This 4 minute video is well worth taking the time to watch, from today's New York Times:
Imagine strangers crossing the street to avoid you, imagine the police arbitrarily stopping you, imagine knowing people fear you because of the color of your skin. Many of this country’s young black men and boys don’t have to imagine.
In this Op-Doc video, “A Conversation about Growing Up Black,”we ask African-American boys and young men to tell us candidly about the daily challenges they face because of these realities. They speak openly about what it means to be a young black man in a racially charged world and explain how they feel when their parents try to shelter and prepare them for a world that is too often unfair and biased.
The video is sad and inspirational at the same time. As you can see from the
comments section to the NY Times website, however, it seems that whenever hard truths are pointed out about white racism, particularly if those doing the pointing are black, certain white people feel almost compelled to line up and take exception, provide "context," or "differentiate" those truths from their own "understanding" of black experience:
These kids and young adults do not represent African-American youth accurately; at least the youth I've gotten to know here in the Bronx over the past five years of working with them daily. Police brutality is wrong; racism is wrong. But directly or indirectly blaming white people for the plight of black youth will get us nowhere.
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It's no secret that blacs commiot 64% of all the violent crime in America. There are 2 million gang members and the prison population is full of black criminals there not because of minor drug offenses.
Blacks dominate 2 sections of my local newspaper: Sports and Local for crime. When we fcee this fact maybe we can have an honest dialog.
(spelling from the original)
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My takeaway from this video: we are creating a culture of victimization around black male youth that is unhealthy; that is, any experience they have is seen through the lens of racisim. For example, one youth in the doc characterizes as racist that the media references the criminal record of a black man in (I assume, it's not clear from the video) after being shot by police. Well, mention of previous criminal record is pretty common in such instances regardless of the race of the individual. Unfortunately, these young men are not being taught critical thinking.
As obtuse, ugly and clueless as these responses are, they do teach us something about the enduring nature of racism. It is not simply a belief system encouraged by their environment one lives in. The reflexively defensive reactions to the relatively simple and straightforward truths articulated by these children and young men demonstrate that racism is a core part of many Americans' being, something that must be defended even if it means surrendering to willful blindness and sophistry. Racism is so utterly crucial for them to sustain, but so fraught with such social implications that people will find any rationale to implicitly justify it without having to actually acknowledge its existence. To deny their racism is to deny an unquestionable component of their "humanity."
Understanding this, it is not hard to understand the success of the Republican Party, which continually stokes the flames of racism to perpetuate its hold on power, even as its adherents repeatedly and demonstrably vote against their own self-interests. Nothing, not even their own physical, social, economic well-being, can compete with the overriding imperative and satisfaction of feeling superior (as the first young man in the interview puts it) in one's race over someone else's.