(To paraphrase George Costanza’s assessment of his understanding of women, I probably know less about American race relations than…anyone on the planet. The rural school district in which I was reared was home to one non-white family and I never had cause to speak with any of its members. The longest conversation I’ve ever had with a person of color who wasn’t trying to help me reboot my cable box was a ten-minute chat with a gentleman as we waited for a speaker to arrive at a conference on politics and journalism. In only those ten minutes, we’d reached agreement on the statement, “Chris Christie is a big asshole.” Who knows what understandings we might have reached had we had more time?
But since we live in a new world where personal experience and understanding have become unrelated to one’s right to express an opinion, here goes…)
Former Pittsburgh Police Sergeant Steven Matakovich was recently sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison for use of excessive force during an arrest two years ago outside Heinz Field. The video of his beating of the young man – who appears to be about half his size and in no condition to defend himself, let alone “armed” – would be disturbing to watch if we weren’t so desensitized to the image of people beating each other on camera.
The atypically harsh sentence would have seemed like a major victory for all citizens – in an era when policemen are routinely accused of violating civil rights in the interest of public safety – had the young man not been white.
Instead, because of that detail, we are forced to, once again, confront the disturbing fact that police officers can do just about anything they want to black people – even on camera – and either a Grand Jury will fail to file charges or a jury will acquit them. Beat up a white kid and it’s your ass.
"So, Now Do You Get It!?"
I must admit: If I were a uniformed police officer trying to do my job in a country were all the maniacs are as well armed (or better) than I, I would be afraid. But if I were a law-abiding person of color threatened by a burglar – or even a potential killer – the last place I’d call is 911. I’d be afraid they’d shoot me, instead.
Fear is the common ingredient that has fueled American racism since the abolition of slavery. We “rugged individualists” can’t ever reveal our fear lest we risk appearing less “rugged.” So, we suppress that energy. But we can’t keep it bottled up inside us indefinitely or we’d be spontaneously combusting all over the place like one of Spinal Tap’s drummers. So, it re-emerges as hate.
And we hate the things we fear because we fail to understand we had nothing to fear from them, in the first place.
Most of the energy we suppress re-emerges as hate. Hate is the way your soul takes a shit. It expels all the energy that isn’t compatible with the fundamental energy of life so it won’t weigh you down for eternity. And most of that energy is either suppressed fear or repressed desire. Both are fundamental to a prior evolutionary stage in which, for our species to survive, we had to procreate while being prepared to run away to avoid being eaten by members of other species.
We should have grown past this stage by now. Instead, thanks to a four-decade-long conservative monarchy, we find the vast majority of our fellow Americans seem to be willing to take a hate all over us at the slightest provocation.
The human species is at a precarious point in our evolution. When you consider the relatively tiny amount of time we’ve been around, it is possible to conclude we are in those “awkward years” – some of us have matured to the point we can be left to our own devices without hurting ourselves and some of us haven’t. Some of us just discovered we have genitals so we send pictures of them to everyone; others have learned to keep them to themselves. Some of us still cling to each-and-every lie our parents told us. Some of us have found our own truth.
"Humans Are Parasites"
Some of us have learned to live respectfully with members of other genders. Some of us are still physically abusing them.
Based on these levels of development, I estimate our species is the equivalent of about thirteen-years-old.
Individuals who are around thirteen-years-old fear the beings who are different from them because it’s a fundamental reaction of an immature mind. They fear (and hate) the things their parents feared and hated because they’re still too young to recognize their parents were just faking it – that they didn’t really understand why anyone deserved to be scorned because of their race but had to act as though they did to play the role of parents and protect their children…just the way their parents protected them.
Which brings us, albeit circuitously, back to the modern American system of law enforcement which has the apparent primary purpose of protecting white people from the ancestors of freed slaves. One hundred and fifty years later, it’s easy to understand how terrified former slave owners must have been in 1865, fully understanding they’d abused a group of people for four hundred years that might use its newly won freedom to reciprocate. But it is just as mystifying how, six generations later, their descendants could still be afraid.
Then a Republican speaks and it all makes sense.
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American racism, strange as it might sound, is not about race. It’s about the division of the proletariat so that it cannot be a threat to the bourgeoisie. And if the weapon were not a race, it would certainly be something else.
Or, as Olson Johnson suggested with words that could still be used when “Blazing Saddles” was produced in the Seventies, “We’ll give land to the (insert racial epithet describing blacks) and the (insert racial epithet describing Chinese). But we don’t want the Irish.”
[Featured image by Johnny Silvercloud/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0]