Racial injustice

According to Mapping Police Violence, which tracks the excesses and brutality of police forces in the U.S., black people are more likely to be killed by the U.S. police. In 2019, as emphasized by the civil organization, the police killed 1,099 people, mainly by targeting black people compared to white people. 

In some states, there is a greater tendency for police forces to overreact, with eight cities mentioned: Reno, Oklahoma, Santa Anna, Anaheim, St. Louis, Scottsdale, Hialeah, and Madison all maintaining their homicide rates for blacks above the U.S. overall homicide rate of 5 murders per 100,000 people in 2018.  

Although the The Counted project by the British newspaper, The Guardian, reports that since 2015, police deaths of blacks have doubled, bringing the national police murder rate in the U.S. to 7.27 per million people, then there are the brutalities committed by agents against Hispanics with 3.51 deaths per million people. In this regard, from New York, Patrick Watson told me about a racially endemic problem in his country; while he is convinced that "we will end up solving it," he acknowledged the long legacy of racial problems.

The analyst and senior editor at Mauldin Economics told me that people in the United States are under a lot of internal pressure and like any country, Americans have different views and differences among themselves. "I think most of us are horrified by the misconduct of the police and we really want a peaceful and tolerant society; some are afraid to talk openly so as not to confront the people who support Trump because they are also aggressive...we have to do better," he argued. 

Watson, who is also an expert in geopolitical analysis, stressed that Trump is not to blame for the racial problems in the United States, but he has contributed to them with his language, messages and attitudes. "Most Americans voted against Trump in 2016; he is president only because of the electoral college system and current polls show only 40% of the people' support and let's say he is very good at manipulating information, the media and undecided voters... I think history will judge his presidency as a terrible accident," said the American analyst. 

I asked Watson if he believes in the dialectic of an internal movement to empower white people or even - perhaps - part of a global movement, a fact that also exists to him.

Are we going back to the past in terms of our rights and values as a global society, in which freedom of expression, the press and immigrants are also under attack? In the opinion of the American expert, this is something that Trump and his followers want. "They want a return that they idealize to a 1950 vision - which never really existed - in which white American men thrived and minorities were in control." 

In Watson's view, in the midst of 2020, freedom in all its broad sense of expression and connotation is being seriously threatened by the ideologies of extremes and by "demagogues" such as Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban and others who use "their power to divide and conquer". 

At this moment, the electoral result for the presidential elections on November 3 is in the air, with a citizenry seriously affected by the passage of the coronavirus pandemic that has placed the American Union as the nation in the world with the highest number of infections, above the 1.8 million positive ones, and also at the head of deaths with more than 108,059 people. 

Added to this, the fall of the American economy, the destruction of jobs due to productive hibernation to contain the speed of the coronavirus' expansion and now, the anger of millions of people all over the American Union who have come out to protest against the American police brutality using George Floyd as the visible tip of that clamour, although behind him, unfortunately, there are many other stories of people killed because a policeman exceeded his function. The world is crying out for racial justice...