TORTURE: ASIAN AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES | JUNE-AUG 2013
VOLUME 02 NUMBER 02 & 03
COLUMN: RON JACOB
Economic Justice The Final Battle? Today is August 24, 2013. Tens of thousands of people are gathered to celebrate a protest fifty years ago when hundreds of thousands of other people marched and rallied in Washington DC demanding equal rights for African-American residents of the United States. It was on that day the the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. made one of his most well-known speeches; a speech from which just a few phrases are usually quoted. “I have a dream...” said King that day. “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While King spoke that day, a fellow freedom fighter was imprisoned an ocean and a half away. That man, Nelson Mandela, had foregone the nonviolent approach so closely identified with Dr. King, but only after the slaughter of hundreds of his fellow Africans by the security forces of the South African white apartheid state. Dr. King would be murdered less than five years after his 1963 speech in Washington DC. Nelson Mandela would spend a total of twenty seven years
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in prison, eventually being freed because of the tenacity of generations of South African freedom fighters. While both men would see the end of legalized discrimination and apartheid in their respective nations in their lives, both understood that changing the law is perhaps the easiest aspect of the struggle for justice they devoted their lives to. The much more pervasive injustice of the economic system of capitalism has not only maintained and reinforced the racial and class discrimination faced by the majority of those engaged in the freedom struggle these men are so closely identified with, it has also served to obfuscate the struggle. On the anniversary of that day fifty years ago in the United States, it has become common for men and women whose views are no less racist than those so intent on maintaining the US South’s legal apartheid to quote Dr. King as they argue against keeping voters’ protections in US laws designed to ensure the voting rights of non-white voters. Furthermore, this same racist system uses its laws and legal system to imprison its