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I was born in the 80s, twenty years after an era in which "white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them," something the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, helped to make less frequent. That's a lot of progress in just twenty years. I'm thankful for that.
It's been another thirty or so years since then, and I must say that things have improved markedly. Sure, we still have a few problems here and there: cops occasionally grab random black people and arrest them for dancing. It's true that white neighborhood watchmen occasionally stalk young black young men and kill them for holding Skittles and defending themselves. It's also true that white cops occasionally kill twelve year-old black boys playing with snow in playgrounds for holding legal pellet guns in open-carry states. You hear about white police officers occasionally chokeholding older black men to death for selling cigarettes and resisting handcuffs. But it used to be a lot worse. Remember when you could be murdered for flirting with a white woman at the age of 14? If someone had told black children in the 50s and 60s that we'd someday come to a point in society in which they could only be arrested or killed for dancing in public or waving legal toy guns around in playgrounds, those children would gladly trade places with us. Things are really good these days. Just today, I went to brunch with a black friend of mine and we weren't turned away at the door or forced to sit in a blacks-only section. We've basically got it made. I'm thankful for that too.
As for the news, I try not to pay too much attention to all the overreactions. Look at this, for example:
As part of a study published in the American Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in March, researchers analyzed the records of 176 mostly white, male police officers, and tested them to see if they held an unconscious "dehumanization bias" against black people by having them match photos of people with photos of big cats or apes. Researchers found that officers who dehumanized black people in the test were also likely to be the ones who had a record of using force on black children in custody.
[...]
In the same study, researchers interviewed 264 mostly white, female college students and found that they tended to perceive black children age 10 and older as "significantly less innocent" than their white counterparts.
-From "Police thought 12-year-old Tamir Rice was 20 when they shot him. This isn't uncommon."
That is such a 21st-century, first-world problem. A few weeks ago while walking home, a police cruiser slowed down as it approached me, and the officer rolled down his window as if to profile me, but then kept going--maybe I was initially perceived as not innocent while walking, but that officer left me alone. Considering that
cops kill black people at a higher rate than white people, I'm just lucky to be here today to type this up on my Macbook Pro as I listen to Radiohead on Spotify. This probably wouldn't have been true 30 years ago (and I don't just mean the Spotify). I'm thankful for that as well.
Here's another news article that makes things seem worse than they actually are: Study shows whites think blacks are superhuman, magical--
The results suggest superhumanization of black individuals may contribute to the undertreatment of pain for black patients because they're viewed as being able to endure more, which supports earlier research from the same authors that showed nurses of any race see black patients as less sensitive to pain than white patients. The authors assert superhumanization may also explain white tolerance for police brutality against black people.
I just don't see what the big deal here is. The way I see it, we've come a really long way since the days when blacks were barred from going to hospitals in the first place. Can you imagine telling Martin Luther King, Jr. that, in an era in which we have our first black president (who passed our nation's first universal healthcare system), we're unhappy about being prescribed fewer painkillers than white people out of a lingering stereotype that we have stronger muscles or less sensitive nerve endings or magical superpowers or whatever? MLK would probably say, "
It's a good time to be black, and it's about time you realized, and were thankful for, it."
Don't let the Mike Brown case or the countless ones just like it make you think otherwise.