I am white and my first brush with overt American racism didn't occur until 1960 when I was twelve years old and visiting cousins who had relocated from the Northeast to a small town in North Carolina.
First, a little context . . . I grew up in a small, steel manufacturing town in the Northeast. That town was pretty diverse, for the 1950s, because steel foundries were pretty diverse. The men in every new wave of immigration could grab a lower rung on the ladder at the steelworks if they were willing to work long, hard, dangerous hours, six days a week. Those who couldn't hack it, usually moved on. The men who remained were proud of themselves and their company and that pride blurred the lines between them.
The Negroes in our town -- which was what polite people called African-Americans back then -- lived in their own part of town. But so did the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, Hungarians, Poles and Jews who made up our demographic. To a child like me, social divisions in our town appeared to be drawn along ethnic, rather than racial lines. New immigrants, and there were a lot of them right after WWII, tended to hunker down together in homogeneous neighborhoods from which they could help each other acclimate. At one time, our little town of under 10,000 souls had eight different churches in about a 3-mile square center.
But, getting back to North Carolina . . . one evening, during our visit, the grownups decided to take us kids into town to see a movie. There were two theaters within about a block of each other, each screening a different movie [no multiplexes in 1960]. When I expressed a desire to see one of them, I was told we couldn't go to that theater. Asking why just got me shushed and we all wound up enjoying the other movie.
More below . . .
The next day, still puzzled, I asked my aunt why we were not allowed to go into the other theater. She explained to me that it wasn't that we "were not allowed" to go to that theater, it was that we "prefer to go to our own theater." Naturally, I asked who "owned" the other theater whereupon she explained that was the "black theater and people down here just enjoy socializing with their own kind," Honey.
That made about as much sense to me as a lot of other stuff that grownups said so I let it drop. Twelve years old, in the early Sixties was a lot younger and more naive than twelve years old today. But after all of these years, I still remember that incident and the uneasy, queasy feeling of something being systemically wrong that it gave me.
By the time that I was graduating from high school I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there was something systemically wrong. Freedom Rides . . . Ku Klux Klan . . . George Wallace . . . Watts . . . Medgar Evers . . . and the martyrs of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL -- four beautiful little girls in their Sunday best murdered in the name of hate by terroristic cowards. All of that culminating in the utterly senseless assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
These things happened in my lifetime and they continue to happen, so, Please! don't tell me that my country is post-racism. I have been targeted by every sly, dog-whistling Southern strategy message deployed over the last 60-some years. And why wouldn't I be? these are secret messages aimed at ME, a white woman, by other members of my tribe. I was raised with the Magic Decoder programmed into my head. These messages have been carefully crafted for my ears only and for maximum deniability, by people of my own race, who assume that, by nature of my skin color, I take for granted that their hate, prejudice, injustice and unfairness toward non-whites is somehow divinely or historically ordained and justified.
But in fact, racism is insecurity and cowardice dressed up as righteous dominance and it rarely owns up to its true oppressive nature. Just listen to a few of the comments, gathered by reporters during an almost exlusively white rally in Ferguson, yesterday, to support Officer Darren Wilson:
"If you do what the police tell you do (sic) -- if you're not doing anything wrong, and the cops ask you to do something, then you're not going to have nothing to worry about," said Michael Bates, 33.
But, if you are jaywalking, then surrendering with arms upraised, while black, you might just have something to worry about, still.
When asked why the pro-Wilson rally didn't have many African-American attendees, John Newshaw, a retired St. Louis County police officer, said, "This sounds wrong, but I don't think the black community understands the system. Again, there's a process. They're screaming about, why isn't he [Wilson] arrested, why isn't he in jail? Well, without the investigation being done, you can't go and apply for a warrant."
Perhaps African-Americans don't understand "the system" because they are subject to a different "process" in which it is very likely that one might find oneself in jail before an investigation is complete.
Exhibit A
And the pièce de résistance:
Newshaw criticized the Missouri Highway Patrol for "doing exactly what the violent protesters want" and trying to use more communication and less force.
"They're going to keep pushing the envelope," he said of demonstrators who've gotten violent during protests in Ferguson. "There's no reason to stop. ... It's as simple as training your dog. If you don't tell them stop biting, guess what, he's going to continue to bite."
That old racist standby, the animal-training simile . . .
And, finally, back to you Mr Bates for a post-racism PSA:
. . . Bates said he was frustrated that the issue was becoming a "race thing," saying that was besides the point.
"If everyone just stopped with the racism thing, it'd all just go away and everything would go to court and come out with the way the law is supposed to do it. Rioting and everything in the streets doesn't get anything done," he said.
Well, if
literally everyone "just stopped with the racism thing" something like that could conceivably happen. But you'll get no sympathy from me if what you're looking for is merely a moratorium on calling racism what it is.
I wonder if anyone in that crowd even noticed the screwy but predictable optics of the police response to their peaceful protest compared to the police response to another peaceful protest running concurrently in their town? Bicycle cops vs SWAT teams in APCs?
So, my fellow Caucasians, if I call some of you on your ignorant racist dumbassery, that you believe you have so brilliantly disguised, please don't give me that disgusted look and accuse me of being overly politically correct. I am being humanly correct and you know it, that's why you hate, hate, hate being called on it.