people of color, including Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities in the United States.
This action is consistent with U.S. State-sponsored killings of innocent civilians worldwide, from Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to Yemen to Somalia, victims of drone-strikes against terrorized populations of color.”
Then as now, USACBI calls on supporters of liberation for oppressed peoples, from Baltimore to Palestine, to stand in solidarity against U.S. racism and state violence.
