Activist Christina Gonzalez appeared in Brooklyn Criminal Court May 11, one of many activists facing charges for protesting the New York Police Department’s racist “stop and frisk” program.
The program exemplifies the racism that is built into the capitalist state. In 2011 alone, the NYPD carried out 700,000 stop-and-frisk detentions—85 percent of those stopped were Black and Latino. A recent study from the New York Civil Liberties Union found that the NYPD has recorded more stop and frisks of young Black men than the total number of young Black men living in New York City!
Protesting against stop and frisk last fall is what landed Christina Gonzalez in Judge John H. Wilson’s courtroom. When Gonzalez mistakenly entered the courtroom without permission from Wilson, in violation of sacred “courtroom etiquette,” Wilson immediately ordered Gonzalez handcuffed, after which she asked a fellow defendant to inform her employer that she was being “arrested by a white racist pig.”
When Gonzalez courageously refused to apologize, Wilson held her in contempt of court and sentenced her to 10 days in Rikers Island jail.
Jim Crow-style programs like stop and frisk are a concrete expression of the capitalist class’s organic dependency on racism as an essential form of class rule, a dependency which spontaneously churns out racist bureaucrats like Judge Wilson.
Wilson, who sent Gonzalez to jail for calling him a racist, authored a “children’s book” in 2006 called “Hot House Flowers,” in which he compared undocumented workers to dandelions that use up water, soil and sunlight meant for native flowers and that need to be “weeded out.”
In our opinion, “racist pig” is a very precise a characterization of Judge Wilson, indeed.
