On the day Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri, the local Ku Klux Klan began raising funds to defend the policeman who shot him. This was an overt example (alongside the police response to protestors in Ferguson) of ‘taking sides’ and the line separating the sides is, at its most simple, about race. Of course it is also about class, and poverty and a host of issues, but the policeman’s response drew the line in blood, in the street, in broad daylight.
Without stopping to think, and contrary to information provided by three eye-witnesses, the Klan fed the flames of a situation already at a roiling boil. The Klan is not the story, and in a way neither is poor Michael Brown. The story is about and why police so often respond to black people with suspicion, hostility, and lethal force and why that response is implicitly condoned by the white majority; condoned by allowing venal politicians and brutal, poorly educated police to act as their proxies, while they maintain clean hands.
Imagine that you were a lion tamer and your life depended on maintaining and enforcing the obedience of a lion. With every repressive or punitive action, some part of your mind might fret about the lion stock-piling resentments and anger at you. You might not even realize that such thinking is humanizing the lion, by comparing his imagined mental processes to what your own might be, but that is the case. The lion is serving as a screen to receive the projections of your inner life.
The United States maintained slavery for a century longer than the British. For another hundred years we destroyed families by selling their members separately; maintained the right to maim or kill one’s own property, prevented slaves from learning to read and write or even look a white person directly in the eye. That system was enforced, well into the late middle 20th century by very public and later by secret lynchings---another word for extra-judicial murder. This was racism at its clearest. Photographs exist of entire towns, assembled at the event, smiling,raising children on their shoulders to regard a hung body, or a charred lump of flesh in the town square.
We can understand the lion-tamer’s worry. The ending of slavery must have taxed slave- owners with haunted nights if they reviewed their own cruelty at all and considered what rage and hunger for revenge might be festering in a black, now liberated population. Perhaps for that reason they immediately began jiggering civil laws to reinstitute oppression—imprisoning thousands for vagrancy and other vague charges and selling their labor to the county—all within a legal framework. This would correspond to keeping pressure on the lion. It is also evidence of the long-standing white fear which colors most racial relationships.
But black folks are neither lions nor panthers, nor any kind of animal except human animals. Perhaps to the surprise of the ex-slaver-owners black people did not organize and create guerrilla gangs to seek revenge or reprisals on former slave owners. There were no lynchings and murders of former masters. In fact, what they did was get on with their lives as free men and women, make a living, try to raise their children above their current standards, and feel safe and protected by the civilization into which they had been, once-again, dragooned. One hundred and fifty years later that fact has not been adequately absorbed by White America which continues to arm themselves and their police to defend themselves against their projections of fear and rage on young black men.
Why else would tanks, snipers with automatic weapons, tear-gas and stun grenades be employed against people exercising their constitutional rights to protest? All that militarized weaponry, all the militarized semiotics of the situation which announce, as if through a loud-speaker, “YOU ARE NOT US” are little more that the fears of the lion-tamer being publicly expressed. Acts of kindness to a lion mean dropping your guard and they are an invitation to be eaten. Acts of kindness and respect to humans are invitations to know one another better.
Black people, Latin people, Asian people (take your pick) are not going to go away. They are home here now and they want to be able to visit the refrigerator for snacks, watch tv, have a few toys and feel as safe as anyone else. Several centuries of manipulation, oppression, and political cheating to defend control haunts white people and they continue to project their same behavior on crowds of “others”; fearing that if they relinquish their advantages they will become the new victims. That’s the fear part.
The anger lies elsewhere I believe. Of course poor whites have been played against black people and vice-versa for years, keeping the divided and preventing them from creating a common-cause of class. But there something beneath that as well. The American dream has been tarnished nearly beyond recognition, its lustre stained and its future murky. More and more people are hurting—working harder, longer, with less vacation. Worker efficiency has risen by an extraordinary amount, but wages are still frozen at 1973 (adjusted) levels. People are falling behind. Moreover, where once government undertook grand projects for “us”---railroads, highways, bridges, subways, now, all that capital has been delivered over to the hedge fund operators and wizards of Wall Street and there is nothing left for us. There is no longer any “us.” Rather than question a system which keeps them penniless, keeps them reduced to having nothing but their labor to sell, the reflex position is to look for what is different. It is too frightening to consider that the whole system might be corrupt and rigged against. What would we have left then? We’d be just another Third World country with an exploitive Bananna-Republic government.What is different is immediately apparent on the streets of any city, on the television screens, in the White House---white people are approaching minority status and it is their imagination of the horrific revenge that the new majority has in store for them hat generates its own fear and anger.
If, as everyone knows, the power structure in this country is white. And if, as everyone knows, people are falling farther and farther behind, are being victimized by laws which protect the rich and punish the poor, passed by that same white power-structure, then it is the system itself which is punishing its citizens. The black, the Asians, the immigrants, the gays, the wacked out kids abortion etc. are being used as diversions to keep us looking elsewhere while the shell-game of the rigged economy continues, and we perpetually fail to find the pea. What are the options?Consider yourself stupid? Analyze the system which has propagandized you since birth? That appears to be all too difficult for most, so they settle for identifying those who appear to be out of place in their childhood memories? That is the America that is being mourned. The stylish, can-do, hard-working America that made the best products in the world, took them back without question if they broke, the country with the best schools, the best music, the best highways and subways, the country which had won the last just war---the country we could be proud of. The country before Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, and then---the coup de grâs--- Iraq and Afghanistan, sweeping us, along with every other failed conqueror into the dustbin of history. There is much to be angry about, but perhaps the most useful thing we could be angry about is something we have not quite perceived yet. It is the prejudices, legal and otherwise, that prevent us from making common-cause with other exploited people that keeps us at each other’s throats. We are undone, and blocking our own way by following the urgein us to take side on the basis of race and political opinion rather than common needs and desires. We are all prisoners in a system where the wardens use race and class divisions to maintain authority and control. Black people have been telling us this directly for centuries but we have not listened. Latin children are telling us this by walking here in bare-feet. Women have been telling us this, laboring for 70% of the wages of a man, and still subject to rape and abuse in the office, the military, and on college campuses. It is so sad. It is a nightmare that could be blinked away by something quite simple to say. White people, “Wake up.” Make common-cause with "the other." Without them you will remain timid and fearful. You will be buoyed up in their company.