New Year, Same Problems

About two weeks ago, on the 2nd of January, a little over a dozen armed white men took over a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon over they have been calling “the tyrannical overreach of the federal government.” They don’t like mandatory minimum sentencing laws and they don’t like complying with federal land use regulations but being frustrated does not give people the right to mount an armed resistance against the federal government. Furthermore, regardless of their claims, they are in clear violation of the constitution and U.S. law. Yet these men have not been removed by local or federal law enforcement. In fact, the response by local law enforcement has been cordial in some cases. Yes, some individuals have asked the militants to leave but, by and large, both the initial and ongoing response have been positive. There is something wrong with this whole situation. How is it that a couple of armed white men can just occupy a federal building, tell the world that they are ready to kill or be killed, and not be immediately removed or apprehended – does white privilege really extend to would-be insurgents?

The response these men have received is in stark contrast to the media coverage and law enforcement response Black Lives Matter protesters have received. When a group of armed individuals takeover federal territory and threaten the use of force to coerce the U.S. government into legislative action, one would think it would be all over the mainstream media and that the coverage would be negative. Yet the media coverage only served to highlight the privilege white people in this country experience. Mainstream media outlets, from ABC to Fox News, failed to truly highlight the gravity of these individual’s actions, initially characterizing them as peaceful protesters. One outlet in particular, Fox, went so far as to suggest that open rebellion is authorized by the constitution. CNN went so far as to attempt to draw a parallel between these men and typically peaceful protesters of color by stating that these men aren’t looting or destroying property. Such a parallel blatantly ignores the fact that the actions these men have taken are seditious, treasonous, and insurrectionist and that protesters are not the ones looting or destroying property. When even the so-called “mainstream liberal media” falls prey to implicit racial biases while conducting real time coverage of events, we know we have a problem.

Oregon is a blue state, the most they have done is ask the militants to leave. When Minnesota, another blue state, had a run in with Black Lives Matter at Mall of America, law enforcement arrived like they were entering a warzone. We are talking about states like Oregon that have liberal meccas like Portland in their borders and a state, Minnesota, that was called the 2nd most liberal state in the Union in 2014. They are not in deep south red states. Suffice it to say, if armed people of color or Muslims took over federal land and threatened violence in the face of attempted removal by law enforcement, we would be seeing a different kind of media coverage from outlets across the American ideological spectrum. My friends, do not tell me that there is not an implicit bias or that we are now “post-racial” or “post-racism.” There is no one that is not guilty of some kind of implicit bias in this country. What does that say about us as a people? It says we have not jumped the racial hurdles we faced during Katrina. The media has not learned much since that tragedy, Katrina occurred over 10 years ago and the consideration afforded these men and the lack of consideration afforded peaceful unarmed black protesters is eerily similar to the characterization of white families as “scavenging for survival” and black families as “looting.” Both white and black families were merely trying to survive in the midst of a tragic natural disaster. Yet one group of people (white people) were cast in a positive light while another group of people (black people) were cast in a negative light. All that does is feed into and reinforce the implicit biases we as a country are guilty of holding.

My friends, we have to admit that we have a problem in this country. That problem is white supremacy and its tools, implicit bias and racism, are insidious and lead to dangerous outcomes for people of color, like a 12 year old child with a toy gun being fatally shot within 2 seconds of law enforcement arriving on the scene. We have to admit that white progressives, as well-meaning as we are, can also fall prey to the same primitive thinking and stereotyping that reinforces systemic biases and racism in this country. My fellow progressives, if we truly want to move forward as a nation and represent a post-racial tomorrow, we must be conscious of our own biases that do feed into age-old stereotypes of people of color – biases that often lead to catastrophic outcomes for communities of color.

 

A National Black Lives Matter Platform and the Lessons from Occupy

From the carcass of the great recession emerged Occupy Wall Street, a movement predominantly dominated by college aged progressives. Driven by a burning desire to highlight the growing wealth inequality in the United States, the plight faced by recent college grads burdened by thousands of dollars of debt and the rapidly deteriorating new deal consensus, they protested from city to city. From the heartland of America to her coasts, the occupy movement spread like wildfire. These individuals had frustration, idealism and a progressive ideological streak in common. What they lacked and what they needed most was direction, and it would be that lack of concrete and achievable goals that ultimately led to their downfall. While there still remains some vestiges of Occupy in American politics and while some candidates echo their rhetoric, the spirit of the movement was lost in the process of their directionless downward spiral. The lesson of occupy is that without concrete and achievable goals, a movement cannot make the necessary transition from changing hearts and minds to changing policy.

That was the lesson Hillary Clinton echoed as she discussed the methodology of the Black Lives Matter movement with its representatives. The movement found itself at a crossroads, do we focus exclusively on changing hearts and minds or do we push a national platform that can be co-opted by progressive elected officials to change policy. While protesting, rallying, and civil disobedience are legitimate methods to have one’s voice heard, repeating mantras at rallies and events is not enough to bring about change. More needs to be done. Furthermore, white elected officials cannot be expected to know the best policies to implement to end police brutality, disproportionate mass incarceration or the general over policing of communities of color. Secretary Clinton said it herself, that her push for three strikes legislation was intended to help communities of color and that she did not expect it to negatively impact communities of color. Secretary Clinton could not be reasonably expected, as a non person of color, to know how to best resolve the plights facing communities of color. A non person of color cannot reasonably be expected to know how to best resolve the problems facing communities of color around the nation. We can implement policy that we think may work but there is no better group to identify the problems of a community than the members of the community most knowledgeable of that community’s issues. If white allies are permitted to play a role in this movement that goes beyond the hashtags and mantras, we must be given a platform that we can follow, co-opt, and implement nationwide. It is unrealistic to expect change without policy proposals or some buy-in by non people of color. Thankfully, after the Black Lives Matter confrontation with Secretary Clinton, the movement released a national platform that recommends a concrete and achievable set of policy goals.

Among the policy recommendations made by the black lives matter movement is ending broken windows policing. Oftentimes, in the course of policing, officers will stop an individual for a minor violation (like a traffic violation) or non-crime and rapidly escalate until the suspect has been unlawfully arrested or killed. That was the case with Sandra Bland in Texas. She was pulled over for getting over without signaling and within a span of ten minutes the officer escalated what should have been a warning or citation into an arrest. Sandra Bland was subsequently found dead in her jail cell. That was the case with Michael Brown in Ferguson (jaywalking), Walter Scott in South Carolina (non-functioning brake light), and Tamir Rice in Ohio (being a black child with a toy gun), just to name a few. Putting a stop to broken windows policing is just one of many recommendations made by the Black Lives Matter movement, they also recommend the implementation of community oversight through the erection of a Community and Civilian Complaints Department, limiting police use of force by training officers to use the international deadly force standard,  implementing body cam legislation that would prevent officers from reviewing the footage of an incident before completing initial reports, statements, or interviews about the incident and putting a stop to for-profit policing by limiting the total municipal revenue that can be derived from fines and fees to 10 percent. The Black Lives Matter movement also recommends state and municipal officials demilitarize the police by putting a stop to the acquisition of military grade equipment using federal grants, the use of military grade equipment currently in the possession of local law enforcement and the deployment of SWAT in non-emergency, life-threatening, or high risk situations. While every policy proposed by the Black Lives Matter Movement may not be feasible, those of us on the local level, whether it’s folks like me in the General assembly or folks in county and city governments or local activists, can and should examine the proposals made by the Black Lives Matter movement and create workable and implementable legislation to stymie the tide of police brutality and over policing of black and brown lives.

Institutionalized, Racism among Millennials

Last week, the United States was given a harrowing reminder of her dark past and her troubling present. A man by the name of Dylann Roof committed an act of terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina against nine African Americans in the historic Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal church on the anniversary of a failed slave revolt by Denmark Vesey after seven months of planning. This man is 21, driven by a white supremacist ideology, and part of a generation we often state is less racist and prejudiced than prior generations. So, how does a millennial become so radicalized in a color blind post-racial society?

One explanation is that our society is neither color blind nor post-racial and that the myth of a color blind post-racial society has allowed millennials to avoid directly addressing their prejudices. Some social scientist posit that millennials actually harbor just as many racial stereotypes as their parents, and that America’s history of structural and institutionalized racism combined with a mythos of color blind post-racism will only sow the seeds for a system where we have racism without racist. When we examine millennial ideology, we find the same race based divides on issues like criminal justice reform, affirmative action, so-called “reverse racism,” and police misconduct of previous generations. Furthermore, although millennials are said to be the most educated generation, they also happen to be the generation that gets much of their information from social media. It is no wonder Dylann was so easily radicalized when he searched for the phrase “black on white crime” and came upon the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where the implicit biases he developed growing up in the United States were given fertile ground to grow and bloom into full blown racism.

Perhaps millennials are not so far flung from the Jim Crow era that they would so readily discard the vestiges of racism, both structural and institutionalized. By telling this generation that color does not matter and that racism is over, we have given them a blank check to ignore the prejudices they may develop over their lifetime through media. When one grows up exposed to a media culture that attributes crime committed by people of color to a character flaw within people of color, it is hard not to develop biases. When one is bombarded by nightly news that disportionately reports black crime, it would be hard to not unwittingly buy into the narrative being pushed. Dylann states in his manifesto that what led to his “awakening” was the Trayvon Martin case, that while watching the news it was readily apparent that Zimmerman was right and that Trayvon was wrong. It would be wholly disingenuous to say the media reporting of the Trayvon Martin case was not biased. There wasn’t a moment during that case that Trayvon was not portrayed as a “thug” or “hooligan” or “troublemaker” by mainstream televised media.

Millennials like Dylann, no matter how far removed from America’s days of overt racism, are just as susceptible to succumbing to the influence of a toxic ideology like white supremacism, and if we never have an honest discussion about systemic and institutionalized racism more millennials are liable to go the way of Dylann and that would have devastating consequences for race relations in America. Until we talk about race we won’t mature as a country. We’ll continue to lose lives to far right ideologues, both ideologically and literally. It’s gonna be hard y’all, but it needs to be done.

Black Lives Should Matter

Within the African American community, there has always been an uneasy relationship with authority figures. During the Jim Crow era, police officers were not the enforcers of equal justice or the equal application of the rule of law that they purport to be. Police officers represented a force that terrorized African American communities, maintained systems of oppression, and enforced institutionalized racism for a white supremacist society that refused to acknowledge the humanity of people of color. Today much has changed and yet much has remained the same. Communities of color still face much of the same institutional roadblocks, lack of opportunities, and discrimination in the United States that they have faced for centuries. African Americans may be free in the literal sense: African Americans may have the right to vote and segregation may no longer be legally enforced, but the African American community and other communities of color still face the specters of classism, racism, and police brutality.

 

Young African American males in the United States are more likely to be victims of a violent encounter with a police officer than their white male counterparts; they are also more likely to be suspected of committing a crime (i.e., profiled), more likely to be incarcerated for committing a crime, and often face harsher sentences than white males for the same crime. Some of this over policing of black males is a result of implicit bias and some of it is a result of a tendency for police officers to focus on high crime areas which are often urban areas where African Americans, especially impoverished African Americans, are more likely to live. Studies have shown that areas with higher population density and higher poverty rates tend to have a  greater volume of crime – these things have a positive correlation (i.e., as one goes up so too does the other), as a consequence of this greater volume of crime police officers are often inclined to patrol these areas more than, say, white suburbia or affluent neighborhoods which results in higher incarceration rates of the residents of these areas. Some might then make the incorrect assumption that there is something inherently wrong with the residents of urban areas. This is patently false. If we look at the crime rates of white middle class suburban neighborhoods and compare them to the crime rates of black middle class suburban neighborhoods, we find similar rates. Furthermore, when we look at white impoverished rural areas (e.g., Appalachian Mountains), we find a higher crime rate than both the white middle class and black middle class suburban areas, yet all white Americans are not painted with broad strokes as unruly hillbillies. The problem is not race. The problems are racism, classism, and lack of opportunity. The problems are institutionalized racism, implicit bias, the overconcentration of wealth in the hands of the few (i.e., income inequality), and centuries of devaluing lives of color.

 

While America was creating the white middle class, she was using every tool at her disposal to prevent the rise of the black middle class or to destroy it anywhere it took root. In many cities across the nation areas with higher concentrations of African Americans were designated as lower value by local municipalities. White bankers, real estate agents, and landlords responded to the incentives created and were reluctant to give loans to African Americans, sell homes to African Americans, or rent out property to African Americans for fear of devaluing the monetary worth of their own communities. So while we ended de jure segregation we propped up a system of de facto segregation across the country that negatively impacted African Americans. When black communities did manage to accrue enough capital to create middle class communities of their own a combined force of local law enforcement, local Ku Klux Klan members, or disgruntled white Americans would conspire to construct circumstances (e.g., the false rape of white women) that would allow them to destroy affluent communities of color (e.g., the destruction of black Wall Street or the Atlanta riots of 1906). The intentional deprivation of opportunity within African American communities by white Americans holding both economic and political power laid the groundwork for the seeds of generational poverty to be planted in the African American psyche. Centuries of institutionalized racism of that manner still manifest itself in the form of implicit bias – this interaction between white America and black America has persisted through the years despite achievements like the Civil Rights Acts and Voting Rights Act. To this day African Americans are still less likely to receive loans from banks, less likely to be sold a home for fear that it would devalue the property of all homes in the community, and less likely to be made tenants in certain neighborhoods.It is no wonder African Americans in Baltimore are in a state of civil unrest. America has created powder kegs across the nation fueled by racism and income equality – powder kegs supported by centuries of institutionalized racism, implicit bias, and police brutality.

 

For some Americans, police brutality is a recent development. In communities of color, police brutality is a constant reality and has always been so. Crime rates are dropping across the board, across all races, and yet police brutality has gone up. Militarization of the police has gone up. The taking of black lives by police has gone up. The incarceration of black lives by the justice system has gone up. Communities of color still maintain higher poverty rates than white communities. I wish we could honestly say all lives matter but the unfortunate reality is that all lives are not given equal consideration. Not in the United States. In the United States, the justice system, law enforcement, and many non-black Americans either implicitly or consciously place less value on black lives than they do on white lives, and this has always been the case. It is for that reason activists say “black lives matter” – because black lives should matter as much as all lives. What Baltimore and its coverage have shown us is that black lives are undervalued, black lives are seen as dangerous, and black lives are considered disposable. Until America is willing to have an honest and open discussion about racism, the equal application of the rule of law, income inequality, real equality of opportunity, and healing the wounds of the past we will continue to have more incidents like Baltimore and Ferguson. We will see more Trayvon Martins, Tamir Rices, Michael Browns, Walter Scotts, and Freddie Grays. I will leave y’all with a quote by El Hajj El Shabazz (Malcolm X):

 

“If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.”