Black people in America are beyond tired of being gaslighted when it comes to talking about our experiences with racism. In case you don’t know what gaslighting is, it’s when someone manipulates or brainwashes another person in an effort to get that person to question their own reality or sanity. It is a tool of abuse and control—a power tactic designed to get you to distrust yourself and to trust your abuser instead. As black folk, our entire relationship with America is one big example of gaslighting, repeated over and over again for centuries, ad infinitum. In individual relationships, we may experience this when we work up the courage to share our humiliating experiences of racism with a cherished white or non-black friend or colleague—only to have them try to convince us that the world is now post-racial and that anti-black racism isn’t really a thing or is just the product of our own individual mindset despite the myriad of evidence to the contrary. It can really drive you crazy, making you wonder what is wrong with you and not the world.
But nothing is more maddening than the perpetual gaslighting that comes from the criminal justice and judicial systems, which constantly tell us that the routine killing of black bodies, acts dripping in anti-blackness, don’t actually happen because people despise us. Instead, those heinous acts attributed to something else. So when white people decide to randomly attack black people on the street, like the murder of Richard Collins III in May, it’s not actually legally designated as a hate crime.
The 22-year-old white man who is accused of stabbing black Bowie State University student Richard Collins III to death in May won’t face hate crime charges.
Collins died after Sean Urbanski allegedly attacked him with a knife at a University of Maryland bus stop three days before he was set to graduate from college. The unprovoked killing, captured on a security camera, was investigated by local police and the FBI as a hate crime. Officials found that Urbanski was a part of a racist Facebook group called “Alt-Reich Nation,” CBS Baltimore reports. Yet Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Angela Alsobrooks said there wasn’t enough information to add the murder charge.
A white man who belonged to a white supremacist group on Facebook randomly attacked and killed a black man at a bus stop. Yet, police can’t find evidence of a hate crime? Spare us, please.
One of the common tactics of gaslighting is to minimize. So when black people see and note these killings as a historical pattern, every effort is made by our abuser (in this case, America) to convince us that this pattern doesn’t exist or isn’t as bad as we think it is. But we are not crazy—America has a problem reconciling the hate associated with the taking of black life by non-black people.
And we needn’t only look at how these crimes are charged among civilians to see this pattern. When police officers also kill black folk, it is the same result. They are rarely charged and rarely convicted. The mental gymnastics routine America goes through to convince us that the state doesn’t actually hate black people is an act worthy of Nadia Comaneci.
The investigation is ongoing, according to NBC Washington. Alsobrooks added that officials are still in the process of seizing Urbanski’s digital equipment. If new information found warrants it, there’s a possibility Urbanski could face hate crime charges in the future.
The police can keep looking for evidence of a hate crime, but it’s clear they really don’t know what they are looking for. It’s obvious that there are specific legal frameworks needed in order to define and charge people with hate crimes, but black people don’t need the law to tell us what we already know. Since America fails to see itself clearly on this matter, let black people point it out plainly: Nooses and lynching parties. The KKK and the alt-right. And these are just overt examples of racial terror.
The more covert examples are all the other ways in which hate and white supremacy have inundated every single structure and system in our country, from education to housing practices to banking to criminal justice. So just who are we kidding here? If there is not a deep racial hatred and sense of white superiority that exists in every nook and cranny in our country that is also present in the minds of white people who think they can take black lives with abandon, then America hasn’t just gaslighted black people—it’s also gaslighting itself.