A cauldron of disarray

There’s so much going on that I suspect that I’m going to ramble today. Bear with me.

Way back in 2019, before George Floyd, before Breonna Taylor, before Amaud Arbery, Eric Garner, or Freddy Grey, and in the middle of Black History month, my publisher Paul Larmer at High Country News and I were talking about how Black History month that year had been infused with several weird racist acts. Actor Liam Neeson claiming that in the wake of a friend’s rape he had prowled the streets armed with a club looking to “kill some Black bastard”; iconic fashion designer Gucci sent a model down the runway wearing a blackface turtleneck; several other high-profile blackface incidents occurred in VA; and then Florida Governor Michael Ertel resigned after photos emerged of him in blackface mocking Black victims of hurricane Katrina.

Iowa Representative Steven King continued with his outright racist comments. And in Sacramento yet another cop mistook yet another cell phone for a non-existent gun and shot and killed yet another unarmed Black man.  Yay Black History Month where we celebrate progress.

Paul, a decent White man of admitted privilege who looks for the best in people, was raised in the Bay Area and now lives in the small, seemingly all White, mountain town of Paonia CO. He was troubled by the many, high profile displays of racism when he asked me, “What the hell is going on?”

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, America was founded and built on the belief in the supremacy of men that are White. So entrenched was this concept that when 13 southern states declared their secession from the United States 242 years after the first Africans were brought to the shores of Virginia to be enslaved for life, Texas echoed the sentiments of all thirteen Confederate states; “The debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law…We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the Confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the White race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”

The Confederacy lost their bid for secession, but the concept of White supremacy lived on. Fifty-two years after the end of the war fought to end slavery and uplift Black Americans, Woodrow Wilson, revered president of the United States, showcased numerous times the silent film, Birth of a Nation to visiting dignitaries. Originally named, “The Clansmen” the film glorified the KKK and the work it accomplished terrifying America’s Black population. Wilson wanted his guests to understand what “America has to put up with.”

In 1994 Democratic President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act which dramatically increased the already disproportionate effect of incarceration on the Black community. The prison population rose from 359,292 in 1970 to 2,306,200 by 2021 with Black men, who account for 6.5% of the American population, accounting for 40.2% of the prison population. In support of the bill, Clinton’s wife, Hillary, and young Senator Joe Biden, both stoked America’s fear of young, Black men when they referred to, “America’s gangs of super predators”.

Jumping forward 20 years to 2014, 12 year old Tamir Rice was shot to death while doing what little boys do - playing with toy guns. City of Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehman who “feared for my life” was never indicted or tried. The president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association defended Loehman by describing Rice as “a 12-year-old in an adult body.” Personally I don’t believe that I’ve ever had trouble distinguishing a 12 year-old from an adult. Maybe I just have observational super powers.

A year earlier in Dearborn Heights, a White suburb of Detroit, Renisha McBride, a young, Black American woman who had a dead cell phone and car trouble knocked on a residential door, likely to ask for assistance. She died at the scene when her knock was met with a shotgun blast to the back of her head as she turned to leave.

Fast forward another 10 years to April, 2023 when a few days ago 16 year-old Black American child Ralph Yarl drove across town to pick up his younger siblings. He knocked on the door of the wrong house and was shot with .32 caliber rounds to his head and shoulder. The shooter, Andrew Lester, claimed that he was “scared to death”. Lester said the teenager was a “Black male approximately 6 feet tall”. Ralph, who survived, stands 5’8” and weighs in at 140 pounds.

Researchers say Lester’s description of Yarl fits a pattern among shootings of young Black males. In multiple studies, people who were asked to judge the size of Black people tended to see Black men and boys as bigger and stronger than they actually were, giving Black children the attributes of adults. The result is that they are seen as more dangerous.

A few days before Ralph was shot, two Black Tennessee state legislators were given the boot for having the audacity to be indecorous when protesting the lax gun laws that contributed to the mass murder in a Tennessee school that took the lives of three adults and three children, plus the murderer.

I often and repeatedly say that here in America if you peel back a layer, you find racism. It’s our national disease. Our national fabric that affects everything. It brought us the electoral college system that in turn brought us five presidents who a majority of the American voters had found undesirable. It brought us runoff elections that damned near brought us Herschel Walker over Raphael Warnock. It denied over 2 million poor people – White and Black - free Medicaid who would otherwise have qualified under the Medicaid Expansion program as a part of the Affordable Care Act.

In 1879, when the positions of the parties were reversed from what they are today, Democratic former Confederates took control of Congress for the first time since the Civil War. Once in power, they banded together and set out to force the Republican president, Rutherford B. Hayes, to stop protecting Black voters by refusing to fund the government until he caved. Sound debt-ceiling familiar in 2023? Fortunately Hayes didn’t cave.

I spend a fair bit of time trying to help White Americans understand how harmful and disruptive America’s thing with race is for not only Black and Brown Americans, but for White Americans as well. For all of us. It can be a hard point to sell. But if nothing else, hasn’t the disruption of the last few weeks been exhausting and just hard to absorb? Hasn’t it kinda been weighing on your mind… affecting your peace and contentment? Hasn’t it made you disappointed in America? To add salt to the wound – at least my wound - I’ve been in communication with several White folks who in the arrogant comfort of their “I’m White, I must be right” bubble have elected to ignore the cardinal mantra of Black people in 2020 in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder – “Stop talking. Start listening.” Dunno about you, but I’ve found it exhausting.

We can and must do better. Call out those racist comments you hear. Vote better people into office from school board to president. Set aside your ideology if you must. Become knowledgeable. A really good place to start is the documentary 13^th, available on Netflix.