US ABUSE OF BLACK MEN A PRELUDE TO SCANDAL

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 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 told him
I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn't
understand the true nature and heart of America.

"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 Clinton did little to change the laws in his
eight 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.