Lets be clear about a few things:
telling a story as one sees it and elucidating its processes in no way, shape,
or form equates to an “apologia” for those processes; and just because we have
a black president, a president who himself agrees that we “are not cured,” in
no way, shape, or form means we’ve addressed attitudinal racism; or just
because we have passed laws against discrimination, i.e., the Civil Rights Act
of 1964 and many others, does not equate to adequately dealing with the issue
or being able to assert that we’ve won the war on racism. No way!
Nor does the simple fact that
some politicians or various news people appear to have “addressed” the issue on
air equate to having a serious, honest, sustained public dialogue about the
deep cultural iterations of racism that manifest in the attitudes and behaviors
of people in the United States.
While these facts may be
satisfying to those who sit in the comfort of their newly constructed houses or
to those who are the beneficiaries of a certain privilege of birth tone, these
facts mean absolutely nothing to people like the Brown family whose son died of
police gun fire on a Ferguson, Missouri, street or the parents of Treyvon
Martin, a sixteen year old kid who was gunned down because he “looked” like a
bad guy because he is black—and wore a “hoodie” on the night he was murdered—or
the countless others. None of that matters to the countless families and
parents of murdered children.
They simply do not have that
luxury.
And it certainly does not equate
to earnestly developing a thorough understanding of the problem and employing
practical ways of overcoming this persistent problem in order to make our
society a more perfect, inclusive version of itself.
Since the police shootings in Ferguson and Baltimore, many
news stations and newspapers have certainly covered the issue of the disproportionate
targeting of black men and women by police; many politicians have offered words
of condolence to victims and their families, and the president himself—who
again agrees that “we are not cured,”—has
donned a microphone in the same way he has done many times before after a school
shooting or some other act of violence in this society, but none has directly
addressed the often unconscious racism embedded in the actions and attitudes of
many ordinary white Americans—and
especially those in positions of power—the kind of racism the Department of
Justice discovered in the communities in which these shootings have taken place.
Here is a sample of what the Justice Department found:
(African Americans
accounted for a whopping 84% of all pedestrian stops between 2010 and 2015,
although they comprise just 63% of Baltimore's population, according to the
report)
This does not by any means amount to a sustained and
meaningful—even uncomfortable and honest—discussion about attitudinal racism in
the US. Lets not kid ourselves.
In the overwhelming majority of cases, no dialogue actually
takes place. It’s pretty much the same recipe served up with the same sauce:
the issue hits the airways. Newscasters (Fox, CNN, MSNBC) seize the moment and
employ “argument journalism” that pits one side against the other or the issue takes the form of an
“either/or” perspective: the black youth shot down by police in American
streets either deserved it and police were justified or police may have acted a
bit prematurely and should have relied on training and de-escalation, saving
the lives of the felled youth.
The issue then morphs into a discussion about the legal
minutiae over whether cops acted in accord with the letter of the law, completely
missing the critical point; we never hear the news media or any other center of
influence in this society directly address the issue of the kind of racism not
in law but in the attitudes of every day Americans, including the very police
we arm and set out on our streets and to what extent this may lead to the
disproportionate killing, incarcerating, and targeting of these, our fellow
Americans. In fact, this kind of discussion is frequently avoided.
This is a message groups such as Black Lives Matter have
been trying to communicate to white America for decades but with very limited
if any success at all.
Instead, what we do get is the typical responses: “all lives
matter,” “blue lives matter” or
some such other nonsensical and enormously insensitive response about
black-on-black violence or the lack of responsible behavior in the black
community[10]—and
on it goes, with the resounding effect of confirming the very arguments of
groups like Black Lives Matter: that white America simply does
not get it.
Finally, as a result of the foregoing as well as ignoring the
decades upon decades of local abuses against black folks in our communities and
their pleas and of not addressing the increasing state violence that has been directed
disproportionately against African Americans for as long, the feeling that
nothing else seems to have worked has taken hold in that community and the use
of violence to equalize the playing field is increasingly seen as the only
defense and means of getting people to listen.
Good post.
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