Shoot first and never ask questions
MIAMI – “Protesters shut down I-195 amid Art Basel frenzy.” This Miami Herald December 6 front page headline speaks volumes about the chasm – local, national, global – that divides those inside from those outside the bubble of privilege in our world of breathtaking inequality.
Let’s get things straight: Art Basel is more about money than it is about art. At the very center of this bubble are the buyers, people who can afford to shell out hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for a painting or a sculpture. Their motives may range from a pure love of art to a desire to display one’s economic status in the most tasteful way possible. The quest for an investment that, being unique and irreproducible, usually appreciates in value, unlike the wild fluctuations that characterize the stock and real estate markets, probably weighs most of all.
The Basel bubble and others like it, bubbles that also include, just outside the exalted position of the buyers, top artists and art dealers, exists in a universe all its own, apart from the everyday world of hard work, shrinking wages, racial injustice and lethal police violence carried out with impunity.
These worlds, which seldom meet, came together Friday evening as hundreds of mostly young protesters of every race and color shut down the main artery of traffic that serves Miami Beach, the epicenter of Basel, as well as the streets in and around secondary sites in Miami’s Wynwood and Midtown neighborhoods.
The Miami protest, which rallied under the banner of “Shut it down,” was one of a series of peaceful protests held in cities like New York, Washington, Chicago, and Paris in order to express outrage over the refusal of the justice system to prosecute police officers involved in highly questionable killings of unarmed black men and boys.
The Miami protest also focused on the police killing of one of our own, graffiti artist Israel Hernandez Llach, who died after being chased down and tasered by Miami Beach police for the crime of spraying paint on a wall.
The fact that the death of an artist happened in the city which is Basel Central is not the only irony. On the same day the protest was held, Delbert Rodriguez Gutierrez, another graffiti practitioner, was run down and critically injured by an unmarked police car in Wynwood, the main Art Basel satellite site in Miami and an area renowned for its murals and graffiti art.
These are not isolated cases. For some curious reason, Blacks and Latinos in this country suffer from a hugely disproportionate percentage of aggressive police actions. These range from random traffic stops across the country, to New York’s infamous “stop and frisk” program, to the use of deadly force.
Beside the fact that an unconscionable proportion of hostile actions initiated by police against citizens happen to minorities, other patterns are clear. One is the triviality of the offenses compared to the outcomes. Eric Garner, for instance, was selling individual untaxed cigarettes before he was choked to death.
Another nearly universal pattern is that the police are always faultless, even when they are caught on video behaving with brutal and illegal violence. There are a multitude of excuses. The officer thought the suspect was reaching for a weapon, which later turned out to be a wallet or a cell phone. Or it was an accident. Or the choke hold wasn’t really a choke hold; it was a martial arts move. Or the 12-year-old black male was holding a gun, even if it was only a toy gun.
If the cops swallowed the tall tales criminals come up with in the same way top cops, prosecutors, and juries buy the stories that police officers, who carry out dubious homicides tell, crime would pay.
Far too often, the fix seems to be in from the start. Take the case of Delbert Rodriguez Gutierrez who, wielding a can of spray paint as his only weapon, was run down Friday by an unmarked police car. By the next day the Miami police chief was declaring the officer involved entirely blameless. Boy, that must have been a really exhaustive investigation. To add insult to grievous injury, as Rodriguez lay battling for his life at Jackson Memorial Hospital and the cool and the wealthy enjoyed Art Basel, the police declared that should Rodriguez recover he will be charged with vandalism.
