Let’s trace the broad history of the status of African-Americans in America. It begins with the long period of slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves, and for a short period in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War black people experienced a dramatic improvement in their condition. However, this was quickly followed by the Jim Crow era, which reduced African-Americans to second-class citizenship. Regular lynchings added to the oppression. The film “Birth of a Nation” led to even more lynchings during the 1920s. Over 3,400 blacks were lynched between 1888 and 1964.
However, the status of blacks improved dramatically in the aftermath of World War II. In 1948, President Truman issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that African-Americans could not be segregated in educational institutions. The civil rights movements went from triumph to triumph, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
But then progress slowed. For forty years, there was little substantial progress. The next step came from, of all places, Silicon Valley: the introduction of smartphones with the capability to record video made it possible to record police misbehavior. Over the last decade, the standard police excuse that “the suspect violently resisted arrest” has been shattered by an avalanche of videos proving outrageous behavior by some police officers. What with smartphones, body cameras, and security cameras, the “blue wall” has been demolished. The majority of police officers are no longer willing to defend the bad apples with their silence.
Yet the outrages continue. We still see videos of racist attacks every day. Why?
The standard hypothesis, which has been in place since the civil rights era, is that there remain plenty of racists in our society, and that the solution must be to punish or shame them into righteousness. Some people have extended the standard hypothesis to claim that American society is “systemically racist” — that racism is so deeply embedded in American society that it is now part of every white American’s psyche.
Right or wrong, this hypothesis has not led us to any solution. Despite great progress in so many areas of society, we just can’t seem to expunge society of racism. This has been our working hypothesis for over fifty years, and we have made less progress during that time than we made during the twenty years following World War II.
I suggest that our mistake lies with our hypothesis as to the cause of the problems we see. To put it briefly, the problem isn’t racism — it’s xenophobia.
Racism Versus Xenophobia
Please indulge me as I delve into a careful explanation of the difference between racism and xenophobia. Racism is animus directed against members of another race. Xenophobia is animus directed towards members of groups other than one’s own. Thus, racism is a subset of xenophobia. There are numerous facts that contradict the hypothesis that Americans are racist while supporting the hypothesis that Americans are xenophobic. The best example is simple: if Americans bear ill-will towards African-Americans, then why did they elect an African-American to be President? Indeed, Americans respect and admire a great many African-Americans; here are just a few:
Oprah Winfrey, Halle Berry, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Beyonce, Michelle Obama, Will Smith, Kobe Bryant, Denzel Washington, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Maya Angelou, Arthur Ashe, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Colin Powell, Thurgood Marshall, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Kamala Harris, Condaleezza Rice, Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson.
Here’s another way of looking at the problem: is religious sectarianism, such as the animus between Hindus and Muslims in India, or that hatred that Sunnis and Shiites share for each other, any different in substance from racism? If this behavior is operationally indistinguishable from racism, then are they merely different labels for the same phenomena?
You can find xenophobia all over the world. Here in America, we have videos of African-Americans attacking Asians. Is this racism or xenophobia? Columbians hate Venezuelan immigrants; in Guyana, the Indo-Guyanese people and the Afro-Guyanese people are at each other’s throats. The government of Bhutan has been expelling ethnic Nepalis. In the 1990s, Yugoslavia broke up and Serbs, Croatians, and Kosovars began killing each other. Who can forget the massacres of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda? The Japanese politely and gently discriminate against almost everybody else. The Koreans are most seriously unwelcoming to others. Gypsies and Jews have long been persecuted in Europe. And of course, Africa is a cauldron of inter-tribal antipathies and wars.
There is a solid reason for the universality of xenophobia in Homo Sapiens: it dates from the early history of the species. Back when early hominids were roaming the savannas of eastern Africa, strangers were always bad news. They were usually scouts from a competing tribe probing for new hunting grounds. If you didn’t chase them off or kill them, they would eventually drive you out of your own territories. It was always best to kill strangers.
A Better Way
If in fact the problem is not racism but xenophobia, then a better solution presents itself: reduce the “xeno” element. If people look like you, talk like you, dress like you, and act like you, then they’re not really strangers, are they? We humans love to differentiate ourselves through all manner of external signs. Attire is one; hair styles and body decorations are another; language is an important element. The Old Testament explains our use of the word “shibboleth”. The Israelites had defeated an army of invading Gileadites, who fled in disorder. The Israelites, moving quickly, secured all the fords over the Jordan River. When a Gileadite refugee came to a ford, pretending to be an Israelite, the Israelite guards would demand that he say the word “shibboleth”. The Gileadite would say “sibboleth”, because their language did not include the “sh” sound. Whereupon the guards would execute the refugee. Language is one of the most powerful means by which we separate US from THEM.
Compare these two gentlemen:
I’m sure you’ll agree that most white people (and probably most Asians and Latin Americans) would feel more comfortable speaking with the gentleman on the left. The gentleman on the right presents as most definitely NOT part of the mainstream American culture. His appearance shouts “I’m not like you at all! I am completely different!” To put it another way, his appearance clearly says “Don’t think of me as one of your ‘US’; I’m ‘THEM’ to you.”
The gentleman on the right is like a Gileadite running up to the Israelite guards screaming “Sibboleth! Sibboleth!” at the top of his lungs. He’s like a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke and loudly singing “Hava Nagila” breaking into a Nazi Party meeting in Munich in 1935. He’s like a member of Antifa breaking into a Proud Boys meeting while burning an American flag. This is NOT how you win friends and influence people.
The gentleman on the right dresses himself, decorates his body, and uses language that defines him as a member of a group strikingly different from what most Americans think of as “our people”. Is it any wonder, then, that they consider him to be an outsider? That’s what he wants!
A solution
One solution, then, is to abandon efforts to alienate oneself from society and instead endeavor to join society. This would entail a rejection of the motley collection of notions that are sometimes called “black culture”. In truth, there is no single “black culture” — there is a wide range of practices that some African-Americans embrace and some reject. Sometimes these work, sometimes they don’t. A good example is Kwanza, an artificial “Christmas” cooked up in 1966 as a rival to Western Christmas. It was a rather clumsy artifice, and has now lost most of its adherents.
Consider this: people from many different cultures have immigrated to the USA, and most of these have enjoyed success. English, Germans, Poles, French, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Swedes, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indians, and many others have come and built happy new lives by blending in with the mainstream culture. Most retain some symbolic components of their old culture: St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Chinese New Year, Hanukkah. But not African-Americans; they’re still stuck at the bottom while everybody else climbs the ladder. I believe that some African-Americans have suffered this fate because they choose not to join mainstream American culture.
Why can’t we just live our lives and be left alone?
This is a good counterargument: why can’t African-Americans simply live their lives in their own culture, speaking their own language and dressing their own way and not bothering anybody or being bothered?
While this may seem like a reasonable request, it has never worked out in practice, because you’re never separated from the people with whom you live. Throughout the entirety of human history, no society has ever suffered an alien society to thrive in its midst. The few exceptions to this rule demonstrate just how serious it is.
The experience of the Jews in Christendom for the last 1300 years is a story played over and over in a loop. The Jews settle in a town and provide valuable financial services greatly appreciated by the rulers and businessmen. They prosper and their wealth becomes increasingly conspicuous. Moreover, they refuse to mix with the locals, maintaining their own households, synagogues, and rituals. Eventually popular resentment of their success boils over and the mobs destroy, burn, and kill. Jewish refugees hit the road in search of a new abode, and the cycle begins again. In the 19th century most Western governments eliminated legal segregation of Jews, congratulating themselves on their open-mindedness. Then came the Holocaust. Oops. A better solution came only with the creation of a Jewish state two thousand years after the destruction of their original home.
The exigencies of trade necessitated the presence of representatives of distant nations in a trading city. The standard solution to this problem was the establishment of “merchant quarters”: sections of the city assigned to the exclusive use of merchants from other nations. In many cities, such quarters were walled off, entry and exit going through a few guarded gates. This was as much to protect the merchants as the citizens of the city. In some cities, the merchant quarters operated under their own laws. They were, in effect, tiny sovereign communities. There were, of course, many variations on the theme, but the common element was the segregation of foreigners from the natives. That was the only scheme that permitted an alien society to survive in a foreign land.
Circling back to police
So what does this tell us about police treatment of African-Americans? Remember that, above all, police are the enforcers of our social system as expressed in its laws. Their purpose is to protect society from those who would violate its values. People like the gentleman on the right of the above photographs are loudly declaring to the world that they reject the mores of mainstream America. Their appearance sets off warning bells in the minds of mainstreamers: “This guy is dangerous.” I suspect that the incitement of fear is deliberate. Police officers get the message, too; they have every reason to fear violent resistance to their authority.
And in fact, violent resistance is one of the depressingly common themes we see in so many of those videos that end with the death of a black man. I don’t know how many times I have thought to myself, “No! Don’t fight back! Just do what the officer says!” while watching one of these videos. Of course, I don’t know how many times that black men obey the police and are not shot. I have also seen a few cases in which a black man did not resist, and was killed nonetheless. For example, George Floyd, the victim notoriously murdered by a police officer kneeling on his neck, had stopped resisting, yet was still subjected to lethal force. I have seen no statistical studies on the role of resistance in shootings, and I doubt that a rigorous study could be carried out. How does one define “resistance”? How much time can pass between the act of resistance and the murder before we disassociate the two? This is messy stuff.
We have now reached the sad state in which history teaches black people to expect abuse by police, while history teaches police officers to expect violence from black suspects. Past experience drives us into a self-defeating cycle. That makes the problem even harder to resolve.
Too many people have died. Too much damage has been done. The old methods aren’t working. It is imperative that we try something new, and integrating blacks into our society seems to me to be our best option.
