HOUSTON, Texas — White terrorism is alive and well in Houston as in other parts of this state and throughout the U.S. against African people.
On July 22, 2009, three North Americans (whites) launched a vicious and brutal attack on Victor McDonald, a 44-year-old African who, after having been laid off from his job selling wireless services, was working as an ice cream truck driver here in Houston to make ends meet so he and his family could eat.
The white terrorist perpetrators, Dale Hollowell, Christopher Elledge and Troy Elledge, beat McDonald to the extent that he suffered fractures to his nose and his skull and a broken eye socket. As a result, he is nearly blind in his left eye which he can’t even open during daylight hours.
And all the while he was taking this beating, Elledge, Hollowell and Elledge relentlessly screamed racial epithets at him.
The three white workers were arrested by Harris County constables and charged with “aggravated assault and a hate crime enhancement.”
But District Attorney spokeswoman Donna Hawkins said she “could not recall the last time the office charged a defendant with a hate crime,” which became law in 2001.
According to the Houston Chronicle, “The last noteworthy case where a hate crime enhancement was considered was an aggravated sexual assault case in which two Spring [a Houston suburb] teens beat another teen so severely that the hispanic youth spent a month in the hospital for internal injuries caused when the two [whites] kicked a plastic pipe into his rectum while screaming racial epithets.”
Meanwhile, McDonald who was the recent beating victim keeps saying that he’s not “vicious or malicious.” He’s been so terrorized by the vicious beating the three white men inflicted on him that he says he’s too scared to have another job like the popsicle truck that “draws attention” to him. He says “Those people have friends and family members. I’m a marked man.”
Terrorism against Africans in Texas part of status quo
The 2001 hate crime law was passed in Texas following the vicious dragging murder of James Byrd, Jr. from the back of a truck by John King, Shawn Allen Berry and Lawrence Russell Brewer on June 7, 1998 in Jasper, Texas.
In 1996, two years prior to the murder of Byrd, guards at the Brazoria County jail in Texas gained international notoriety when they forced predominately African inmates to strip and lie on the floor of the jail. A video tape of the pre-Abu Ghraib torture incident showed a police dog attacking several of the naked prisoners, one of whom could be seen being bitten on the leg. Guards prodded prisoners with stun guns like cattle and forced them to crawl along the ground. Then they dragged injured inmates face down back to their cells.
Other ferocious colonial assaults on the African community by white power in Texas have followed the Jasper assault on Byrd.
In Tulia, Texas in July 1999, 47 mostly African people were rounded up by Texas “authorities” in a bogus drug sting led by undercover agent Tom Coleman. Twenty percent of the African population of Tulia was caught up in this blatant disregard for democratic rights represented.
Many of these defendants remained in jail until 2004 when a six million dollar wrongful arrest settlement was won and charges were dropped. These incidents reveal the colonial nature of African existence in the US.
In a 1999 opinion, federal Judge William Wayne Justice wrote of the situation in Texas state prisons: “Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions.”
When then-president Bush made statements against the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, many Africans asked if he had ever looked inside a Texas prison.
Organization and theory key to ending colonial terror
Because Africans have been colonized and lack organization and a theory that explains the world, individuals such Victor McDonald, James Byrd and so many others are not equipped to understand why they are attacked by these terrorists.
Like Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, many of us wonder why we and white people can’t just get along. McDonald stated that he could forgive the individuals but not forgive the act.
But we have to understand that it is not any job that “draws attention” to us that makes us victims of colonial terror. It is a historical colonial relationship that African people have to the U.S. and Europe that is maintained through terroristic force. Sometimes that terror is imposed by the state and sometimes by regular white people who have taken their cue from the terrorism imposed on Africans by the state.
We need a movement such as the Uhuru Movement that can sum up our experiences and enable us to fight in our own interest to defeat this terrorism and gain power for ourselves.
The International Peoples Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) is the organization under the leadership of the African People’s Socialist Party that fights for the unification and organization of African working people worldwide.
InPDUM is the only force capable of organizing and mobilizing the colonized and oppressed masses of African workers and poor peasants for mass resistance to European and U.S. imperialism.
InPDUM has adopted the Revolutionary National Democratic Program, found here on UhuruNews.com which can guide the masses of African workers and poor peasants to complete the worldwide African Revolution and end the colonial terror being waged against us for the past 500 years.
