Don’t call it a riot, I said, my voice shaking a little at the besieged indifference in the ugly fellow’s voice. I’d sat at a poker table with him for about 14 minutes before I discovered his proclivities on the topic of race. They ran the gamut from banal platitudes about hard work to incendiary comments about the folly of black culture. There we were, two white men playing cards. He was old. I was less old. And he hit me with the big hammer—“I’d ram my truck through those bastards in an act of self-defense.”
I pursed my lips in the learned helplessness I long-ago developed around these creatures. I used to think I’d left them behind in the South Carolina swamp where I grew up. I later learned that wasn’t true. Bigotry travels by airplane—in first class even—and it’s planted its roots as far as you can travel in this twisted world.
I prepared to jump in, as I’m wont to do. Maybe some fiery diatribe about how he’d have been better born in the 1850s. I could have gone to the old faith—asking him where he had his white hood dry-cleaned. Instead I spent some time ruminating. I fixated on one thing in particular—self-defense. His claim that the indiscriminate slaughter of black people by car would be an act of self-defense. It challenged any notion of self-defense I’d seen presented by the best case triers in the criminal courts of Texas. Surely my trial advocacy professor would have called that a serious reach. He thought the very existence of protesters and protests presented a threat to his existence, or at least to his world.
“Do you think those protesters are entitled to self-defense?” I asked him.
His answer surprised me. “Sure,” he said. “When I do something that harms them, they’re entitled to it.”
Our pitiful construct of what constitutes violence is all wrong. It’s limited and limiting. Rocks thrown through windows are tools of violence, and hurling bottles toward armored police officers counts, too. But what about votes? What about the act of getting in one’s car and driving to the local precinct to elect a person who’ll vote against body camera legislation? What about advocating online or in person for a candidate who strips struggling public schools of funding or demands punitive measures against already struggling inner city children? Why aren’t these political acts deemed violent when their consequences surely leave human beings in worse shape than even the hardest punch my elderly poker competitor could throw?
Charlotte is a violent city defined by segregation, degradation, and an expanding suburbia driven by white flight. It’s a city where black citizens earn the suspicion of police officers despite the state’s legislature passing a law giving them the right to carry. One in every four Mecklenburg County residents lives in a “distressed” neighborhood as of 2010, and according to the Charlotte Observer, that’s up from one in 10 in 2000. A study from Harvard suggests that Charlotte’s poverty is more entrenched than poverty elsewhere. According to the smart people there, getting out of Charlotte poverty is more difficult for children than escaping the scrounge anywhere else. If you’re born poor in Charlotte, chances are good that you’ll die poor.
All the while, North Carolina’s increasingly reactionary state government drains the state’s limited resources and drives away tax-paying corporations by fighting for contrived bathroom purity.
To draw a clean line from historical oppression to modern-day foot stomping doesn’t require much creativity. Charlotte was once home to some of the South’s most segregated schools before an aggressive busing integration program made the city the envy of many. Across the border in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the Friendship Nine were arrested for their role in a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter. Despite the progress Charlotte made after the Supreme Court drug it into the future, city’s ceded ground. As Sam Fulwood writes in a piece for Newsweek titled Charlotte’s Shame:
But for all that is on the upswing in the Queen City, there is something rotting at its core. The consolidated city-county schools have lumbered backward, segregating once again by race and class, producing separate and unequal outcomes for the district’s more than 144,000 students in 164 schools.
Racial violence is nothing new, either. More than 100 black men and women were lynched in Charlotte and surrounding cities near the turn of the 20th century. Lynching was so ingrained in the culture of the area that the then-editor of the Charlotte Observer wrote, “Lynching in North Carolina will never stop until the killing of lynchers begins.” More recently, police shot FAMU football player Jon Farrell for the crime of seeking assistance after an auto accident while black.
When police singled out Keith Scott for attention because he apparently had a gun, the tactic should have given rise to a litany of questions. The actual journalistic investigation seems to have centered on the irrelevant question of whether Scott possessed a gun. Investigators and officials should have been asked why, in an open-carry state, a black man with a gun arouses suspicion or even curiosity. In a state so craven that legislators have officially codified the right to carry a bullet shooter openly on your person without so much as a license, the sight of a black man doing the same was enough for police to initiate the conflict that cost him his life.
Those of us who grew up hearing the conversations understand why this happened. We know that like many rights in America, open carry is not for black people. Open carry is because of black people. The discourses on gun ownership and the ability to carry center on discussions of “defending one’s home” that are the smallest layer deep. Peel back the conversation for a second and you’ll see the gaping wound of racial grievance and fear. You’ll see mostly white men dreaming of a time when they might use aggressive self-defense to protect themselves against a person coming through their door. And it doesn’t take a psychology major to know who they think will be coming through that window or door for their flatscreen. If I ever had any personal doubts, those were answered when I peered into a private message sent by a perfectly respectable former friend who, when asked by a graduate psychology student a question for a class survey, responded that when she “pictured a criminal, she pictured a black man, a rapist.” It didn’t much help that the friend told the psychology student she “felt bad about thinking that.”
Open carry exists precisely because white people in places that border Charlotte are scared of black people. With that in mind, one can see why the sight of a black man openly carrying a weapon might be cause for concern rather than cause for NRA celebration of the exercising of a fundamental American right. If black men avail themselves of the right to openly carry, it undermines the entire, unstated assumption behind the law. The right to self-defense is constantly denied to black men and women because in the frailty of white supremacy, a black man or woman can never act in self-defense. He or she is always the aggressor.
And that brings us to the protests, and to my friend at the poker table who wanted to use his car to score a 2-10 split on protesters he called “bowling pins.”
Even the worst of riots are an act of collective self-defense. When the political status quo inflicted on citizens produces segregated schools that leave poor black children without the resources to properly learn, those families are suffering under an ongoing act of violence. When the political status quo leaves food out of the mouths of children and enforces a reality where even playing by the rules leaves a family unable to climb from poverty, the very rules themselves are tools of violence. Fighting those rules is not aggression. It’s not anarchy. It’s self-defense.
Are we so simple that we can only understand violence as the throwing of a punch, the lighting of a fire, the brandishing of a knife, or the popping of bullets? A single mother dying a slow death because greed and systemic inequity have stripped her of an equal chance at financial independence suffers under violence no different than the man who dies a slow death because of the effects of a bullet. That we can’t see the relationship is an indictment of our ability to compartmentalize our own folly.
Voting for a racist sheriff who will train his deputies to escalate conflicts out of fear of black men is itself an act of violence.
Voting for a district attorney who will enforce harsh drug penalties for non-violent offenders is an act of violence.
Voting for a state representative who will advocate for a painful, rumbling stomach in a nine-year old living in one of Charlotte’s abandoned neighborhoods is as much an act of violence as punching that child in the stomach.
We afford people the right to defend themselves. We afford this right so absolutely that George ZImmerman can get away with killing an unarmed black child in the street. We don’t afford protesters—or their maligned cousins, “rioters”—the same right and ability to defend themselves. It’s time we did, and it’s time we start understanding that votes for the purveyors of mass inequity are sanitized violence.