Letters | Latest US police shooting of a black man yet another symptom of systemic racism in America
- The latest tragedy took place in Ohio in the rust belt, where economic decline and entrenched racism have proved a potent mix
- In Hong Kong, people should be glad for the professionalism and restraint of the police force
Some background on the city of Akron, Ohio, where the tragedy happened, is necessary for contextualisation. Akron, Ohio is located in what has been known as the rust belt, a strip of land spanning across the Midwest from which capital and talent fled, due first to deindustrialisation starting in the 1980s, followed by the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization.
The region’s fate mirrors the decline of automobile production in the US. There was massive unemployment with people incapable of achieving upward social mobility.
The government’s loss of tax revenue resulted in a lack of provision for social programmes and education, with racialised neighbourhoods – with lower levels of dispensable income relative to the whites – disproportionately bearing the consequences, and this gradually led to intergenerational poverty and increased incidence of non-white people pivoting towards the informal economy, including precarious employment.
One’s social and political attributes shape one’s lived experience in society. In the US, the rate of African-Americans engaging in fatal encounters with law enforcement is substantially higher than that for other races. The rate of African-Americans being incarcerated in both federal and state penitentiaries has been stubbornly high. The list goes on.
