UN-AMERICAN? LOOK AT TRAGEDIES BLACK MEN SUFFER

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the abuse of Iraqi soldiers by
American soldiers was "inconsistent with the values of our nation. It
is inconsistent with the teachings of the military to the men and
women of the armed forces, and it was certainly fundamentally
un-American."

In his Rose Garden press appearance with King Abdullah II of Jordan,
President George W. Bush said he told the king: "I was sorry for the
humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation
suffered by their families. . . .

"I assured him Americans, like me, didn't appreciate what we saw, that
it made us sick to our stomachs. I also made it clear to His Majesty
that the troops we have in Iraq, who are there for security and peace
and freedom, are the finest of the fine, fantastic United States
citizens, who represent the very best qualities of America: courage,
love of freedom, compassion and decency."

Of course, all of the apologizing over un-American behavior comes only
after the global equivalent of the Rodney King tape.

What happened in Iraq is a natural extension of the humiliation that
has gone on for two decades in this country. Whether Americans'
behavior in Iraq is due to racial, religious, or other cultural
feelings of superiority -- or a numbed acceptance of government
sponsored violence -- the abusing soldiers and the commanders who let
it happen assumed that they were dealing with people who had no voice.
So thought the Los Angeles police who clubbed King in 1991 -- until
the videotape.

Bush lately is fond of saying, "Freedom is the Almighty's gift to each
man and woman in this world." Yet for tan Muslims in Iraq and black
men in the United States, the gift is too often incarceration and
worse. In the midst of the soldier scandal, it is critical to consider
a recent report by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice think
tank.

Fifty years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education
decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional, the Sentencing
Project says there are nine times more African-American men in prison
or jail today than in 1954. There are now 884,500 African-American men
incarcerated compared with 98,000 at the time of Brown.

In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren said: "Education is perhaps the
most important function of state and local governments. . . . It is
doubtful that any child may be reasonably be expected to succeed in
life if he is denied the opportunity of an education."

In the 1980s and 1990s, prison building accelerated as Americans chose
to scapegoat African Americans for a national drug problem. African
Americans represent 13 percent of monthly drug users, the same as
their percentage of the national population. Yet African Americans
make up 32.5 percent of people arrested for drugs. While white youth
snorted unseen behind fences and gates, police swept nonviolent black
drug offenders off stoops and corners.

While looking at the photos of Iraqi prisoners bound, wired and
beaten, one must not forget that in 1992, not even the videotape that
showed King's beating, in which he received a fractured skull, was
enough to shock sense into the jury in Simi Valley, Calif. The jury
acquitted the police officers on almost all charges. That jury had no
African Americans on it.

This humiliation, it should be clear, grew under both Republican and
Democratic administrations. Federal drug laws that treated black
offenders far more harshly than white offenders began during the
Reagan and elder Bush years, but President Bill Clinton did little to
change the laws in his 8 years. No one even talks about black
prisoners under the younger Bush.

African-American prisoners, it turns out, were a prelude to Iraq.
Congress and the White House said they needed to wage a war on drugs,
the weapon of mass destruction in inner cities. After lots of hard
police work and community activism, violence in the streets has been
significantly "pacified" on the surface. But how long the streets stay
peaceful is unknown as the nation continues, through its wild spending
on defense and tax cuts to the rich, to turn its back on education for
working-class and low-income communities. All it does is throw
mandatory tests at ill-prepared, easily discouraged youth.

Black men are criminalized to the point where one out of every three
African-American boys faces the prospect of jail at some point in his
life. Black men can't even drive without facing a significantly higher
chance of being stopped by police. Black men can count on innocent
people being periodically brutalized. Who can forget the 41 bullets
New York police pumped into the unarmed Amadou Diallo? Or the retired
black minister, Accelyne Williams, who was literally scared to death
by Boston police in a botched drug raid? Or the New York police
sodomizing of Abner Louima? Or the shootings, beatings, and
stranglings that barely make the papers and end up as justifiable homicides?

The Iraq abuse scandal shows how America keeps forgetting its mistakes
at home. Rumsfeld says the abuse was un-American. African-American men
remain the proof that abuse is an American pastime.