It used to be that racists in America were open and obvious about their feelings. From slavery to lynching, there was little fear of openly admitting that you hated black people -- or worse -- beating, raping or killing them. For the most part that has changed. But don't tell that to Martin Lee Anderson or Ali Gilmore.
Racism hasn't changed much, at least not in the percentage of people who are racist. I'm sure it has declined some -- particularly if you go back far enough in history -- but no major change in the quantity, even if the quality has changed. Nowdays, people just hide it until they are in the right country. Like the time back in 1993 or 1994 when I was filling in as a bartender at my aunt's country bar and some large white patron proceeded to tell me that "niggers" were the root of everything that was wrong in our country. And that's no exaggeration, he literally said "everything." And when I didn't openly agree, he nearly ripped my head off.
Luckily, guys like that are few and far between these days. But racists have found ways to continue their racism in less obvious ways. Take two recent cases from Florida. First up is the horribly sad tale of Martin Lee Anderson.
Anderson was a 14-year-old boy who was arrested for joyriding in his grandmother's car. He was sentenced to time in a Florida "boot camp" for juvenile offenders. On his first day at the camp, he was forced to do extensive physical training. He then collapsed. As many as eight adult guards, almost all of them white, then proceeded to assault the 14-year-old in attempts to get him to resume exercise, despite the fact that he was clearly unable to do so and was offering no resistance. At one point, the guards covered his mouth and forced him to inhale ammonia. It was this last trick that killed Anderson. All of this was captured on video and it is clear that there was no legitimate reason -- or sanity -- involved in this beating. Whether or not the guards were racist is left for speculation. (If you want to see some explicit racism, read the comment thread for the video).
The next step was a quick autopsy done by a white doctor who was so incompetent that in an earlier autopsy, he signed off on a report that discussed damage to a girls' "testes." This hack -- again who may or may not be racist, we don't know -- claimed that Anderson died from natural causes due to sickle cell trait. Soon after Anderson's burial, sickle cell experts who heard of the story started saying that the autopsy result was fictional and not a legitimate possibility. Recently, a new autopsy has shown that it was clearly the ammonia that lead to Anderson's death.
So we have a situation where a young black boy died at the hands of a ridiculous number of (mostly white) guards abusing him and a botched autopsy that almost seems like a cover-up. But the case was clearly shown to be the cause of the actions of the guards and we have it on tape, yet we have nobody arrested. Not one guard has so far even begun to be held accountable for his actions. Why not? If Governor Jeb Bush's daughter had been the person killed in the boot camp -- and she has done things as illegal or worse than Anderson -- would this be the case? What if she had been beaten to death by black guards?
Another case from Florida has more national implications for the racism that still exists in our country. The equally sad case of Ali Gilmore. Ali is an attractive 30-year-old woman who disappeared earlier this year while she was four months pregnant. Why does that sound familiar? Not because you've heard about it, but because it's basically the exact same storyline as Laci Peterson. Yet you probably know all about Peterson and have never heard of Gilmore. What's the difference? They were both young. They were both attractive. They were both pregnant. They both disappeared mysteriously. So why the different media treatment? Peterson dominated the national news for months and it was nearly impossible for anyone who read the newspapers or watched TV not to hear about the case. Gilmore's disappearance got local coverage and a little bit of regional coverage. You probably already guessed the reason why. Yep, Gilmore was black.
We are inundated by the cable networks with tales of missing white women -- stories that, while they are tragic, do not affect anyone other than those who know the missing person, those who harmed that person and the community from which they came. But black women disappear, too, and we never hear about that. For that matter, men disappear, too, and we don't hear about them, either. And this kind of racism isn't just a few guards or a doctor or something like that, it is nearly an entire media industry and, by extension, the viewers and readers of that media.
We talk about how much we have progressed on race issues in this country, but we've really just driven racism into hiding. Is that progress?