This is the third in my series, Race, America and Me. Part One is located here, and Part Two can be found here.
Danger, Will Robinson!
All white people know who the dangerous other is in America, even if they won’t admit to that knowledge. But Don Imus and Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage and Ann Coulter and a thousand lesser points of conservative radio wave lights will tell you: the “dangerous other” in America is anyone who is not white. Let me repeat that, for emphasis:
(cont.)
We see signs of the dangers non-whites pose to white Americans everyday in our newspapers, cable news shows, movies and TV series and video games. The dangers that are displayed run the gamut from physical violence (including rape, terrorism, drive-by shootings), the spread of drugs, economic disruption (e.g.,”welfare cheats” and “illegal immigration”) to the threatened (or imagined) debasement of civilized society by “the Other’s” culture and/or his or her immoral activities and attitudes.
You don’t have to go very far to find examples where non-whites are depicted as Bogey Men, even from that bastion of so-called radical liberalism, Hollywood. You can readily find sinister portraits of “the Other” in popular television shows such as 24 (Arab terrorists) movies such as Rising Sun (Evil Japanese), and in popular rap music glorifying (and stressing) the violence of African American street gangs.
The representation of non-white minorities as prone to violence, illegality and immorality has been a regular feature of American popular culture my entire life. It has led to lynchings, random beatings and murders (James Byrd) and implicitly sanctioned police brutality against minorities, as anyone familiar with the stories of Rodney King or Amadou Diallo can attest.
The aftermath of 9/11 has seen a rash of violence against Arabs and other people from the Middle East, or to be more precise, anyone who, in the eyes of whites, fits the stereotyped image of an Arab, and thus a potential terrorist. Here’s a recent example of just such an incident involving a Sikh-American and US Navy veteran of the first Gulf War:
On Friday March 30, 2007 at around 3:00pm, Mr. Kuldip Singh Nag, a Sikh American who was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in the U.S. Navy during the first Gulf War, was at his home in Joliet, IL when a local police officer noticed that a van parked on Mr. Nag’s private property had expired registration tags. Upon being confronted with this, Mr. Nag’s wife, Vera Kaur Nag, informed the officer that the van is parked on their driveway and was inoperable.
Mr. Nag then came outside to answer the officer’s questions regarding the van. The Joliet police officer then demanded that Mr. Nag park the van inside his garage and not on the driveway, to which Mr. Nag responded to the officer that it was not possible and that regardless, the van is parked on his private property and he has a right to park it on his driveway.
At this moment, the officer pulled out his pepper spray and attacked Mr. Nag. As Mr. Nag screamed in agony, the officer removed his baton and violently struck Mr. Nag numerous times until he fell to the ground. While the assault ensued, the officer was reported by both Mr. and Mrs. Nag as saying, “You f****** Arab! You f***** immigrant, go back to you f****** country before I kill you!”
Mr. Nag’s wife and six year-old child both witnessed the violent assault, which resulted in Mr. Nag immediately being admitted to the hospital where he stayed for five days due to complaints of intense pain and head trauma. Mr. Nag also received numerous bruises and a serious head injury which have caused him to go blind for several minutes at a time.
Mr. Singh Nag has been charged with crime by the City of Joliet, Illinois (presumably for resisting arrest) according to the Times of India, the only online news report I could find about this incident. This is how racism plays out in the aftermath of 9/11. And it is not an isolated occurrence, as demonstrated by the case of “Mostafa Tabatabainejad, a 23-year-old senior of the UCLA, was stunned with a Taser by a campus police officer after he refused requests to show his ID card” last November as he was exiting the UCLA library.
At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately.
The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.
The student began to yell “get off me,” repeating himself several times.
It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition.
UCPD officers confirmed that the man involved in the incident was a student, but did not give a name or any additional information about his identity.
Video shot from a student’s camera phone captured the student yelling, “Here’s your Patriot Act, here’s your fucking abuse of power,” while he struggled with the officers.
As the student was screaming, UCPD officers repeatedly told him to stand up and said “stop fighting us.” The student did not stand up as the officers requested and they shot him with the Taser at least once more.
“It was the most disgusting and vile act I had ever seen in my life,” said David Remesnitsky, a 2006 UCLA alumnus who witnessed the incident.
As the student and the officers were struggling, bystanders repeatedly asked the police officers to stop, and at one point officers told the gathered crowd to stand back and threatened to use a Taser on anyone who got too close.
Laila Gordy, a fourth-year economics student who was present in the library during the incident, said police officers threatened to shoot her with a Taser when she asked an officer for his name and his badge number.
It probably doesn’t need to be said, but Mostafa Tabatabainejad is an Iranian-American.
“Dangerous Others” and Me
I didn’t grow up around many minorities in the west suburbs of Denver. We had one African American family, a few Latinos families, and a smattering of Asians whose kids attended the same schools as I did. It was pretty much a Wasp community. We used to joke that Catholics were our school’s token minority group. Even the schools we competed against in sports were usually suburban, and thus 95% white. The only time I remember going to game in which our school competed against a predominately African American school, was in the state Basketball championship my sophomore year, where our team of all-white team lost by 2 points to one of the Denver public high schools whose team was all-black.
With so little opportunity to interact with blacks, most of what I learned about them came from television. I remember watching news coverage the race riots of 1965, the coverage of Martin Luther King’s assassination, the occasional television documentary depicting the “urban ghettos” and TV shows in which African Americans were portrayed as either criminals or servants.
Even the first TV show to feature an African American as the lead character, Julia (a nurse and young mother played by ) was as much about her crusty old boss, Dr. Chegley, as it was about her life as a single black woman (conveniently, her “husband” in the show had been killed in Vietnam so the producers of the show weren’t faced with the dilemma of how to portray a black man to their predominately white audience). It was a strangely sanitized “white liberal” version of black life, and even then I sensed it was a phony and unrealistic portrait of how most African Americans actually lived.
“Joe”
It wasn’t until I went away to college that I had my first significant interaction with black people. My sophomore year in college I lived in an off campus apartment with 4 roommates, one of whom was black. Joe (not his real name) had been a football player at the university and was now trying to catch on with a pro team. He needed a place to stay and wasn’t adverse to living with 3 scrawny white boys, even if their tastes in music was radically different than his own. The way that apartment was laid out, it had a central living and kitchen/dining area, and two bedrooms with two single beds each. Joe and I shared one of the bedrooms.