Note from Henry Giroux on July 10, 2016: The racist killing machine is in full bloom in the age of domestic terrorism. Once again, Americans and the rest of the world are witness to a brutal killing machine, a form of domestic terrorism that is responsible for the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.
Castile and Sterling were both shot point-blank by white police officers who follow the script of a racist policy of disposability that suggests that Black lives not only do not matter, but that Black people can be killed with impunity since the police in the United States are rarely held accountable for such crimes. What we are witnessing is not simply the overt face of a militarized police culture, the lack of community policing, or the toxic consequences of a culture of violence that saturates everyday life. We are in a new historical era, one that is marked by extreme violence and a policy of disposability fueled in part by a culture of fear, a deeply overt racist culture that is unapologetic in its racism, and a culture of cruelty that is the modus operandi of neoliberal capitalism. This culture of cruelty is a cage culture, a culture of combat, a hyper masculine culture that views killing those most vulnerable as sport, entertainment and policy.
