This is the first in a series of diaries that will examine the underlying causes for the continuing police violence disproportionately employed against African Americans, causes I believe to be deeply rooted in the past history of racism, slavery and the unique situation of blacks in the history of this country. Thanks in advance for reading.
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What can I say in defense of the man who killed Walter Scott (pictured below)? Indeed what can anyone say in Michael Slager’s defense?
And to be fair, I gave it more than two seconds of thought. I tried to imagine what type of defense could be presented on his behalf, any excuse for his actions that could create reasonable doubt. Hell, I looked for any doubt at all, reasonable or not, that – assuming there is no plea deal (and one cannot discount that possibility) – Slager’s defense counsel could present in defense of Michale Slager at his trial for consideration by a jury of his peers.
And while there will always defenses that can be conjured up in murder cases no matter how bizarre or outrageous we might find them (e.g., the Dan White trial for the murder of Harvey Milk and George Moscone and the Ethan Allen case, there were none I could imagine that would excuse Officer Slager’s cold-blooded murder of Mr. Scott when he shot him in the back and then, with the help of his own police department, lied repeatedly about it.
We will never know what was going through Slager’s mind at the time he pulled his gun out, took careful aim, and fired 8 bullets at a fleeing Walter Scott. He won’t tell us, or if he does, as Darren Wilson did before a Grand Jury in St. Louis led by a prosecutor who treated him like a client, Slager will remember his “encounter” with Walter Scott by spinning whatever story is most favorable to his own defense.
That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t have something to say regarding the larger question of American law enforcement’s “shoot first, make up excuses later” policy with respect to African Americans. Because Michael Slager is not unique. There have been thousands of “Michael Slagers” over the years, people granted the lawful authority to use deadly force who have taken that power and abused it by killing people of color. He just happened to have his crime recorded on mobile phone. Indisputable evidence (though I’ have no doubt it will be disputed).
A lot of people invariably find reasons to justify the killing and excessive force used against African American by police officers who actions are comparable to Michael Slager’s deliberate murder of Walter Scott, with the exception those cops’ lies weren’t exposed by a video recording. And yet even in cases where video shows blacks unjustifiably being murdered – for example the Tamir Rice and Eric Garner cases – that video did not lead to convictions of the police officers who killed them.
Follow me below the fold for part one of my discussion regarding the deep, underlying causes of the systemic, institutionalized and racially charged use of deadly force by America’s police against people of color, and why so many whites accept the necessity for the police to treat African Americans as imminent threats to public safety.
Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we? And any discussion of our nation’s systematic and disproportionate slaughter and abuse of African Americans must begin with the excuses white people make up for their fear of, and bias against, black people, and the white majority’s tacit acceptance of the use of violence against an oppressed and minority.
Fantasy, Mythology & Lies
What Post-Racial Society?
Why do many people claim the United States is a colorblind society? Or more importantly, why do so many want to claim we live in one? I believe that the beginning of answer to those questions can be found in this quote by a black attorney from Atlanta, Christine White:
“When we decide that we’re going to be colorblind, then we cease to be intentional about trying to combat what we know has negative effects on a whole group of people in this country. If we accept colorblindness as true in our culture, then we are less likely to attempt to remedy some of the negative effects that this implicit bias creates.”
That cuts to the heart of the issue that so many Americans, particularly white Americans, have with our nation’s well-documented oppression of Black people – denial. In other words, the desire to forget our own past, and replace the brutal, ugly nature of what happened “so long ago” with a less discomforting narrative about what exactly European colonists (and later their descendants) did to fellow human beings brought to these shores in chains, against their will. A story that erases as much of the ugly stain of slavery and racism away as possible, thus laying the foundation for ignoring the continuing state-sanctioned violence still practiced against the descendants of those slaves under the auspices of our current justice system.
White people have been in the business of fictionalizing the past when it comes to the history of our “exceptional” nation for a very long time. That our society has portrayed our country as uniquely good and morally superior occurred in the past and continues to occur in the present is not that surprising. Nor is the fact that we have consistently sought to suppress and purge the worst parts of our past from public knowledge. This kind of thing occurs throughout the world in many countries (e.g., Turkey and the Armenian genocide), whenever a minority of people have been oppressed by the majority.
The reason is that denial serves many purposes. Denial of unpleasant truths preserves the status quo, for one thing, permitting that oppression to continue under different guises. Denial also allows the dominant group to expunge any feelings of shame or guilt that might otherwise arise should the truth be told on a regular basis. It also reinforces the cultural norms and values of the majority, and reinforces the current political power structure in a society.
In America, many whites justify discrimination and prejudice against people of color because those white contend that blacks, collectively if not individually, do not fully embrace American values – that WASP ethos of hard work, devotion to family, education, progress, etc. – that the white culture views as the pathway to success in this great land.
Which brings us to textbooks. Specifically, textbooks for K-12 education, because that is the place where people first learn about their collective past, and learn how to define themselves through the stories that are told to explain that past. And when those stories are full of fiction and lies what do you think happens? Those who “own the past” will also own the present.
Historical Revisionism and Race:
Anyone who has seen the movie Gone With the Wind, knows that revisionist narratives regarding the African American experience in America is not a recent phenomenon. Far from it. In both the states that attempted to secede from the Union, and those who opposed them, myths about slavery and the Civil War were perpetuated for decades. Both sides found common cause in downplaying the significant role of African Americans in securing their own liberty by fighting as Union soldiers.
Between 1863, when Henry Harmon expressed his optimism about history’s treatment of the black soldier, and 1897, the American nation had all but forgotten that black troops had ever played a role in the Civil War. Both Saint-Gaudens and Dunbar were working at a time when segregation was beginning to bite in the South with the ‘Jim Crow’ Laws, but the exclusion of black troops from the national memory of the Civil War began long before the 1890s. In the Grand Review of the Armed Forces which followed the cessation of hostilities very few blacks were represented. Relegated to the end of the procession in ‘pitch and shovel’ brigades or intended only as a form of comic relief, neither the free black soldier not the former slave was accorded his deserved role in this poignant national pageant. Rather than a war fought for liberty, in which the role of the African-American soldier was pivotal, the image of the American Civil War as a ‘white man’s fight’ became the norm almost as soon as the last shot was fired.
Both victorious Union historians and those who chronicled the war from the perspective of defeat played up the heroism of the white soldiers, Union or Confederate. Both viewed African Americans as an inferior race of people, though their reasons for doing so were not always the same. In the North, African Americans were seen as unwanted competition for white men’s jobs. Many northern whites adopted the prevailing narrative of racial inferiority because it justified exclusion of free blacks from the labor market. In the South, the fear that justified prejudicial stereotypes of African Americans was not merely economic, but concerned the threat that white would lose political power (as indeed happened in some southern states for a brief time during the Reconstruction years).
But it was the South, alone, that invented the revisionist narrative of a mythical Lost Cause. The Lost Cause mythos is a passionate defense of an imaginary antebellum society where honor and graciousness ruled.
The Old South, in imagination, was a land of prosperous plantations and happy Negroes, large white houses with window glass, cultured people who could read and write, music and literature, and a stable economy based on cotton. It was actually one of the most unpleasant and hellish societies ever invented by man, and one well on the way to dissolution when it was destroyed in fire and war. The peculiar institution, slavery, sheltered horrors that are difficult to appreciate from this distance. It was curious in a ‘free’ country to meet with kaffles of chained slaves being driven along the National Road, a sight that impressed many a European traveler.
Lost Cause revisionists created a narrative that buried the ugly reality of slavery as an evil, corrupt institution that brutalized and commodified one group of human beings to serve the economic needs of others under a pack of lies and distortions.
The central article of faith … was that the South had not fought to preserve slavery, and that this false accusation was an effort to smear the reputation of the South’s gallant leaders. In the early years of the twentieth century the main spokesperson for this point of view was a formidable Athens, Georgia, school principal named Mildred Lewis Rutherford (or Miss Milly, as she is known to [United Daughters of the Confederacy] members) …
Miss Milly’s burning passion was ensuring that Southern youngsters learned the “correct” version of what the war was all about and why it had happened—a version carefully vetted to exclude “lies” and “distortions” perpetrated by anti-Southern textbook authors. To that end, in 1920 she wrote a book entitled “The Truths of History”—a compendium of cherry-picked facts, friendly opinions, and quotes taken out of context, sprinkled with nuggets of information history books have often found convenient to ignore. Among other things, “The Truths of History” asserts that Abraham Lincoln was a mediocre intellect, that the South’s interest in expanding slavery to Western states was its benevolent desire to acquire territory for the slaves it planned to free, and that the Ku Klux Klan was a peaceful group whose only goal was maintaining public order. One of Rutherford’s “authorities” on slavery was British writer William Makepeace Thackeray, who visited Richmond on a tour of the Southern states during the 1850s and sent home a buoyant description of the slaves who attended him: “So free, so happy! I saw them dressed on Sunday in their Sunday best—far better dressed than English tenants of the working class are in their holiday attire.”
Sadly, it is this Southern fantasy that is making a strong comeback today, as can be seen in the number of schools that use or seek to use textbooks that teach the tropes of the Lost Cause.
A charter school in Arizona has come under fire after it was revealed the school is using controversial books that suggest slavery was actually beneficial for African-Americans.
“Parts of [this textbook], The Making of America, present a systematically racist view of the Civil War,” Epps added. “A long description of slavery in the book claims that the state (of slavery) was beneficial to African-Americans and that Southern racism was caused by the ‘intrusion’ of Northern abolitionists and advocates of equality for the freed slaves.”
Of course, one doesn’t have to actively fabricate lies about a land of milk and honey, even for those whose bodies and labor were owned by benevolent masters, to deny the atrocities of slavery. More often than not, the easier way is to omit from your teaching curriculum any serious discussion of what slavery was really like, and what it did to the people who endured its horrors and suffered both physically and spiritually from the ruthless exploitation of their lives by slave owners, slave traders and everyone else who profited thereby.
Downplaying the role that slavery had in starting the Civil War, and instead focusing on “sectionalism” and “states’ rights,” even though the sectionalism and states’ rights arguments directly stemmed from Southern states wanting to keep slavery. There’s also a chance your kid might be misled to think post-Civil War racism was no big deal, as the standards excise any mention of the KKK, the phrase “Jim Crow” or the Black Codes. Mention is made of the Southern Democratic opposition to civil rights, but mysteriously, the mass defection of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party to punish the rest of the Democrats for supporting civil rights goes unmentioned.
It’s Not Just Historians – The Influence of Popular Culture:
For decades after the Civil War, popular culture, through its employment of racial stereotypes and iconic depictions of “colored people” played a heavy role in defining how white society viewed African Americans. Here’s the abstract from one of among a number of research studies that looked at the role popular culture played in perpetuating myths about slavery and the African American experience:
Symbolic Slavery: Black Representations in Popular Culture
In this paper, I examine popular culture items that represent blacks in degrading, stereotyped ways, and objectify former sets of work roles and social relations. These material objects were most popular from approximately 1890 to the 1950s, and they symbolically reflected the social control mechanisms underlying majority-minority relations during that period. In addition, they helped to allay status anxiety and promoted a sense of social solidarity and superiority among whites. The production of these objects declined only after the challenge of an alternative development in the cultural sphere—the ascendence [sic] of a black self-consciousness during the Civil Rights Movement. My research calls attention to an additional symbolic way social control is extended and the structure of society is maintained and reproduced in a relatively stable manner.
After all, if you, as a member of the majority social group, can be made to feel superior to a minority, it is much easier to deny those individuals the same rights and privileges that you expect. I suspect that minstrel shows were successful for precisely that reason. Their demeaning depiction of blacks as little more than childish simpletons was tailor made to buttress both popular prejudices and pseudo-scientific theories regarding the racial inferiority of dark people.
Furthermore, if you can also demonize that inferior race as a potential threat to you and yours, it is also easier to justify harsh treatment of them by law enforcement and the judicial system. Research regarding racial stereotypes has shown since at least 1947 that blacks have been viewed as possessing a predisposition for violence and criminality. I imagine images like this have had something to do with that perception:
The image of the “black brute” is a particularly powerful symbol that justifies the use of any means necessary, including deadly force to protect whites, and especially in the eyes of white men, the “honor and purity” of their white women.
During Reconstruction (1867-1877), White fear of the brute caricature they had created found expression in arguments that the animalistic instincts of Black men had been kept in check only by the paternalistic hand of slavery. Without it, they were resorting to criminal savagery. The Black race was being caricatured into a kind of “black peril,” a depiction which lasted into the early 1900s. Anti-Black propaganda was common fodder in so-called scientific journals, including those promoting elimination of racial undesirables through eugenics, and in crime novels, which frequently resorted to the Black rapist as a plot device. One of these publications was the lengthy volume, The Negro a Beast, written by Charles Carroll and published by American Book and Bible House, St. Louis, in 1900. The title page points out that Mr. Carroll spent fifteen years of his life and $20,000 compiling his work. The Negro a Beast is a complete rejection of Darwinian evolution. The book then attempts to produce “biblical and scientific evidence” that Blacks were not descended from Adam, and are not part of the human family. Miscegenation (inter-racial breeding), the book claims, produces beasts without souls and is the reason God decided that his Son had to be sacrificed–to save the world from the sins of man’s amalgamation with Negroes. Carroll even suggests that Blacks were “the tempter of Eve”. In 1903 the journal Medicine published an article by Dr. William Howard in which he claimed that, “the attacks on defenseless white woman are evidence of racial instincts that are about as amenable to ethical culture as is the inherent odor of the race…the African’s birthright is ‘sexual madness and excess.'”
This stereotype is still with us today. Think of the images of black athletes down through the ages, from Jack Johnson through Jim Brown and Sonny Liston to O.J. Simpson. The defining theme is of a powerful, raging black beast with an unbounded sexual lust for white females. Clearly, such dangerous “animals” must be controlled, and if they cannot be controlled, imprisoned or even killed when necessary. Indeed, large multinational corporations still make millions of dollars each year exploiting this very iconic, racist and thoroughly American image.
But where did this particular image of the threatening black male originate, one so dangerous that even today, our society disproportionately incarcerates black men and, as we have seen on our television screens, allows police to gun down even non-threatening unarmed black men with impunity?
To understand the answer to that question, we have to first look beyond the myths of “white” goodness and superiority vis-a- vis “black” depravity and inferiority. We must examine the truth about our nation’s initial rise to economic power and one of its greatest moral transgressions – African-American slavery. That’s the topic for part two of this series.
