It is overcast this morning as I sit in my kitchen with coffee and type out these thoughts. The dogs are sleeping and I’ll soon wake them and take them on a walk then go for a run, confident that my suburban life is one of relative safety. Yes, there have been some break-ins recently, but the odds are in my favor. I’m white. I’m solidly middle class. I live in a town with a well-run and ethical police force and I have the characteristics that allow me to feel secure that, when I need the police, they will come, they will treat me with respect, will listen and do their best to help.
I’m pretty damned lucky — as most Americans are.
I say most, because that is not the case in the United States if you are black or brown, if you speak Spanish or Arabic, or live in neighborhoods that have been purposefully neglected for decades.
I say most, because not all police officers are as ethical or conscientious as the men in blue here in South Brunswick. I say most, because there are too many places in this country where safety is a rare commodity, where calling the police is as potentially dangerous as leaving the streets unpoliced.
Alton Sterling is dead, shot by Baton Rouge police. Philando Castile was killed by police in a St. Paul suburb. These killings — executions, really — just add to the litany of African Americans who have died in police custody. This is unacceptable, which is why American streets are now filled with protesters shouting enough is enough.
In Dallas, five police officers were killed by snipers in what is an apparent act of revenge. It is a terrible act, a cowardly act, a foolish act. Five more families are now left broken, permanently scarred. It is a reminder of the dangers police face everyday, just as the deaths of Sterling and Castile — and Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, et al before them — are reminders of the dangers that black Americans also face. The Dallas attack, sadly, is likely to do nothing more than provide cover for those unwilling to acknowledge the way race continues to infect our public policy, the way privilege distorts the supposed meritocracy in which we live.
We will talk about protesters fomenting violence, retreat to our camps and allow the anger to fester.
We are awash in guns in the United States but we will continue to do nothing about that. Minority neighborhoods are treated as war zones, their inhabitants viewed as combatants, and we will do nothing about it. We will do nothing to address failing schools and broken institutions, but we may find a few extra dollars for police to buy high-tech weaponry, which has been the default position for far too long.
We will talk about high-crime areas, about black-on-black crime, and we will toss around the racist canard that blacks lack responsibility. But that just blames the victims. Residents of cities like Chicago, Newark, Trenton, etc., are at the mercy of broken institutions — of failed schools, dysfunctional governments, of militarized police. They live with concentrated poverty, in segregated neighborhoods that have seen businesses close, residents flee, and despair move in.
Michael Eric Dyson, the social critic,
writes in today’s New York Times that the accusations that “black folks kill each other every day without a mumbling word while we thunderously protest a few cops, usually but not always white, who shoot to death black people who you deem to be mostly ‘thugs'” is “nonsense is nearly beside the point.”
Black people protest, to one another, to a world that largely refuses to listen, that what goes on in black communities across this nation is horrid, as it would be in any neighborhood depleted of dollars and hope — emptied of good schools, and deprived of social and economic buffers against brutality. People usually murder where they nest; they aim their rage at easy targets.
It’s about a de facto, if not legal, segregation, he says. While there are blacks and Latinos in the suburbs, overwhelming majority of minorities continue to live in primarily black or Latino neighborhoods. So, we should not be talking about black-on-black crime, but about “neighbor-to-neighbor carnage.”
Again, I’m lucky. Many of us are lucky. We are far removed from the carnage, to use Dyson’s word. We are not the ones who, when stopped by police, are met with an automatic suspicion based on nothing more than the color of our skin. We have been “given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy,” Dyson writes.
Those binoculars are privilege; they are status, regardless of your class. In fact the greatest privilege that exists is for white folk to get stopped by a cop and not end up dead when the encounter is over.
Those binoculars are also stories, bad stories, biased stories, harmful stories, about how black people are lazy, or dumb, or slick, or immoral, people who can’t be helped by the best schools or even God himself. These beliefs don’t make it into contemporary books, or into most classrooms. But they are passed down, informally, from one white mind to the next.
I have one of those white minds. I’ve been lucky to have the binoculars, the privilege, to have attended good public schools, to have access to funding, to safe streets, to police who are committed to the notion that they are here to protect and serve.
I could ignore what is happening. I could retreat to my privilege. I could, but I won’t. Enough is enough.
Send me an e-mail.
Hank Kalet 