Saturday, November 5, 2016

An Epilogue to the Rhetorical Use of Violence: the lack of Honest, Genuine Dialogue about Race in the US



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.

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