Who is to Blame?

The killings of young black men in Ferguson and, more recently, in Saint Louis and in many other places, as well as the recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union that in Boston black men are much more likely to be stopped, and interrogated by police than whites has once again drawn attention to racist practices by many police forces all over this country.

In their treatment of black men, especially young ones, many police forces are out of control.

Large scale, continuing protests by many Americans, black and white, show that many of us are appalled by this resurgence of anti-Black racism. Or, perhaps, it is not a resurgence at all. The racism has been there all along but lately it has been so dramatic that even we whites cannot overlook it any more.

Clearly serious changes have to be made. Racist police practices have to be stopped.

At the same time, as a white man, I worry that we will once again take the easy way out and point the finger at individual police officers and individual police chiefs and put all the blame on them.

Whites, liberals and leftists, do that to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the continuing racism that poisons our society. We blame the police, we blame “the government,” we may also blame mass media. Some are critical of the supposed Archie Bunkerism of the working class. But they do not understand that everyone, even white anti-racists, as members of this deeply racist culture, are implicated in its maintenance.

At the heart of racism is the belief that Black people are significantly different from whites, that, with very few exceptions, they share certain characteristics which are overwhelmingly negative. Black people are different, they share specific qualities, and those make them undesirable members of a white society.

The white anti-racist rejects that last belief: Blacks, anti-racists believe, are not inferior to whites. But what is very difficult for us white anti-racists to give up is the idea of a largely homogenous group--”Blacks” or “African-Americans”--which is significantly different from us whites. Growing up in racist America, white anti-racists are also imbued with this map of our society in which distinct and significantly different groups—Blacks and Whites—live together uneasily. Racist whites regard the others as inferior; we anti-racist whites regard them as equally as good as us, or sometimes as better, and at other times as victims of racism whom we, white anti-racists, need to assist in their struggle for liberation.

But that is of course a mental map that humiliates those regarded as different. There is great diversity among Black people, in bodily characteristics, in mental traits, in their emotional make-up, in abilities and interests. Lumping many, very different people under some common label manifests one's disinterest in knowing them for who they are. Not being interested in knowing a certain group of people is a way of showing contempt and disrespect. Approaching strangers and acting as if one knew them already—being prejudiced, pre-judging others—is profoundly insulting.

Some people respond to that difficulty by claiming to be “colorblind.” But ignoring the racial divisions that exist in housing, in education, in employment, in incarceration rates, and elsewhere is just another way of helping to maintain racist divisions. The evils you ignore can continue to exist without your opposition.

White anti-racists confront a serious dilemma. On the one hand we should treat each individual as the individual they are and not worry much about their group characteristics. On the other hand a racist society does lump people into groups and in so far as these distinctions are often unjust we cannot ignore them.

So our task is complex. We must resist the injustices done by racism and racists to a specific group of people. We must at the same time train ourselves not to think of these persons only as members of their group but take them individually as fully seriously as we want to be taken seriously ourselves. We must stop talking about “they”; we must learn not to notice their group membership as the outstanding characteristic of persons we meet. We demand from others that they see us for who we really are, and we hope to see others for the individual person they are, with their own history, and their own outlook on the world. We must learn ourselves, and teach others, not to allow group characteristics to come between us and the other person.

Racism will not disappear as long as we only see types and not unique human beings. Most of us find it quite difficult to get beyond the group traits through which our society defines us. We maintain the racial and gender and disabilities maps that are part of our culture. To that extent we are complicit in the racial injustices committed in this world, regardless of how hard and sincerely we are fighting them.

Unsung heroes

Many Americans are proud that we now have a Black president – ignoring for a moment all those who are struck with apoplexy by the same fact.

I have been reading Howard Zinn's book about SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that fought the brutal reign of terror wielded by small-town police and sheriffs over the African American citizens in the states of deep South. They fought that tyrannical regime by sitting in at lunch counters, by demonstrating, by desegregating waiting rooms and buses. They helped many blacks to register to vote, often in counties where no black person had dared to register before. Most of all they fought by inviting arrest, knowing that once in jail they were liable to be beaten within an inch of their life, knowing that their houses were liable to be bombed, or shot up by drive-by attacks.

We owe it to them that we have a black president today. But our debt to them is rarely acknowledged. Every town in the eastern portion of the United States boasts a memorial to the soldiers of the Civil War—the war we still have not been able to get over. Every town has memorials for the soldiers who fought in World War I, in Korea, in Vietnam, and civic leaders are now getting ready for the next set of memorials for the soldiers in the most recent wars. But no one commemorates the brave black teenagers and college students to whom we are indebted for what ever easing of racial hostilities we are now enjoying.

We just recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's speech in Washington DC. Every pundit repeats the inane “I have a dream. . .” line. But Martin Luther King, however brave and powerful himself, did not win relative improvement for African-Americans himself. It was not Martin Luther King who reduced white America's shame for the oppression and exploitation of Blacks. That was won through the heroism of hundreds of young men and women, most of them black, and of their white supporters. To them we owe so much.

Today is Veteran's Day when we celebrate the veterans of foreign wars. It is high time that we also honor the veteran's of the wars at home in these ceremonies.