So this happened.
In my home town of Philadelphia.
In 2018.
Angela Helm at The Root has the details:
Police across the country just can’t seem to break out their M.O. of enforcing and reinforcing this country’s longstanding, irrational fear of black bodies.
As noted in a recent column, black people are pretty much criminalized for breathing in the United States. (That, and standing, sitting, sleeping, walking, and 45 some other odd “things.”)
Latest case in point: On Thursday, two black real estate agents in Philadelphia were cuffed and led out of a Starbucks—the epitome of loitering space—because
employees at the store called the police after the men allegedly wanted to use the bathroom but did not buy anything.
A white barista apparently pulled rank and called the police, one of the most dangerously aggressive things one can do to a black person in America.
After the police arrived, the two men were actually perp walked out the store…
The two black men both bearded, one had cornrows—were mostly silent when multiple officers arrived to slap handcuffs on them.
Their white compatriots, however, questioned the police for the arrests (something that said two black men most assuredly would be punished for).
“What did they do?” incredulously asks one man of the police.
“They didn’t do anything, I saw the entire thing,” another person said…
Last question: A show of hands for all those who think this would never have happened to two white men sitting in a Starbucks in an affluent neighborhood, regardless of what they bought or did not buy?
Right, we didn’t think so. Neither does Philadelphia’s mayor, who said the incident “appears to exemplify what racial discrimination looks like in 2018.”
To emphasize this point— it’s 2018.
Of course, none of us should be surprised.
Yesterday, I posted a diary about the presence and activity of white supremacists on Facebook, and noted that, along with the direct and immediate harms of hate speech, white supremacists can conspire to commit violence with impunity (meanwhile Black male professionals can’t wait for a friend, in what is the very definition of a public accommodation, before placing their order with the barista).
But there is another aspect of the tolerance of white supremacist on Facebook and other social media platforms than is highlighted by this episode of white privilege: the normalization of white supremacy as the social, cultural, political and economic framework of our society, since its earliest days:
The process of normalization of bigotry, for example, allows it to flourish, thus leading to more hate speech that is not recognized as such, and to overtly violent and destructive acts. Each time hate speech is promoted, it both a) injures people, and b) contributes to the culture in which bigotry is reified as the norm...
The arrest of two Black males because they are Black in public (is ‘flagrantly and publicly Black among gentrified Whites’ considered a disorderly persons offense?) is a cardinal example of structural racism.
When Angel Helm explains that calling the police is ‘one of the most dangerously aggressive things one can do to a black person in America’, she is making explicit the presence and consequences of the structural racism that we are all immersed in, and which continues to be normalized, every day.
Brentin Mock at City Lab elucidates the utterly predictable outcome of normalized, structural racism:
… a team of researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health recently endeavored to find out was whether the kind of racism that’s woven into laws and policies also informs racial disparities in police violence. Their findings were released in the paper, “The Relationship Between Structural Racism and Black-White Disparities in Fatal Police Shootings at the State Level,” which was recently published in the Journal of the National Medical Association.
For this study, a research group led by community health sciences professor Michael Siegel looked at data on fatal police shootings between 2013 and 2017 from the
Mapping Police Violence database, and then ran that along
five key indicators of systemic racism— racial segregation, incarceration rate gaps, educational attainment gaps, the economic disparity index, and employment disparity gaps—for each state.
The worse that African Americans are doing on those five fronts compared to white people, the higher the state’s score on what the researchers call a “state racism index.”
If a state scores high on those five factors, and also happens to have a high per capita rate of unarmed African Americans shot and killed by police, then structural racism serves as a worthy explanation for police violence in those states. (emphasis added)
The normalization of racism (like a barista calling the police, who place two Black males under arrest, because they haven’t yet placed an order, or the tolerance of White supremacists’ messages, and their marches, and the absurd efforts to explain their terrorism and murders as anything other than because of their White supremacist beliefs) allows even self-described progressives to deny its pervasiveness, its insidious role in the daily life of all us (to the benefit of all Whites, and the detriment of all People of Color), its influence on our political institutions, at every level.
As I said in a previous diary: White privilege and white entitlement give rise to white supremacy, whether we recognize it or not. (Aug. 20, 2017)
Time to start recognizing it.