There are many ways to view racism in 2015, and many of them are far too simplistic and not particularly helpful. The most common view of racism among the uninitiated focuses on hate.
"You're racist! You hate black people!"
"I don't hate black people!" the racist responds, and the discussion reaches a fateful impasse.
While racism certainly involves some element of hate, this focus area is misplaced and misunderstood. For the vast majority of people, racism takes on a different form. It manifests in latent or even open misconceptions about the inferiority of the other. It's less about hating that other person and more about the belief that the other person is in some way inferior or deficient.
When I watch officer Eric Casebolt or any other white man of the law interact with black people, I'm reminded of this important nuance. It'd be easy to assume that Casebolt charged from his car intent on terrorizing black kids because, on a daily basis, he harbors hate in his heart for people who look like them. It's unlikely, though, that Casebolt gets off on hunting black kids for sport. More likely is that he, like many officers and many who those officers act to protect, see in those young black kids an inherent threat, a constant source of apprehension.
These black kids made to sit on the ground hadn't given Casebolt any reason to think they were dangerous. In fact, a fair viewing of the situation places many of these kids decidedly on the "good" side of the kid behavior spectrum. While being cursed at, quite a few of them used the word "sir" and calmly explained not only why they were in the area, but why they did what they did. Insomuch as kids can be expected to act at all times like petulant assholes, these young men and women fell somewhere within a reasonable section of the teenage bell curve.
Casebolt didn't see it that way, though. When he went charging into the situation so fast that he couldn't keep his feet, he showed that he saw these kids as a threat. When he shouted commands at them to get on the ground, even as they were engaged in conversation with another officer, he demonstrated his understanding that at any moment, they might return to their perceived base state, doing harm to him and those around him. When he put the entirety of his weight on top of a little girl in a bathing suit, he made clear that even when a fragile little girl is outfitted in a bikini, her very being represents clear and imminent danger.
And when he pulled out his firearm at the sight of two young men reacting like young men should when they see an innocent person being victimized, he showed that for people like him, even being in the presence of black people is enough to produce that ever-important apprehension. "He feared for his life," indeed.
Read enough and you'll see justifications of all sorts of police behavior on the basis of reasonable fear. After cops shoot people multiple times in the face, and after they drag little girls to the ground, their defenders announce unashamedly that the officer in question was justified because, after all, "He feared for his life." And in truth, they're probably right. Officer Eric Casebolt probably did fear for his life. But that doesn't make his fear reasonable, and it should be an occasion for us as a society to reflect upon why officers like Casebolt - and so many before him - fear for their life the moment they encounter a black person who moves a little too quickly or not quickly enough.
The answer lies, at least in part, in our collective inability to even start the arduous process of racial reconciliation. America suffers still from deep wounds, and white America - to the extent that there is such a monolith - refuses to acknowledge either the existence of or the impact of the sins of our past.
A deep reading of American history reveals that in one of her two original sins, America set herself down a path where slavery would not only afflict the prevailing white view of black Americans, but also instill a deep and unjustified fear of black people in many white Americans. The responses to situations like the one in McKinney often lead to battles of blame. Who is at fault for white fear of black people? If you listen to the racists, you'll learn that black people bring it on themselves. "Don't commit so many crimes," they'll say, "And we won't be afraid of you."
But this kind of blame-shifting is just that, an effort to extinguish within ourselves a sense that the fear of black people is deeply rooted not in black pathology, but in our own unsettled history. We are to blame for our fear of black people, not because we individually had anything to do with slavery, but because of our refusal to follow through with a process that might let the country as a whole heal from it.
During the early to mid-1800s, there were many reasons why Southern whites clung so tightly to their slave-holding ways. Many of those were economic, of course. Plantation owners in Southern society had grown accustomed to the ease of business that comes when you can quite literally own the labor force that aids in your production. This wasn't all, though. A deep fear was rooted in Southern psychology. It was built on two bedrocks that continue to afflict many today.
It would be far too kind to let antebellum whites off the hook for their less cultivated views on black ability. To be sure, history suggests that many during that era saw their black brothers and sisters as savages, somehow less than human and less than capable of controlling their urges. This belief in the reality of inherent black criminality was aided by a belief that if black people were released from slavery, they would surely have their revenge on the whites that had enslaved them.
The turn of the nineteenth century exacerbated white fear of black retribution. Then, slaves held in Haitian captivity revolted and won their freedom on the island of Hispaniola. Word of these revolts reach the US, and slaveowners feared that their slaves would take motivation from the success of the Haitian revolts. Of course, this fear was bolstered by the sheer number of slaves imported into the United States during the late 1700s. Of the more than nine million people in the US when the 1820 census was taken, more than 1.5 million were slaves.
White people during that time had a keen understanding of the injustice they'd placed upon the black population of America, even if they wouldn't admit it. Perhaps even more so than today, those who lived in plantation culture were exposed to the realities of the dehumanization of black people. There was no hiding from the reality and no accumulated effect of decades of white-washing done through American schools. In their fear, these people demonstrated recognition that what they'd done was wrong, and that any retaliation would largely be justified. When you combine the sense of inherent inhumanity placed upon black people by the white population then with the very real sense that black people had something to be upset about, you got a powder keg of fear.
That powder keg still exists today. At the root of new American racism is not hatred, but fear of black people. And just as it was in 1850, this fear is today driven by the unspoken understanding of white people that black people truly do have something to be mad about.
The new Southern racist fights head-long against the teaching of the sins of the past, accusing any person who brings these things up of being a race-baiter, or worse, of hating America. The new Southern racist refuses to admit in many cases the wrongness of things like Jim Crow or housing discrimination. He equivocates on these issues and will never acknowledge the wrecking role these institutional forces have played in setting the socioeconomic playing field by which black and white people currently live today.
His repression and deflection is a classic symptom of his inherent shame. These are people who believe that if they for long enough ignore the injustices of both the past and the present, then those injustices will cease to exist. But deep down, their fear is driven by their realization that the harms done against black people for more than three centuries might actually cause the black people of today to seek them out for retribution.
In this, we see the costs of America's inability to own her past and engage in some process of reconciliation. America is increasingly lonely in her unwillingness to engage these realities. In South Africa, where the 20th century racism was so bad that the term apartheid is forever linked to the country, a Truth and Reconciliation effort has been valuable in helping the country heal. There, the injustices of the past are acknowledged, allowances for their impact are made, and the two sides engage in open discussions about things like pain and hurt. Racism hurts. Its effects are real. In America, there are grandmothers and grandfathers walking around today whose childhood was marked by the fear of white terrorism through the South. These are people who grew up unable to drink at many water fountains. They do not exist in the abstract or in the academic sense. They exist in real life, and the hurts they suffered linger. Had America engaged in a reconciliation process like the one in South Africa, the wounds may have healed more quickly.
In Germany, where the wrong done by the Third Reich was so severe that it is the single wrong by which all other wrongs are judged, the country has taken major steps to acknowledge what happened and to ensure that it doesn't happen again. It's one of the reasons why Germany doesn't have the death penalty. For a country that made its name in the 1930s and 1940s by sending Jewish people (among others) to the gas chamber, systematically killing citizens today is just too much like the past. Germany acknowledges its past as a mark of shame, and with very limited exception, the country is allowed to exist today in detachment from that sin. Few think of Germans today in the context of National Socialism.
In America, we've done no such thing. There are entire wings of academia dedicated to mitigating the realities of racism and slavery. I grew up in elementary school classrooms and church Sunday Schools where we were taught that slave owners "did their slaves a favor." At the rehearsal dinner for my own sister's wedding, the presiding pastor gave a history lesson on the church, in which he said that the church's namesake, "Owned slaves, but he treated them well." We have blocked out an entire century of racial history - the time between the Civil War and the start of the Civil Rights Movement - in which black people were lynched, firebombed, and otherwise terrorized just on the basis of their newfound freedom. We rarely talk about convict leasing, a system by which black men were routinely rounded up and charged with false crimes, just so the prison system could reinforce slave labor after emancipation. And few students who have gone through white schools could tell you about the effects of red-lining, the discriminatory housing practice that excluded black families from the elevator of wealth that was home ownership during the middle 20th century.
Our approach to race, driven mostly by a fearful and shame-ridden white body politic, has been to hide it. This is especially true in the South, where we celebrate a "Southern" culture that in no way recognizes the contributions of black people in building that culture. We romanticize the Confederacy as a tranquil place where people sipped sweet tea on wrap-around porches, seeing "grits" as quintessentially Southern while allowing ourselves to believe that human ownership was somehow not a part of this same culture. It's the misunderstanding of transcendence that afflicts our racial understand. Just as Nazi history will forever be linked to the Holocaust, no matter what else might have happened during that period, elements of our racial history cannot be extricated from their cozy relationship with white-on-black oppression.
It's alright as a white person to admit that these things happened. I am as white as a lily, and I had little to do with slavery, with Jim Crow, or with any of the injustices of the past. My choice today is whether to deal with the reality of what these institutional forces have caused, and to make allowances for the ways in which they continue to shape social inequity. My choice today is not whether to own my role in the past, of which I have none, but to own my role in the present. To acknowledge the atrocities and to listen to the pain they caused. To give the victims an opportunity to speak without accusing them of using their pain for gain.
And when I listen, I may learn something. I may learn, as I often do, that black people are not mad at white people, at least not in the way that scared white racists often think. The vast majority of black people today want, just as they've always wanted, to be a part of an equitable American way where people are valued and opportunity exists. It's perhaps one of my favorite features of "Black America" - to the extent such a thing exists in practice - that they as a collective have shown tremendous restraint despite centuries of horrid racial seclusion and oppression. I struggle to understand why, at this point, but they've asked for little more than to be given an equal stake in an America that's so blatantly disrespected their place and contribution.
To speak to black people, and to have honest conversations about race, is to find that black people largely do not walk down the street on a daily basis singling out white folks as targets of racial animosity. Black teenagers are like any other teenager, looking to have fun, and go on dates, and play sports, and figure out life. To open one's eyes and engage in these conversations is a critical step in dismantling the fear that drives people like Eric Casebolt to enter Craig Ranch North like he's barrel rolling his way into a war zone.
The way forward is complex. And it's hard to know what the answer is to fixing the all-too-common sense among some racist Americans that black people by their very nature - or more conveniently, by their "culture" - are inherently criminal. But the other side of the coin - that fear that comes from an acknowledgement that black people truly have something to be mad about - can be extinguished if we as white folks would engage the racial reality, understand the perspectives of black people, and make acknowledgements about not only the realities of the past, but how that past continues to shape the present and will shape the future.
"He feared for his life" may be so, but it's no longer good enough.
