Eris Rosenburg and Sofia D. | Red Phoenix correspondents | Minnesota– 

On the evening of Dec. 22, the South Minneapolis community came together for a solemn vigil for the late Ra’Lasia Wright, a 25-year-old Black transgender woman who fell victim to what was likely a tragic hate crime at the beginning of this month. Together, all in attendance shared stories and left candles to celebrate the life that Ms. Wright led. The organizers also presented a list of demands to the Minneapolis Police Department regarding the investigation of her murder, and a wider call for the perpetrator to be brought to justice.

Ms. Wright was a transplant from Gary, Indiana, and moved to Minnesota at the age of ten, as she expressed during interviews with the internet talk shows Live on Lake Street and Address !T.  She came out as transgender at the age of eleven, began her transition at twenty, and has been a beloved community icon ever since. At the vigil, her loved ones recounted her confident, caring, and joyful personality, and her unashamed representation of the transgender community at home, online, and when going out. They emphasized the importance of bringing the community together now to prevent further copycat hate crimes in the future, to prevent reactionaries from becoming emboldened to harm our communities, and to maintain the relatively safe environment that Minnesota has for transgender people.

The Star Tribune reported earlier this month that family members lost contact with Ms. Wright overnight on Nov. 30, and that by using a location-sharing app, they found her body the following day in a neighborhood where she had no ties, dead from a gunshot wound.

The Minneapolis Police Department is said to be investigating Ms. Wright’s death, but they have been unsympathetic to her family and friends: they are withholding information about the status of the investigation and circumstances of the killing such as nearby camera footage and autopsy details.

The police’s handling of this brazen murder echoes their previous enabling of terrorism against minorities just a few weeks ago in November, after two transgender women were assaulted by a group of six at the Hennepin light rail station. In that event, the police not only refused to investigate under a cheap pretext of the perpetrators being unidentifiable despite the omnipresence of surveillance cameras, but directly insulted those women and blamed them for being beaten bloody in an altercation they did not provoke. Speakers at Ms. Wright’s vigil emphasized the importance of coming together as a community to force the MPD to investigate and prosecute the case so that it does not get covered up, and barring that, to use resources such as crime-watchers to find the perpetrator.

As Marxist-Leninists, we understand that the police are the first line of coercive state power wielded by the bourgeoisie, not an impartial force standing above society to enforce justice or the rule of law. The police claim to “serve with courage, protect with compassion,” but who are they protecting? They have no interest in the lives of working-class citizens, but only in protecting private property – murders mean little to them, unless they represent a threat to private property, capital, or profit for even small business owners. Police serve and protect the bourgeois capitalist order. Moreover, they justify this callous disregard for human life by employing their preexisting social biases such as racism, misogyny, and queer- and transphobia. These biases are actively encouraged by mainstream media to protect the police from scrutiny when they neglect to put their resources into protecting the lives of the people in their communities.

Moreover, we see that the police do not merely look the other way when the victim of a murder is a member of the working class. These same police forces, with special emphasis given to the police of the Twin Cities, are responsible for both atrocities and violations of the bourgeois-democratic civil liberties granted to those workers. In their ongoing pattern of brutality and murder of Black and brown workers such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, in their blatant terrorism as in the 1985 Philadelphia MOVE Bombing, in their illegal eviction of homeless encampments during the middle of winter as we saw last year with Camp Nenookaasi in Minneapolis, we see the real character of the motto “to protect and serve.”

The two-tiered nature of the bourgeois press and policing is further demonstrated when we compare the response to Ms. Wright’s murder with the killing of former United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Ms. Wright was killed presumably for her status as a transgender woman of color; by comparison, Mr. Thompson ruled at the top of a hierarchy responsible for the social murder of tens of thousands of Americans annually. We leave it to the reader to imagine which of these two was repeatedly dead-named, misgendered, and subjected to character assassination; while the other has had armies of bought-off fascist “influencers,” talk-show hosts, newspapers, and bourgeois politicians insist that we, the people, express sympathy. This blatant obsession of the instruments of capitalist rule ignores and even promotes the real terrorism that workers, particularly workers of color, experience on the job, in the street, and at home every day in the United States. Ra’Lasia Wright was a victim of that same terrorism.

While pressuring the Minneapolis police to find Ms. Wright’s murderer, we must also renew calls for community control of the police as an interim reformist measure to reduce the harm the bourgeois state directly or indirectly inflicts on the masses, particularly those of minority origin. At the same time, we must continue to work towards the formation of a proletarian vanguard party, and must build proletarian community organizations that promote safety, solidarity, and education so that no other innocents lose their lives.

Ms. Wright’s friends and family have published a list of four demands:

1. Release. Release all relevant traffic camera footage and any available dash-cam footage from MPD vehicles involved on the night of the murder.

2. Disclose. Provide full transparency regarding the investigation into Ra’Lasia’s murder. She deserves a thorough and dedicated investigation with the necessary resources allocated to ensure justice is served.

3. Community Unity. We must stand united as a community, supporting one-another with strength and solidarity. It is essential that we come together to advocate for the rights of all, including our trans siblings. Trans people deserve to be treated with the dignity and humanity that every individual deserves, and it’s on us as a community to create spaces of acceptance and love.

4. Uphold Dignity. Stop from misgendering, dead-naming, and circulating negative images of Ra’Lasia in death. She deserves to be remembered with the dignity and respect that every individual deserves.

Rest in Power, Ra’Lasia Wright.

Categories: Racism, U.S. News