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.

 

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.