Africa -China Review Africa -China Cooperation and Transformation
Published: January 30,2023
By staff writer
Protests in the US after police killed an African American Tyre Nicholas in Mephis, Tennessee.
Recently, some US cities were faced with mass demonstrations by protesters after police beat to death an African American young man in Mephis, Tennessee. A video shared on social media showed police officers beating the black man Tyre Nicholas. Police alleged that Nicholas was stopped for reckless driving. He was beaten and kicked, pepper sprayed while the victim cried “mom”. He died later in hospital due to cardiac arrest and kidney failure.
This is not an isolated case in US instead it is the norm where Black people are subjected to police brutality, racism and imprisonment on flimsy charges. The US administration is aware of this kind of discrimination done especially by the police department but nothing is done to bring it to an end. It is shameful to hear the US president Joe Biden talking as if his arms are tied and there is nothing he can do about it.
Commenting on the death of Tyre Nicholas, President Biden said that he was, “outraged and deeply pained to see the horrific video of the beating that resulted in Tyre Nichols’ death.” “It is yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that Black and Brown Americans experience every single day.” If the president knows this happens every single day and there is no serious action on the law enforcement officers this sounds like crocodile tears when in actual fact siding with the offenders.
Demonstrations similar to these happened on May 25, 2020, when another African American George Floyd was knee chocked by a police officer Derek Chauvin for more than nine minutes and died.
Statistics indicate that in 2022, Police in the US killed 1,186 people according to Mapping Police Violence. African Americans were 26 percent of those killed by police in despite accounting for only 13 percent of the population.
On January 27, which was the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres lamented that antisemitism, hate speech and misinformation are ever-present, a statement many believed referred to the US. Guterres, further warned that there is a growing disregard for human rights and disdain for the rule of law, “surging” white supremacist and Neo-Nazi ideologies, and rising antisemitism – as well as other forms of religious bigotry and hatred. The world must beware “siren songs of hate.”
Although the US takes itself as the standard measure of everything including human rights, most of the human rights abuses including killing of Blacks and people of colour, white supremacist, Neo-Nazi ideologies, anti-Semitism and hate speech take place in the country. However, instead of dealing with their own failures to protect human rights, they prefer to point fingers to other countries. For example, as China was struggling to fight religious based terrorism in Xinjiang province, the US persistently and falsely accused the country of genocide.
The US put in place the so called human rights organizations like Human rights Watch, not to monitor human rights violations in the world but to be used as a political tool to cover up its human rights violations while condemning countries perceived to be “enemies.” This is the highest level of hypocrisy that the US exercises while assuming the self-acclaimed role as “the world police and standard measure of humanism” yet in practice the opposite is the reality.
The hate speech and racism mindset in US is not only targeting Blacks but also Jews and Asians, the latter being because of the “China threat theory.” Statistics indicate that between 2020- 2022, there were nearly 12,000 violent incidents against Asians across the US, and hate crimes against Asians increased by 177 percent. President Joe Biden, at a Lunar New Year reception in the White House, acknowledged the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in response to two mass shootings that happened in the Asian American community. Biden said that the community has experienced “profound hate, pain and violence and loss.”
Instead of blaming other countries for the very crimes it is guilty of, the US should carry out self-reflection and abandon the mirror accusation but rather concentrate on correcting its domestic mistakes. China does not interfere in the affairs of other countries and expects other countries to do the same. China may not warn US of the gross human rights violations, but will condemn false narratives on human rights situation in China and subjecting to the world to double standards.
