Saturday, May 17, 2008
Reaction to the killing of an African street vendor by police shows the growing protest power of the city's immigrant communities.
Feb 12, 1999 | NEW YORK -- Ebrima Jobe, a Gambian immigrant who sells sunglasses and videotapes out of a little glassed-in booth on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, heard about the shooting of fellow West African immigrant vendor Amadou Diallo by police almost immediately. He had called one of his suppliers for baseball hats.
"He said he couldn't come that day. We have somebody die, he say, the African people. They shoot Diallo."
Jobe immediately knew who Diallo was -- the West African community in New York is relatively small -- and immediately knew that he had to do something. "I went to protest. I don't talk about anything, but I hear everybody say they go to City Hall to demand justice from [Mayor Rudy] Giuliani, justice for this guy, because they made a mistake."
Diallo, a native of Guinea, was gunned down in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building by four New York police officers just after midnight on Feb. 4. He had been unarmed, yet officers unloaded 41 bullets at him, hitting him 19 times. Public anger built in New York, spontaneously and quickly. Over the weekend, the streets in front of his former home were mobbed with peaceful protesters, many of whom had never been to a political event in their life.
The quick mobilization in response to Diallo's death is a measure of the killing's shocking brutality. But it also points up the central role of New York's immigrants in building opposition to Giuliani. On Tuesday, more than 1,000 people showed up outside the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan to protest Diallo's killing. People poured off the subway onto Centre Street, a steady stream from 11 a.m. until well after 2. They were almost entirely African-American or African-born, and very few of them were the usual suspects from anti-police-brutality rallies. For once, the International Socialist Organization, the Free Mumia set, the black Muslim radicals were in the minority.
Instead, people in the crowd were using a different rhetoric, talking about a different kind of politics. "They're trying to pit us against Archie Bunkers, against pro-cop white bigots," one woman told me. "But we know they're not our enemy. It's the poor and the working people, and they're pitting us against one another. Little by little, the people are starting to understand."
The rhetoric of class struggle may have been a little antiquated, or a lot antiquated, but the Diallo rally showed the potential for a new kind of politics. People weren't shouting the usual slogans or going through the usual motions of street protest. Even the Rev. Al Sharpton, the biggest protest hack of all, put aside his usual race rhetoric and appealed for a more universal system of justice.
The absence of white protesters was noteworthy, and yet predictable. The white left in New York is moribund. Aging Upper East Side intellectuals and Vietnam War protesters never show up at protests in this town anymore, and probably never will again. The political landscape of New York has changed entirely. The white intelligentsia isn't angry about anything and has little or nothing to offer the political debate. Their dirty little not-so-secret is that they benefit from Giuliani's repressive policies. Their streets are cleaner, their fear of crime dissipated, their place in the city's socio-political firmament secured. Many old radicals are comfortable now.
Instead, the burden of protesting the system has fallen to an odd mishmash of people, most of them immigrants, some African-American -- from chestnut vendors to the mothers of Puerto Rican teenagers to cab drivers, who are at the butt end of the new New York City. Like all protest movements, this one suffers from division, from prejudice, from lack of resources. Most of all, the people who are affected by the repressive policies of the Giuliani administration speak dozens of languages and are from every country in the world. They are nearly impossible to organize coherently -- but they are organizing nonetheless.
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