It’s been this way since the first black man was brought upon our shores in chains centuries ago.
The promise of America has always been tenuous for people of color. While Irish and Italians and Germans came to our shores and faced bigotry from the populace, no one put them in chains or tried to treat them as three-fifths of a person. When Chinese, Japanese and Mexicans came here, after slavery was eradicated, they did not face the sting of Jim Crow the way that black people did.
The black populace of America has historically faced the worst of our bigotry. Their physical captivity was ended in 1865 with the conclusion of the Civil War, but their legal captivity remained another century. When their legal captivity was ended, they were told they needed to stop being so angry, that they were treated the same as everyone else. Of course, none of those people stopped to consider that they were higher up the ladder of progress looking down at the people whose backs they used to scale it for centuries. They didn’t consider that equality would be long in coming for a population who’d been beaten down and handed crumbs of promise while the rest of the nation flourished in our best economic times, and that by the time that legal captivity ended, that height of progress would be headed downwards.
They didn’t consider that in the midst of a war in Vietnam, it would be black soldiers bearing a disproportionate amount of casualties. Fifteen years later, after those people had abandoned the cities because of riots by those they’d held down for centuries (too violent, they said), the poor black people left behind would face a crumbling infrastructure, too impoverished to boost it up themselves, because the economy was turning away from cities, and they were left with no options. Then the drugs took hold in the cities, and our politicians, whiter than a shelf full of bedsheets, decreed we were in a War on Drugs, and stiff penalties were enacted on crack cocaine (the drug of choice for poor black people), while powdered cocaine (the drug of choice for Wall Street stockbrokers, bankers, etc.) stayed with their relatively low penalties, beginning a staggering rate of incarceration for young black men, the highest in the free world.
The black community began to climb out in the 1990s, finally, only to have the economic uncertainty and predatory mortgages of the next decade push them back into the hole. Coupled with the push to take back the cities, policies in cities like New York (headed by Republicans Rudy Guiliani and Mike Bloomberg), and Baltimore (headed by Democrats like Martin O’Malley), insured that since the majority of the city was people of color that they would face the brunt of it, that enforcing all the small and petty laws would hit them hardest, and with that enforcement meant an inability to be “rehabilitated,” because any criminal record is enough to deny someone student loans, grants, and decent jobs. A crumbling public education system that was constantly embezzled from didn’t help either. So, that populace can’t work themselves out of a hole they only dug a portion of, and they turn to crime, because it’s the only thing that makes them good money, or they turn to anger, because anger is all that’s left after the hope has been systematically stripped away by centuries of repression and neglect.
That’s where things stand today.
This past week has been personally exhausting for me. Having a hundred discussions that inevitably become arguments. My faith, my church, the words of Jesus, these have been my North Star in how I feel about this situation, and why I am on the side of the black population. I passionately believe that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the riot is the voice of the oppressed. I do not condone looting or destruction of property, but I understand it. I understand how a populace left without hope, without honest jobs, without education, without money, would turn violent and rage. You know who else did that? The Jews under Roman rule. Jesus’ own brother, James, died during the Jewish rebellion in 66 AD, and he had been a staunch proponent of nonviolence. There is a point where people break underneath the accumulated weight of injustice.
The unnecessary murder of Freddie Gray by Baltimore police caused that breaking point for the poor black populace of Baltimore, a city with a history of racial divide, a city where the white population had shunted the black population slowly but surely into a virtual cage: the inner city, where life expectancy, median income, and education were far below the outer parts of the city, whose population was much whiter. Then there is the actual cage, the amount of black people beaten by cops over the most trivial of offenses: the 87-year-old grandmother who’d called in a shooting to police and was beat by the responding officer because he thought she was covering up the truth. The church deacon who’d rolled their own cigarette and a cop who suspected drugs beat them down. The lady selling raffle tickets for her church’s fundraiser. The military veteran. The stories go on and on, backed by court verdicts and settlements. More money that couldn’t be spent on making the inner city better because city officials had to pay it to hundreds of people their police force had assaulted illegally.
So, to all of those who sit back and point their finger in judgement, yes, I can understand. I can understand how you see violence and stealing as awful, because they are awful. I can see how you, having grown up for the most part in good neighborhoods and good schools, with cops that didn’t beat on you and were respectful, with a two-parent household because your father wasn’t in jail for smoking crack instead of snorting cocaine, yes, I can see why you just shake your head and talk about those animals out there. Just because I can see that doesn’t make it any more right than people rioting and looting.
We need to think about what kind of country we are, and we need to decide what our future is, because quite frankly, the constant desire of white people to whitewash our history, to remove from textbooks mentions of our genocide of Native Americans or the violence of slavery, to run from our history in hopes that it will somehow make everything better, is only making it worse. We love to look at ourselves as this outstanding place, this bastion of freedom, when there’s a thousand small, insidious ways we strip certain people of their freedom, and then blame them when they get fed up and revolt.
You don’t want riots? Great, neither do I. Neither does the black community. Stop giving them reasons to. Start treating them equally, truly equally. Fix their schools. Reform the justice system, which everyone from Rand Paul to the President says is broken. Start training police better, which means stopping the ridiculous flow of surplus military equipment to them and teaching them that being on patrol doesn’t mean walking through “enemy areas,” but instead being amongst those they swore to protect and serve. And for God’s sake, acknowledge that we, the white community, got to where we were on their backs, that we built this nation into an economic juggernaut on the backs of slavery, and then used Jim Crow, redlining, drug laws, media imagery, and so many more things to continue to define the black community as less than us, as thugs and criminals, as animals we need to be scared of, as uncivilized people who sag their pants and wear flashy clothing and have no respect for authority (and while on that subject, maybe a little more respect for our President, who has withstood a flood of vitriol steeped in bigotry). Admit our culpability in this mess, and maybe, just maybe, we can finally start to fix it.