African Americans ‘scapegoats’ for social, economic problems: Jackson
African American communities in the US are increasingly falling victim to violence and discrimination, says prominent black activist Reverend Jesse Jackson, adding that the country is now in an "anti-black mood."
Speaking to the BBC on Friday, Jackson said the American public has become deeply divided thanks to the unhealthy political climate in the country.
“The poison of the rhetoric has had a devastating impact,” he said. "Just the permissiveness of violence towards black people is ready and apparent."
He said black people are being used as “scapegoats” for the deepening fears of a cultural and economic collapse, while they are not the “cause of them.”
“It’s a kind of anti-black mood, anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim bashing, immigrant bashing, women bashing. There’s a kind of mean-spirited division in the country. This is just one manifestation of the divide,” Jackson added.
Some of the country’s biggest states were also plagued by economic and racial injustice, further fueling the widespread problem, he noted.
Jackson’s comments come amid outrage in the US, after two unarmed black men were killed by white officers. The incidents fueled the debates over police brutality and led to a series of deadly strikes against law enforcement.
In the most brutal case, a gunman in Dallas, Texas, killed five officers and wounded seven more on Thursday night.
Police in the United States killed over 1,150 people in 2015, with the largest police departments disproportionately killing at least 321 African Americans, according to data compiled by an activist group that runs the Mapping Police Violence project.
Jackson blamed part of the problem on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his supporters, holding them responsible for the growing racial tension in the country.
“It’s not just Trump but the followers of Trump who really believe that somehow they have lost the blacks, the browns, the Muslims, we’ve globalized capital, we’ve globalized the human rights and workers’ rights and women’s rights and children’s and environmental rights,” said the civil rights activist who supports Hillary Clinton, Trump’s possible Democratic rival in the race for general election.
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