A Critical Discourse

MENTALLY ILL WOMAN TASED TO DEATH WHILE SHACKELED, BEATEN, AND HANDCUFFED

Natasha Mckenna, a mentally ill woman who died after a stun gun was used on her at the Fairfax County jail in February, was restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles and a mask when a sheriff’s deputy tasered her four times, incident reports obtained by The Washington Post show.

Six members of the Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team, dressed in white full-body biohazard suits and gas masks, arrived and placed a wildly struggling 130-pound McKenna into full restraints, their reports state. But when McKenna wouldn’t bend her knees so she could be placed into a wheeled restraint chair, a lieutenant delivered four 50,000-volt shocks from the Taser, enabling the other deputies to strap her into the chair. 

Minutes later, she stopped breathing. Days later, she died.

The truth is, though, that police have been covering up the real details on Natasha’s death for months. And, even after all of this, police are not quite clear on why Natasha McKenna was even jailed in the first place. On the day she was arrested, she had actually called the police herself to report being assaulted and appeared to be struggling mightily with mental illness before she bounced around between hospitals and jails for days.

Nothing has happened to the officers yet.

Source / Source / Source 

Environmental racism refers to the intentional and unintentional disproportionate imposition of environmental hazards on minorities (x). It is a term that can be used to describe a number of unjust realities faced by minority populations all over the world. In the United States, it is a term that can be used to explain why minorities are almost 80% more likely to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution poses an extreme threat to human health (x). It explains why 56% of the people living within a 3 mile radius of our nation’s hazardous waste facilities are people of color, and only 30% of the people living outside of those radii are people of color (x). It explains why even in big cities, poor white people still inhale less nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) from car and power plant pollution than affluent people of color (x). Race, it turns out, is a better predictor of the location of hazardous waste facilities than education or income, and is also a better predictor of dangerous exposure to air pollution than income (x)(x).

It is not uncommon in the world of developmental theory to read about the intergenerational transmission of racist ideologies from parent to child (x). What is discussed much less is the intergenerational perpetuation of race-based oppression that occurs when the lives of minority children are affected by environmental racism before they even gain individual autonomy. Because exposure to environmental pollution is an important determinant of infant health, inequities in exposure can lead to persistent group-level differences in health at birth (x), and those differences at birth can affect a child for their entire lifespan.

In the whole history of the United States the impact of racism has been to attempt to contain black people, has been to attempt to stifle the desires towards liberation. One of the ways in which this is accomplished is by trying to convince black people that they are completely powerless before this huge apparatus and that the police can just come into the community and pick someone out, kill them—as they have done on many, many occasions in the past—charge them with something they didn’t do, railroad them to prison, send them to the gas chamber. This is just one of the many ways that the system—and it’s not a contrived effort in the sense that it’s done consciously by a few men up at the top, it’s built into the system, it’s built into the nature of the society. And getting back to the question of what a revolutionary is, a black revolutionary realizes that we cannot begin to combat racism, we cannot begin to effectively destroy racism until we’ve destroyed the whole system.

The greatest difficulty confronting groups that seek to create a new type of revolutionary organization is that of establishing new types of human relationships within the organization itself. The forces of the society exert an omnipresent pressure against such an effort. But unless this is accomplished, by methods yet to be experimented with, we will never be able to escape from specialized politics. The demand for participation on the part of everyone often degenerates into a mere abstract ideal, when in fact it is an absolute practical necessity for a really new organization and for the organization of a really new society. Even if militants are no longer mere underlings carrying out the decisions made by masters of the organization, they still risk being reduced to the role of spectators of those among them who are the most qualified in politics conceived as a specialization; and in this way the passivity relation of the old world is reproduced.