This is the third in my series, Race, America and Me. Part One is here, and Part Two is 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.)
Warning Signs
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 Consequences of Racial Stereotypes
The representation of non-white minorities in popular culture 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
Let me start off with quote from a recent post at James Wolcott’s blog, because I find it apropos to what I have to say about myself:
I’m not prejudiced against people of any Crayola color–indeed, I’m rather partial towards those endowed with a deep blue hue–but I do recall a standup comic from the old Improv days who did a routine about how everyone boasts that they don’t care what color a person is, it’s what’s inside that matters. “People say,’Black, white, purple, polka-dot, makes no difference to me, I don’t believe in discrimination.’ They’re so proud of themselves. Like some nice polka-dot family is going to move in next door, come over to borrow things. Hell, anybody can be tolerant of imaginary beings.”
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.
In outer appearance, Joe was your classic white boy’s nightmare of a big bad menacing black man. Physically he was 4-5 inches taller and a good 100 pounds heavier than either I, or my other two roommates. He had a large booming voice, and exuded a larger than life presence. Despite that, it was hard not to like him. He was talkative, charming, smiled constantly and never gave anyone the impression that he had a violent bone in his body, despite the fact that he had been a former college football starting running back at our college, and was still trying to hook up with any professional football team that would have him after he was cut in his first attempt just before the start of school year. He’d come back to our little college town because his coaches had offered to let him use the training facilities to stay in shape while he waited for another opportunity at the big time.
Despite Joe’s friendly demeanor, and despite my idealistic belief in racial equality and tolerance, there were things about him that bothered me. Know, let me be more explicit – there were something about him that frightened me. It wasn’t anything he did. He was simply himself. But he was more talkative, more gregarious than I was. His language included words I’d never heard before, and, perhaps most of all, my girl friend (I’ll call her Natasha though that isn’t her real name) at the time struck up a friendship with him.
I was a pretty insecure and very shy 19 year old. Nat was literally my first girl friend, and I had lost my virginity with her on my 18th birthday. A year later we would marry. So it isn’t hard to imagine that I saw any male friend of hers as a threat to me. But Joe was in a different category than all the others, and the only reason was because he was black.<p.
You see, despite my best intentions, and the fact that I personally liked Joe, I still bought into all the stereotypes about black men. That they have more sexual energy then white men. That they are violent. That they desire white women. That they are lazy. That they aren’t as intelligent as whites. In short, I couldn’t eradicate my own prejudices about African Americans, despite my upbringing, despite all the intellectual reasons I told myself that my prejudicial view of Joe was wrong . Emotionally, that prejudice, a prejudice not based on any real experience with black people, but solely based on the cultural norms of white society, liberal or conservative, was too powerful to ignore.
I became wary of Joe. An unspoken barrier between us arose, one of which I’m sure he was aware, because he and I drifted apart. We talked less, interacted less, and when we did, tensions began to come between us that hadn’t existed before. And it didn’t help matters that Joe was having financial difficulties. He couldn’t find full time work in our predominately white college town. He ended up taking a part time job with the school’s athletic department, but it wasn’t enough to cover rent, or his other expenses.
One day, after a rather loud argument between him and one of my other roommates about past due rent (the one whose name was on the lease), Joe simply packed up his stuff and left. Left without paying the rent, and without paying a large long distance bill that I was on the hook for, since the telephone bill for our apartment was in my name. We never heard from him again. At the time one of my roommates (after he had left, of course) vowed never to live again with any “fucking niggers.” To my shame, while I didn’t say it aloud, the same thought was running through my mind.
Part Four of this series will be titled: Unlearning Bigotry.
Posted at Booman Tribune, Daily Kos and My Left Wing.