The moralizing has begun.
Those who have rarely been the
target of organized police gangsterism are once again lecturing those who have
about how best to respond to it.
Be peaceful, they implore, as
protesters rise up in Minneapolis and across the country in response to the
killing of George Floyd. This, coming from the same people who melted down when
Colin Kaepernick took a knee — a decidedly peaceful type of protest. Because
apparently, when white folks say, “protest peacefully,” we mean “stop
protesting.”
Everything is fine, nothing to
see here.
It is telling that much of white
America sees fit to lecture black people about the evils of violence, even as
we enjoy the national bounty over which we claim possession solely as a result of the same. I beg to remind you, George
Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early
colonists nor the nation’s founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There
were no sit-ins at King George’s palace, no horseback freedom rides to affect
change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.
We are here because of blood, and
mostly that of others. We are here because of our insatiable desire to take by
force the land and labor of others. We are the last people on Earth with a
right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never
believed in it and rarely practiced it. Instead, we have always taken what we
desire, and when denied it, we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make
it so.
Even in the modern era, the
notion that we believe in non-violence or have some well-nurtured opposition to
rioting is belied by the evidence. Indeed, white folks riot for far less legitimate
reasons than those for which African Americans might decide to hoist a brick, a
rock, or a bottle.
We have done so in the wake
of Final Four games, or
because of something called Pumpkin Festival in
Keene, New Hampshire. We did it because of $10 veggie burritos at Woodstock ’99, and because there weren’t
enough Porta-Potties after the Limp Bizkit set.
We did it when we couldn’t get
enough beer at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake, and because Penn State fired Joe Paterno.
We did it because what else do a
bunch of Huntington Beach surfers have to do?
We did it because a “kegs and eggs” riot sounds
like a perfectly legitimate way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Albany.
Far from amateur hooliganism, our
riots are violent affairs that have been known to endanger the safety and lives
of police, as with the infamous 1998 riot at
Washington State University. According to a report at the time:
The crowd then attacked the
officers from all sides for two hours with rocks, beer bottles, signposts,
chairs, and pieces of concrete, allegedly cheering whenever an officer was
struck and injured. Twenty-three officers were injured, some suffering
concussions and broken bones.
Twenty-two years later, we wait
for academics to ruminate about the pathologies of these whites in Pullman,
whose culture of dysfunction was taught to them by their rural families and
symbolized by the recognizable gang attire of Carhartt work coats and backward
baseball caps.
Back to the present: To speak of
violence done by black people without
uttering so much as a word about the violence done to them is perverse. And by violence, I don’t mean merely
that of police brutality. I mean the structural violence that flies under the
radar of most white folks but which has created the broader conditions in black
communities against which those who live there are now rebelling.
Let us remember, those places to
which we refer as “ghettos” were created, and not by the people who live in
them. They were designed as holding pens — concentration camps were we to
insist upon plain language — within which impoverished persons of color would
be contained. Generations of housing discrimination created them, as did decade
after decade of white riots against black people whenever they would move into
white neighborhoods. They were created by deindustrialization and the flight of
good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.
And all of that is violence too.
It is the kind of violence that the powerful, and only they, can manifest. One
needn’t throw a Molotov cocktail through a window when one can knock down the
building using a bulldozer or crane operated with public money. Zoning laws,
redlining, predatory lending, stop-and-frisk: all are violence, however much we
fail to understand that.
As I was saying, it is bad enough
that we think it appropriate to admonish persons of color about violence or to
say that it “never works,” especially when it does. We are, after all, here, which serves as rather convincing proof that
violence works quite well. What is worse is our insistence that we bear no
responsibility for the conditions that have caused the current crisis and that
we need not even know about those conditions. It brings to mind something James
Baldwin tried to explain many years ago:
…this is the crime of which I
accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor
history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying
hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but
it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.
It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
White America has a long and
storied tradition of not knowing, and I don’t mean this in the sense of
genuinely blameless ignorance. This ignorance is nothing if not cultivated by
the larger workings of the culture. We have come by this obliviousness
honestly, but in a way for which we cannot escape culpability. It’s not as if
the truth hasn’t been out there all along.
It was there in 1965 when most
white Californians responded to the rebellion in the Watts section of Los
Angeles by insisting it was the fault of a “lack of respect for law and order”
or the work of “outside agitators.”
The truth was there, but
invisible to most whites when we told pollsters in the mid-1960s — within
mere months of the
time that formal apartheid had been lifted with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 —
that the present situation of black Americans was mostly their own fault. Only
one in four thought white racism, past or present, or some combination of the
two, might be the culprit.
Even before the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s, whites thought there was nothing wrong. In
1962, 85 percent of whites told Gallup that black children had just as good a
chance as white children to get a good education. By 1969, a mere year after
the death of Martin Luther King Jr., 44 percent of whites told a
Newsweek/Gallup survey that blacks had a better chance than they did to get a good-paying job. In the
same poll, eighty percent of whites said blacks had an equal or better opportunity for a good education than whites did.
Even in the 1850s, during a
period when black bodies were enslaved on forced labor camps known as
plantations by the moral equivalent of kidnappers, respected white voices saw
no issue worth addressing.
According to Dr. Samuel
Cartwright, a well-respected physician of the 19th century, enslavement was
such a benign institution that any black person who tried to escape its loving
embrace must be suffering from mental illness. In this case, Cartwright called
it “Drapetomania,” a malady that could be cured by keeping the enslaved in a “child-like
state,” and by regularly employing “mild whipping.”
In short, most white Americans
are like that friend you have, who never went to medical school, but went to
Google this morning and now feels confident he or she is qualified to diagnose
your every pain. As with your friend and the med school to which they never
gained entry, most white folks never took classes on the history of racial
domination and subordination, but are sure we know more about it than those who
did. Indeed, we suspect we know more about the subject than those who, more
than merely taking the class, actually lived the subject matter.
When white folks ask, “Why are
they so angry, and why do some among them loot?” we betray no real interest in
knowing the answers to those questions. Instead, we reveal our intellectual
nakedness, our disdain for truth, our utterly ahistorical understanding of our
society. We query as if history did not happen because, for us, it did not. We
needn’t know anything about the forces that have destroyed so many black lives,
and long before anyone in Minneapolis decided to attack a liquor store or a
police precinct.
For instance, University of
Alabama History Professor Raymond Mohl has noted that by the early 1960s, nearly 40,000 housing
units per year were being demolished in urban communities (mostly of color) to
make way for interstate highways. Another 40,000 were being knocked down
annually as part of so-called urban “renewal,” which facilitated the creation
of parking lots, office parks, and shopping centers in working-class and
low-income residential spaces. By the late 1960s, the annual toll would rise to
nearly 70,000 houses or apartments destroyed every year for the interstate
effort alone.
Three-fourths of persons
displaced from their homes were black, and a disproportionate share of the rest
were Latino. Less than ten percent of persons displaced by urban renewal and
interstate construction had new single-resident or family housing to go to
afterward, as cities rarely built new housing to take the place of that which
had been destroyed. Instead, displaced families had to rely on crowded
apartments, double up with relatives, or move into run-down public housing
projects. In all, about one-fifth of African American housing in the nation was
destroyed by the forces of so-called economic development.
And then, at the same time that
black and brown housing was being destroyed, millions of white families were
procuring government-guaranteed loans (through the FHA and VA loan programs)
that were almost entirely off-limits to people of color, and which allowed us
to hustle it out to the suburbs where only we were allowed to go. But we can
know nothing about any of that and still be called educated. We can live in the
very houses obtained with those government-backed loans, denied to others based
solely on race, or inherit the proceeds from their sale, and still believe
ourselves unsullied and unimplicated in the pain of the nation’s black and brown
communities.
As much of the country burns,
literally or metaphorically, it is time to face our history. Time to stop
asking others to fight for their lives on our terms, and remember that it is their collective jugular vein being compressed. It is their windpipe being crushed. It is their sons and daughters being choked out and shot and
beaten and profiled and harassed.
It is their liberty and freedom at stake.
But by all means, white people,
please tell us all the one again about how having to wear the mask at Costco is
tyranny.
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