Gary Younge sets out in chilling detail (The nation of laws, but no justice, 26 November) how the structural disadvantage of African Americans is rendered concrete in specific acts including being shot dead in the street. Regrettably he offers no indication as to how this situation might begin to be remedied. In 2003 Brown University of Providence, Rhode Island, set up a steering committee on slavery and justice, its purpose being to locate the university’s historic role in relation to slavery and to make recommendations accordingly. The published report – as well as offering a sophisticated analysis of the repercussions of slavery in America – made a series of recommendations (eg on hiring protocols and the acceptance of monetary legacies) which the university set in train. The Brown University project is the obvious model for a Senate, Congressional or joint committee of inquiry on the legacy of slavery. There are, for example, 21 Senate committees currently sitting, including ones on ageing, ethics and Indian (Native American) affairs, but the screaming absence at the heart of the US governmental committee system remains slavery. It is not altogether clear how particular committees come into being, but if the president has any influence on the process, Barack Obama has the chance to bolster his somewhat threadbare legacy. Would it not be wonderful if his last act as president was to force the instruments of the US state to confront the great unspeakable in American culture?
Colin McArthur
London
• The human rights protests in the US draw attention to a great deal that’s wrong with our own media. US human rights abuses have gone largely unreported by journalists. It’s not just the killing with impunity of black Americans that is the problem. The US has only 5% of the global population but its often privatised prison system incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners. A disproportionate number of these are black – as are the death row inhabitants. African Americans make up around 12.5% of the US population. Yet, according to academic Michele Alexander, in some US cities the proportion of African American males with some form of criminal record approaches 80%. Also some of the worst abuses of the post-slavery era are still largely intact. Brutal post-civil war “disenfranchisment” which forced African Americans out of the public sphere and persisted into the 1960s in the practice of murdering voter registration activists now continues in the form of semi-legal “voter suppression”. Lynching culture has metamorphosed into “stand your ground, shoot-first laws”, now legal in 30 US states. These norms are being imposed across the globe and imported into our own society.
Dr Gavin Lewis
Manchester
• Surely, no police officer anywhere in the world needs to shoot to kill when attempting to disarm a potentially dangerous person? Putting a bullet in an arm or a leg is quite sufficient to disable a possible criminal. Furthermore, a white police officer putting a killing bullet into a black suspect in a country with a long history of racism must inevitably lead to riots.
Rachel Gibbons
Hove, East Sussex
