The Sunday Times: These shootings reveal an America still shackled to the ghosts of slavery

June 28, 2015
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Photo: John Mark Arnold

In 2009, a few months after President Barack Obama took office, Jiverly Wong shot dead 13 people at a community centre for immigrants and refugees. Later that year Nidal Hasan killed 13 soldiers in Fort Hood, Texas. In 2011, Jared Loughner shot dead six people outside a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. The next year James Holmes killed 12 people in a cinema in Aurora, Colorado; followed by Michael Page who killed six in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin; followed by Adam Lanza who killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in a school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. In 2013 Aaron Alexis killed 12 inside the Navy Yard in Washington.

The next year, Fort Hood was attacked again when Ivan Lopez killed three. This year, Craig Hicks killed three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and this month Dylann Roof shot dead nine members of a Bible study group at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina.

These are just the massacres that gained international attention. In fact, since the Sandy Hook Elementary School atrocity 2½ years ago, there have been 72 mass shootings — involving three or more people being shot — with at least 226 being killed.

The Sunday Times: The friction making Baltimore burn is not race but class

May 3, 2015
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Photo: Skitter Photo

The riots in Ferguson, Missouri, last year were provoked by racism. No rational person could argue otherwise after a black man was shot dead by a white police officer. The facts speak for themselves. This small suburb adjacent to the port city of St Louis has only 21,000 residents, two-‐thirds of whom are black. Yet its officials are almost without exception white — from the 94% white police force to the white mayor, the white police chief and almost all-‐white city council.

In Ferguson’s case, at least, one answer to the institutional imbalance is relatively easy to see: encourage more people to vote in local elections and they will have more say in the outcome. A mere 6% of black voters took part in the 2013 local elections. It stands to reason, if more people within the community are involved in its decision-making processes there is a greater chance that the right kind of change will happen from within.

The Sunday Times: As US racial harmony chokes and gasps, a bigger enemy looks on

January 11, 2015
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Photo: The Independent

New York in the late 1980s and 1990s was a polarised city state, where whites and minority groups lived side by side but in no sense together. They were, to use a phrase coined at the time, “the closest of strangers”.

My arrival in New York in 1987 coincided with the notorious Tawana Brawley case. Tawana was a 15-year-old African-American girl from upstate New York who was abducted and raped by a group of white men. Tawana was subsequently found in a semi-conscious state inside a rubbish bag with racial insults, including “KKK”, “N*****” and “Bitch”, scrawled across her body.

One of her alleged assailants was a local policeman, who committed suicide the week after Tawana was found. Another worked as an assistant district attorney.

Even before Tawana’s ordeal, passions were high in New York because of an incident the previous year in Howard Beach, Queens, in which a black teenager had been killed while trying to escape a white mob. Her assault raised tensions to a whole new level. Howard Beach had been about working-class racial tensions, the kind that New Yorkers were all too familiar with. The Brawley crime implicated the white male establishment.