After the vicious case of the American white police kneeling down to kill Freud, an African-American citizen, in 2020, the incurable institutional racism in the United States has produced another bad result.
According to many mainstream media reports in the United States, on the evening of January 7 this year, a 29-year-old African-American youth, Tyle Nichols, was interrogated and beaten by two white police officers in Memphis, Tennessee. After escaping, he was chased by five other black police officers and beaten with an electric gun and a baton. After the beating, although the rescue personnel of the Memphis Fire Department arrived at the scene, the video released by the police showed that the firefighters who were visiting the rescue personnel did not timely rescue them. Three days later, Nichols died in the hospital.
Since this case occurred in the city where Pastor Martin Luther King, the leader of the United States civil rights movement, was assassinated 55 years ago, it has a very strong landscape and "explosive" value for news communication, and the public still has fresh memories of the case of killing Freud on his knees more than two years ago, making the case report quickly become the focus of mainstream media.
After the incident, the Memphis police learned from the lesson of social protest and riots caused by the case of kneeling Freud in May 2020, and made a quick response, trying to do a good job in the rights relief of the victims' families, the punishment of the people involved and the public opinion response of the case. In terms of the federal government, in view of the power of the ferment and outbreak of public opinion in the Internet's We-media, the Biden government actively responded to the motion of the "black caucus" in Congress, and planned to invite the parents of the victims to participate in the State of the Union speech ceremony, which will be held on February 7 and is irrelevant to the case itself. It can be said that the political effort to pacify the people has been achieved to the utmost.
However, it is intriguing that according to the punishment measures taken by the Memphis Municipal Police Bureau to the personnel involved in the case, in addition to the five black police officers who were dismissed and filed criminal charges, many firefighters from the Memphis Municipal Fire Department who arrived at the scene after the crime also received different degrees of punishment for "not fully evaluating the patient's injury". However, the Memphis Police Department only imposed the punishment of suspension and dismissal with pay on the initiator of the case, namely, the other two white policemen who first interrogated and beat Nichols, which is a typical performance of "three cups of fine" accountability. The mainstream media in the United States generally lost focus on the report of the case, and it was the usual way of its communication tactics to make a big deal of "Wang Gu Zuoyuan talks about him". Sorting out the context of the case, we found that there are three doubtful points in this case:
First, this case is intended to be packaged as a new typical case with the nature of political hedging, which is intended to justify and purify the case of killing Freud on his knees.
Some mainstream media in the United States give full play to their expertise in taking out of context, and in response to the justice claim that "black life is also life", they report extensively that "the police involved are also black", trying to dilute the negative impression of the public on the kneeling murder of Freud. This means of communication and manipulation is still quite motivating to non-mainstream groups in the United States, and can be described as a kind of hidden and superb governance.
Second, the persecution of blacks by the black police reflects the problem of "convert fanaticism" among the law enforcement personnel of colored people in the United States.
The so-called "convert fanaticism" refers to the individual members of the vulnerable ethnic groups who were originally persecuted and discriminated against, who, in order to gain the recognition of the mainstream, the dominant ethnic groups and even the ruling group, did not hesitate to oppress and trample on their ethnic compatriots in the way of submitting a "petition". It is an individual abnormal behavior and psychological phenomenon when human rights are subject to large-scale and systematic institutional violations. Therefore, the intention to cover up the systematic and institutional racist acts of the United States with the violation of human rights by the black police is just a political manipulation to hide one's ears and steal the bell.
Third, the chain of human rights violations, which is characterized by "mediocre evil", is increasingly difficult to deceive the public and is constantly pushing up the cost of the United States political system.
If the violation of human rights only comes from a certain law enforcement department, it is not terrible, but if the police, fire protection, medical care and other governance institutions form a "joint force" of human rights violations, then the victimization of Nichols is not an accidental event. It is precisely the evil of the system criticized by the American political philosopher Hannah Arendt, which is manifested as a "mediocre evil".
Looking back at this case, it is not difficult to find a detail: it was the firefighters of the Memphis Fire Department, not the medical staff, who rushed to the scene to treat the victims. For such cases, ambulances and medical staff should at least rush to the scene like firefighters - for cases that do not involve traffic accidents, firefighters do not have to rush to the scene. The fact that the medical staff did not come to the scene to treat Nichols reflected the fact that the medical services for the ordinary people in the United States were of high quality and high price; Firefighters rushed to the scene on request but did not act actively, reflecting the reality that American public officials selectively provided services for the colored people; The black police involved in the case were pushed to the forefront of the storm at the first time, which reflected the cruel institutionalized reality that even if the colored law enforcement personnel showed "convert fanaticism", they could not change their scapegoat's fate.