CALIFORNIA––Notorious white rapist Brock Turner was released from the Santa Clara County Jail on September 2nd, after serving three months for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. He was sentenced to six months, but was released early for “good behavior.”
The sentencing was so lenient because, according to the judge, prison would have “a severe impact on [Brock].”
Turner is the 20-year-old former Stanford undergraduate who was found guilty of: intent to commit rape of an intoxicated person, sexually penetrating an intoxicated person with a foreign object and sexually penetrating an unconscious person with a foreign object.
In July of 2016, The Burning Spear newspaper reported:
“Many white people have rallied behind the Stanford ‘star athlete’ who raped an unconscious woman in an alley behind a dumpster. White media refused to publish his mug shot for months, instead showcasing his grinning yearbook photo and details about his prospects of becoming an Olympic swimmer. If Brock Turner had been African, his mug shot would have been front-page news the next morning after the story broke. But the fact is, Brock is not African. This thug who assaulted and raped an unconscious woman was white, and he represents only the latest act of sexual terror from a white society in which literally every eight seconds, another rape occurs.”
Turner’s return to freedom after a mere three months of his slap-on-the-wrist six-month sentence appears in stark contrast to the stolen lifetimes of over 1.5 million African men and women locked down in U.S. colonial prisons, mostly for nonviolent drug-related charges.
Brock Turner and the violence in white culture
In the July 2016 Spear article we discussed how the Brock Turner case reveals the prevalence of sexual violence in white culture, stemming back to the bloody origins of the Euro-American capitalist social system in slavery, genocide and colonialism.
Turner’s release also sheds light on the fact that there are two Americas, one for white people and another for Africans, and that white people enjoy a different relationship with the colonial State than Africans who live as colonial subjects. The “justice system” is a two-tiered system. For African people, the court system is a legalized lynch mob.
White people are told that the role of the police, court systems and jails are to “stop crime,” but as Chairman Omali Yeshitela says, crime is defined as anything that challenges the monopoly of violence in the hands of the white ruling class. Law is the opinion of the ruling class.
Chairman Omali explains that the role of the State is to maintain the division of society into haves and have-nots, and specifically to enforce, through violence and coercion, the colonial domination of African people.
White people as a whole sit on the pedestal of the colonial oppression of African people and have been complicit and participants in colonial terror against Africans and Indigenous people for centuries.
In white society, the State is not concerned with stopping the Brock Turners of the world.
In fact, his behaviors are sanctioned, because he is just a white boy who wanted to be an Olympic swimmer, whereas an African accused of the same act would be vilified as a demonic rapist deserving of the harshest punishment.
White protestors fail to recognize the core contradiction which is white power
There were a small group of white people who gathered outside of Turner’s home armed with assault rifles to protest his release.
“He should not be able to go to jail for three months…and then just live his life normally,” said 22-year-old Jaimes Campbell, one of the AR-15 rifle-wielding protesters.
What these protests fail to recognize is that Turner is a mere manifestation of a social and economic system of white power built on domination, including sexual violence, of Africans and other colonized peoples.
The rape culture of white society rest on the genocidal violence of white power and colonialism in which the daily murders of African occur including the murders of children such as 13-year-old Tyre King who was shot by Columbus, Ohio police on September 16, 2016.
Where are the white protesters encircling the homes of the killer cops who steal the lives of African people?
The true nature of the white colonial State becomes obvious when comparing the case of Brock Turner with the case of Brian Banks.
Banks, an African high school football player with dreams of joining the NFL, was accused of rape when he was sixteen years old. He was tried as an adult and received more than five years in prison, compared with Turner’s measly three months. Banks’s accuser later admitted to fabricating the allegations.
Parasitic Capitalism was built on the domination of Africans and other colonized peoples
The entire U.S. social and economic system—parasitic capitalism—was built on the brutal domination of Africans, Indigenous, Arab and other colonized peoples by white power and white people who used every form of terror and violence imaginable including sexual violence.
For over a hundred years at the turn of the century, mobs of white men, women and children lynched African people, mutilated their genitals, and burned them alive during open festivals of sadism.
This continues to this day.
Inside U.S. prisons, African people are subject to sexual torture by prison guards. One such example is Jon Burge, the Chicago police commander who tortured over 200 Africans between 1971 and 1992.
Every day in cities across the U.S., including New York and Philadelphia, the African community is subject to sexual molestation by police in a tactic known as “stop and frisk.”
Brock Turner is an ugly reflection of the American social system. His behavior and the State’s mild chastisement of him are not exceptional; they are normal within white power imperialism.
To quote The Burning Spear July 2016 article on Turner:
“Problems such as rape that occur within the white community revolve around the fundamental rape and assault on colonized peoples upon which all of white society rests.
“White people who want to break ties with the rapist oppressor nation must unite with the struggles of the African and Indigenous people to reclaim their land, resources and destinies.
“Reparations to African and Indigenous people is the weapon that will smash the white culture of rape.
“White solidarity with Black Power is the doorway for white people to rejoin the rest of humanity in the struggle to create a new world of liberation and genuine peace through revolution, a world without war, genocide, slavery and rape.”
