Daunte Wright: Against “Democratic” Racism – General Class Struggle

Here we are again. Rarely do things reappear so quickly and with such striking resemblance as they did in Minnesota on the afternoon of April 11. Eleven months earlier, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. Now, ten miles away, at the very same time that Officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for Floyd’s murder, another black worker has been killed by the police. The latest murderer and her colleagues, both on the police force and among the bourgeoisie in general, are already resorting to the same tired excuses and the same repressive measures we have seen in prior police slayings. They blame the victim, feign ignorance, and weep crocodile tears over the tragedy. At the same time, calling for “peace,” they harass, arrest, and assault any workers who stand up to their racist terrorism.

Daunte Wright, age 20, was driving with his girlfriend when he was pulled over by police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota for some contrived driving offense (variously reported as an expired registration or an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror). The cops claim that they found out he had a warrant for his arrest. They have yet to show this warrant to the public, and no one in his family knew of such a warrant if it did exist. Wright started walking away from the police when they tried to arrest him. In response, a white police officer named Kim Potter shot him. Wright ran back to his car and attempted to drive to safety, only to die from his wounds a few minutes later.

The cops had their excuses ready. The perpetrator of this bloody crime, which really constitutes a summary execution, claimed that she meant to fire her taser at Wright but used her pistol by mistake. The chief of police, Tim Gannon, called this an “accidental discharge”. This is ridiculous on its face, an insult to the public’s intelligence. An accidental discharge refers to any time a gun fires when the shooter did not intend it to, whether through a malfunction or through improper handling. Even the most generous definition of the term does not describe what happened yesterday. The bumbling cop in Brooklyn Center, who has been apparently on the force for 26 years, just grabbed the wrong weapon, one meant to kill instead of maim. That, according to the fairy tale the police are spinning, is the real tragedy! The whole tale resembles the excuse of a kindergartner who punches her classmate and then claims it was an accident: “I was just pretending! I didn’t mean to really hit him!”. And why would they need to tase him to begin with? 30,000 volts for insubordination? These are just more of the excuses that come from the bourgeois State when its brutality becomes clear for all to see.

The police clearly see that the public has rejected their story. Both Potter and Gannon have submitted letters of resignation. Potter has retained the same attorney who represents Chauvin in his trial. Protests against the killing, which began within hours, have continued in spite the State’s lies.

Liberal democracy’s propaganda apparatus is already up and running. Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, pretends to be shocked that this could happen again, despite the cops acting under his command. But at least he is “praying for Daunte Wright’s family”! The mayor of Brooklyn Center, Mike Elliott, claims that the near-instantaneous repression of the protests was all about “safety”. He sends out caring thoughts on Twitter as riot police run wild in his city.

The bourgeois State had its repressive measures ready. The riot police and National Guard were on the scene within hours. A curfew was declared that night and every night since (to punish all the workers for their insolence!). The bourgeois State will not be embarrassed again like it was last year. To that end, a multi-agency security program, called Operation Safety Net, was already in place to deal with protests surrounding the Chauvin murder trial, which are expected to increase when the verdict is announced. The operation entails the militarization of the entire Minneapolis region, complete with National Guard troops and paramilitary police. It is a transparently repressive operation, designed to punish free expression before it even occurs. Now it gets an unexpected test run in Brooklyn Center.

But as communists we know that rights do not really exist under capitalism – they are only tools for the bourgeoisie to oppress the proletariat, and woe to those proletarians who try to use them to their advantage.

Daunte Wright was a worker. He held retail and restaurant jobs, through the pandemic, to support his two-year-old son. He struggled in school because of a learning disability, but planned to pursue his GED. He was, by all accounts, a loving and beloved person. And these are the same reasons the cops killed him. They killed him to send a message to black workers and the working class in general that no amount of hard work, dedication, or compassion can save them from the bourgeoisie. This is the bourgeois State. This is its terror! And the terror continues for the workers who gather to mourn their murdered friend, who are greeted with “less lethal” bullets and chemical weapons.

The whole situation of police violence and protest is a serious test for the Biden administration. Liberal propagandists have been telling us that everything evil in the US departed for Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump. But the murder of Daunte Wright shows everyone that nothing has changed. Trump was a normal president: George Floyd was killed and the protests against his murder were harshly repressed. Biden is a normal president: Daunte Wright was killed, and the protests against his murder are being harshly repressed at this very moment. The US state behaves the same way regardless of who is running it because bourgeois states always act in the interests of the same class.

This is also a test of the protest movements that sprung up in opposition to Trump in the past several years, which were primarily composed of the petty bourgeoisie. Will they still come out for demonstrations now that the orange man is out of office? Of course not. And good riddance! Those grifters were only there for their own private gain.

The situation in Minnesota demonstrates the bankruptcy of the anti-fascist strategy that became so trendy during the Trump years. It was not a neo-Nazi who killed Wright, but a representative of the democratic State, acting in a democratic way. Fascism is only the most chauvinistic form of the oppression that is imminent in democracy. Not only did the Minneapolis City Council not defund the police, they gave them more money. Wright is among the victims of that oppression. And in any case, anti-fascism is cheap. Even the most reactionary parts of the ruling class can oppose fascism because they believe it is below them (the Catholic Church’s response to fascism is a perfect example). The same reactionaries are happy to see the police crack down on the workers, so long as it is in service of a democratic “order”.

The task now is to mobilize the proletariat as the leading force in the struggle against racism. We saw the first seeds of this class mobilization in the George Floyd protests last year. Some unions played an active role in the movement, the ILWU’s Juneteenth action being the most prominent example. In Portland, Oregon, workers marched together in blocs by profession (a nurses’ bloc, a teachers’ bloc, etc.), an extremely rare display at demonstrations in the US. These are the seeds that communists must cultivate. We will show every worker that class struggle is the only solution to capitalism’s racist terror. We will also show workers of all races that the struggle for the liberation of our class must necessarily abolish the racist violence that sustains capitalism.