Melville Cooke
STANLEY 'TOOKIE' Williams was executed on Tuesday morning. The founder of the Crips gang, he had been on death row since 1981, when he was sentenced for the murder two years earlier of four persons in two robberies.
Commuting Williams' death sentence to life imprisonment (of which he had probably already served close to half, since he was 54 when he was executed and had been imprisoned for 24 years), was up to muscleman turned actor turned governor Arnold Schwarznegger. This is the man who grinned as he told Iraq-bound United States troops, "You guys are the real Terminators."
Williams stood as much chance of survival as the Terminatress in the last instalment of the series. We knew how it was going to end, but getting there was 90 per cent of the fun.
What struck me about the Williams case, though, was a brief television interview I saw with Lora Owens, stepmother of Albert Owens, who was the person killed in the first robbery. A white woman, she insisted very forcefully that Williams must die, that he must pay for what he was convicted of doing (Williams steadfastly declared his innocence which, of course, does not mean he did not do it).
This is in contrast to the attitude of a black murder victim's mother, as reported in last Friday's Observer. Her son had an ice axe buried in his skull from behind by one of two white boys in a racially motivated attack. The two had teased him at a bus stop and then ambushed him as he walked across a park.
If time really heals, I would have expected the person who lost an immediate relative over 20 years ago to be more forgiving than the person whose loss is much fresher.
But that is par for the course for black people, the most forgiving race on the face of the earth. We have enough one love in our collective psyche for the whole human race, the inhumane to us and all. To our continued detriment.
The black capacity for forgiveness towards those who oppress them amazes, confounds and infuriates me. For a people who have been murdered, raped, enslaved and tortured, then discriminated against by the murderers, rapists, enslavers and torturers and their descendants (legitimate and illegitimate), we have been remarkably forgiving and outstandingly forgetful.
So it happens again.
When I speak of black forgiveness and forgetfulness, I am not speaking of the spontaneous rioting like what took place after the Rodney King verdict, or the recent electrocution of two young black men in France. Those are explosive releases of anger and frustration which soon fade. What I refer to is a structured, determined, concentrated and unflagging programme of the two rs remembrance and revenge.
The Jews are good at that. They not only preserve the memories of their losses at the hands of the Nazis (and, unlike the President of Iran, I do believe it happened and sincerely sympathise), but they also search for those who did them wrong. Sometimes when I see the age and pictures of the latest 'vicious guards' they have uncovered living peacefully in some village on the edge of nowhere, I wonder if even the supposed miscreants remember what they were supposed to have done.
This is in complete contrast to the most recent example of the black attitude, the situation in South Africa. I do not propose a wholesale slaughter of whites, but surely some of the Caucasian cruelties under apartheid should have been punished. And the maldistribution of wealth which was - is, because apartheid is not over yet - should have been addressed. I cannot imagine black people living comfortably from their slaughtering and stolen gains if the situation had been reversed.
So I was not surprised that on the 10th anniversary of the fall of apartheid there were young black children who knew almost nothing of the savagery. It was not taught in schools, it was not reinforced on television. We were so eager to white out the past - again.
Me? I believe in what Paul Bogle said - fire for fire, blood for blood, colour for colour.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
