BALTIMORE, Maryland December 1, 2014 - I've cringed more in recent weeks than I have throughout my entire life. It is the aftermath of Ferguson and now Staten Island that causes me this awful tension. Why us, Lord? We have tried hard. We have made big mistakes, but we have tried and we want to do good. Yet, I cringe when some angry white guy gets on the tube and says the entire blame for Ferguson is the abdication of responsibility by black parents. I cringe when some angry black man says white people are, by definition, racist. And I really really cringe when race hustlers claim - without coming right out and saying it - that black people will never be equal to white people in America but will, instead, forever need financial assistance and expanded legal protections.
Some say the Ferguson episode is part of what is right about America because we wash our dirty laundry right out there in the public eye. I know I feel a whole lot better about these United States after I listen to Rev. Al Sharpton berate all things patriotic. I watched the videos available from the night in question in dear old Ferguson and listened and read the information available from the grand jury in Missouri. Michael Brown, it seems, was a disaster waiting to happen on the night he was killed. But that doesn't mean he should've been killed.
Through all of this, in Ferguson and now in Staten Island, is a common thread. We, as Americans, will not admit the obvious lessons from these awful episodes, and we will not accept the obvious, the almost necessary penalties that society has pushed upon it when its people cannot or will not accept these truths.
This is what I mean when I say that we will not admit the obvious. Bear with me on this.
The first slaves were brought to what we colloquially call the New World in the year 1501. The nation that started the slave trade, it seems, was Spain. They weren't alone for long. Britain joined in this debauched slave trade in 1562. By 1581 there were slaves in Florida. In 1612 the first crop of tobacco was planted in Virginia and it was obvious, from the start, that this was a crop that was perfect for forced labor. Within seven years, in 1619, slaves had been imported from Africa to tend to the tobacco crops, first in Virginia, and then in other American locations. (I draw this historical account from my own knowledge and from a well-researched timeline posted at https://sharondraper.com/timeline.pdf)
England ended its involvement with slavery in 1833. The legendary civil rights leader, William Wilberforce, was one of the members of Parliament who first introduced the legislation that brought about the end of all things slavery-related. There is a movie that depicts these events called "Amazing Grace." The film follows Wilberforce's decades-long fight to eliminate Britain's participation in the slave trade, and it is both moving and gut-wrenching. The superb cast has Ioan Gruffudd as Wilberforce, Benjamin Cumberbatch as William Pitt the Younger, Michael Gambon as Charles James Fox, whose stunning defection from the side of the slave traders eventually wins the day for Wilberforce, Albert Finney, in a tour de force performance as a reformed but still self-tortured slave trader who injects so much of the God-Awful practice's barbaric inhumane reality onto the screen, and Romola Garai as Wilberforce's Wife, Barbara Spooner. There are, I'm positive, more realistic depictions of the slave-trading practice during the years right before and right after the American Revolution, but I am not familiar with them. Even for someone who knows the story, this movie will make you squirm and sweat.
It took America until January 1, 1863, when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, to rid itself, officially, of slavery. But, as every American knows, the Emancipation Proclamation changed the law on paper, but the wholesale discrimination and other acts of repression openly practiced in American society against the black race took a century or more to disappear. And, to be honest, not every discriminatory result of slavery has gone away. Only God knows how long that will take. Ferguson and Staten Island indicate that the final act is not exactly right around the corner.
During the years of slavery in America, enslaved blacks were prohibited from learning to read and enslaved blacks were prohibited from learning to write. Enslaved blacks could not own property and in some states they were prohibited from marrying. Enslaved blacks were treated like chattel or property and in many cases berated, criticized and humiliated around the clock. Enslaved blacks were beaten and subjected to physical intimidation and punishment of the most fiendish kind. Furthermore, white people freely talked and acted as if they were racially superior, and even the suggestion that blacks and whites were equal was met with derision and open hostility.
Changes took place gradually, moving forward in fits and starts, and sometimes slipping backwards. There were improvements after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but not quick changes. Improvements in the lot of the Black American were slow in coming and, when they finally did come, they did not show up nationwide but instead came to one part of the country at a different time than they came to other parts. Throughout these generations of time, whites ruled in American society and blacks either did what they were told or suffered for it. Only in the 20th century were improvements palpable. Only in the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's did blacks really begin to pull equal to whites in most phases of American life.
And yet Americans today expect that the sinister and debilitating effects of slavsry to have completely disappeared from our world today. At least by today, the thinking goes, we are so far past slavery that it is totally a thing of the past. It's been over a century, you know. Well, the legacy of slavery has not disappeared. What other reason is there for the ghettos of our great cities to be populated, by and large, by a minority race? How long does it take an entire race to completely recover from centuries of base discrimination; i.e. discrimination in all walks of life? It takes generations, at least. At least.
At least now blacks have an expectation of equal treatment. At least now public officials enforce laws that demand that all people be treated equally. At least now any person can escape the life they were born into. But for those who start in the ghetto, that escape will be far more difficult than the upward climb will be for someone born in an affluent suburb. The reality of equality? We are not there yet.
So this is the truth we want to ignore, but have to accept: Slavery did a tremendous amount of insidious harm. It wasn't just economic harm. Black intellectuallism was all but non-existant during the times of slavery, and even when slavery ended, the number of black intellectuals in America has grown ever so slowly. There are other professions that are only now gaining a respectable representation of minority persons. I graduated from the University of Maryland in 1977. In my final year I wrote a long piece for the school magazine on the trouble the school was having, not in attracting minority students, but in keeping them enrolled. It's hard to believe that as recently as the later days of the 20th century - 1975 to be exact - the National Pastime finally hired its first black manager. Blacks rally still to any lingering effect of racism because it is a vestige of slavery. Sadly, now there are the Sharptons of the world who seize situations like Ferguson for their own low-brow gain.
Only during the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy did the idea of real societal equality get a firm kick in the pants. Other Presidents since then have pushed and pushed to get us where we are now. Johnson dragged the landmark civil rights acts through a sometimes openly hostile Congress. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder, Clinton and Bush the Younger continued the surge forward, some more forcefully than others. One legacy of the two Bush Presidencies is the firm and inarguable societal statement that America will not slip backwards on civil rights, no matter who is president and no matter what the priority of the ruling party is.
Actual societal integration is now getting to be a reality as states and the federal government vigorously enforce open housing laws.
But the reality of our racial journey in America is that the black population was held back, thwarted, and prevented from making progress as a matter of public policy, and this went on for many many years. The reality of equality - the reality of having a right to live in a society where your race will not be used against you - is only now taking hold.
And still, stone cold statistics tell us that black people are far more likely to be shot by police than are whites. There are lots of reasons for this reality, but at least part of it is a legacy of racism and slavery. Certainly the most pervasive reason why blacks are far more likely to be shot by police than are whites is the geographic reality that the inner cities, the most violent part of America, is the domain, for the most part, of poor black people. More people are killed in urban settings, and some of those deaths are brought about because of gunfire from police. A huge percentage of the total number of police shootings are legally justified. The few that are found to not be legally justified are met with harsh punishments. Statistics tell of this, stone cold statistics. But this is not the end of the road. It cannot be.
Some shootings are legally justified, but not, in reality, absolutely necessary. In other words, the officer pulling the trigger will not be sanctioned for doing so, even though, in reality, the story might have had a different ending. This is the portion of police shootings that might be susceptible to change if the public will is mustered.
It does not seem like a huge leap for police departments to admit the truth of all of this without being indignant about it. Most of the time - in reality, almost all of the time - police are not to blame when a citizen is shot by an officer. Charles Barclay is taking heat now because he says "we have to be very careful in criticizing police. If it wasn't for police we would be living in the wild wild west in our neighborhoods." What Mr. Barclay says is also unquestionably true. But the fact that most police shootings are legally justified, and that police provide an absolutely necessary anti-crime force in urban areas, does not mean that open-minded people cannot look into the fact that a lot of police shootings are white officers shooting black people.
Officer Wilson - the man at the middle of the Feguson Uprising - says that if a white man did what Michael Brown did, he, too, would be dead. I won't argue with him, but there are times that I believe white officers shoot quicker and with more deadly results in situations where a shooting is legally justified but not actually necessary to protect the officer. Some of this is because whites have an inherant fear of blacks in urban settings. Is this justified? It isn't an easy question to even consider. I hope I can say that I assign my trepidation in a given situation to the so-called facts on the ground. If a person is attacking me and I have the means to defend myself, I want to believe I would use deadly force in a very few situations, only those when it is the only possible way to save my own life.
I believe that an overwhelming number of police officers - more, I believe, than some black leaders will admit to - are good and decent poeple trying their best to make the community they patrol a better place to live.
Society cloaks its police officers with a right to kill people so long as a well-defined set of conditions exist at the moment the lethal shot is fired. At a minimum, the Officer has to believe his life is in danger, or the life of a third person, and the only way to protect either his life or the innocent third person's life is to use so-called lethal force. What I wonder is whether the officer must use lethal force everytime he is cloaked with the protection of the law?
In the moment when snap decisions are made and lives are on the line, I want to believe that police officers are totally color blind. But police officers are human, and at the core of this extremely vexing problem is whether a vestige of racism plays a part in the life and death equation that is solved by the action taken by the officer. Society has to keep up the drumbeat of equality and dignity, and it also has to keep up the drumbeat of those other societal problems that play a role in this problem.
I literally break into a cold sweat even considering the questions that are confronted when we examine these issues. They are that innately troubling. And they - these questions - are well worth being troubled about.
I agree that these questions are very disturbing. Part of what is disturbing is that I, as a middle class white man, simply do not know what it is like to a different color in this society: it's a stretch to understand someone else's reality. I do think it is true that the trauma of slavery carries on through multiple generations in one way or another. This is obvious but still worth noting. Some people, some families, some communities, have responded to trauma in many positive ways. Emphasizing education for example. Others have responded extremely negatively - turning rage against members of their own group, for example. As you suggest, none of this is pre-determined - there is a great role for choice and moral responsibility here. Bottom line, we have a problem here that goes beyond any particular political perspective: this is America, a place that we should see in its best lights, its most hopeful, democratic lights (not ignoring its worst incarnations either). We can live together, we just have to work at it, and work at it, and work at it. Not giving up, not expecting results on a grand scale anytime soon, but staying with it.
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