“When men oppress their fellow men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for the oppression.”
-Frederick Douglas
In 2017, answering to calls for the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee in Virginia, a mob of white men marched through Charlottesville. Armed with guns, shields, sticks, and torches, and wearing swastikas, confederate flags, and MAGA hats, they chanted nazi slogans like “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us”. The demonstration quickly turned violent, culminating in a white nationalist driving his car into a crowd of counter-protestors. While the group who marched in Charlottesville represent an extreme fringe of the conservative movement, there exist over 700 confederate monuments across the country, and widespread resistance to the idea of removing them.
It’s important to ask the questions of why these monuments were erected several decades after the Confederacy lost the civil war, what is motivating people to staunchly defend their removal, and why that defense manifests itself in racist and violent ways. Looking at the totality of American history, a troubling pattern emerges of white people refusing to face their past atrocities, developing an irrational fear of their victims, and using that fear to justify more atrocities. This cycle of violence is fueled by false hero narratives and White America’s tendency to lash out against those who challenge them.
The confederate monuments were erected in service to a false narrative that the Confederacy had fought a noble battle against big government, masking the reality that they had committed treason against their country in an effort to continue slavery. This allowed for an irrational fear of black people taking over the country and enslaving whites, triggering a wave of racial terrorism that lasted for decades. Fast forward to 2018, and several new layers have been added to the false narrative, and white people are still being ruled by irrational fear of people of color. Black people rightfully want monuments of domestic terrorists removed because they are a reminder of the very real pain they have endured, but white people are perceiving it as an attack on their culture and lashing out. 150 years after the abolition of American slavery, everything from the mass incarceration of black people, to the election of Donald Trump, to the march in Charlottesville, serve as clear evidence that our nation is still grappling with its legacy.
The conservative line of thought states that we need to stop living in the past and take responsibility for ourselves in the present. In reality, the story of the past 150 years has been black people trying to move on from the past and partake in the American dream, but being thwarted by whites who are clinging to a false narrative and acting on unfounded fears. It’s true that slavery has been a fact of human civilization for thousands of years, and it is unfair to cast white Americans today as villains based on the crimes of previous generations. However, this is not what is preventing us from moving forward. To the contrary, it is the villainization of the oppressed and the fear that they will prove to be just as barbaric as their oppressors if given power that is keeping us stuck in a cycle of racism and violence. No amount of violence will ever allow White America to live free from fear of retribution, as they will continue to be unable to look in the mirror without seeing a monster that they must protect themselves from by any means necessary. Only by confronting and atoning for the past can we heal our psychological wounds and cure ourselves of the disease of racism.
Indeed, slavery can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece, when Aristotle invented “climate theory” and reasoned that people from the moderate climate from Greece were superior to and had a right of dominion over inferior people from the extreme climates of Africa and Eastern Europe. When the Roman Empire rose to power, they continued the practice of slavery, subjecting those they deemed inferior to forced hard labor while using corporal punishment to keep them in line. The Romans took this depravity to another level by forcing slaves to fight each other to the death to entertain enormous crowds of people. Mobs of Romans would pack the coliseum to its capacity of 50,000 to witness the spectacle, and arenas all over Rome hosted gladiator events to great fanfare. While the Roman Empire was incredibly advanced in many ways, the decadence, bloodthirstiness, and depraved brutality of many of their practices revealed a society that was deeply sick.
Rome was shook to its core when the gladiator champion Spartacus led one of the most notorious slave revolts in history. Gladiators were both revered as noble warriors and looked down upon as dumb brutes in Roman culture, but when they organized and fought back in an effort to gain their freedom, Romans projected all their worst characteristics onto the rebelling Gladiators. While Spartacus tried to lead his slave army to freedom outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, they were perceived as threats to the Roman way of life and mercilessly hunted down and slaughtered. When the slave revolt was eventually put down, the Romans crucified six thousand people in an effort to discourage future uprisings. To keep the slaves they claimed to be savages in line, they had committed an act of savagery that went well beyond any act of violence committed by Spartacus or his men. This is the same pattern that would play out many times in America between the white ruling class and the black underclass: the powerful justifying unfathomable cruelty by imagining that they will one day become the victims of their own atrocities.
I. Nat Turner & Slave Revolts
“Let it never be forgotten, that our negroes are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, if they could, become destroyers of our race”
-Charleston Times editor Edwin Clifford Holland
When Americans won the Revolutionary War and claimed their independence from Britain, it was hailed as a triumph of justice. No longer burdened by the taxation of their colonizer, the American economy thrived. With slave labor serving as the backbone for this economy, slave populations boomed, and fear of insurrection grew. While American suffering due to British colonialism paled in comparison to the horrors of intergenerational chattel slavery, the injustice they were perpetrating upon black people was barely registering upon the American consciousness. When black slaves embarked on harrowing voyages in attempts to gain their freedom peacefully through escape, they were were met with slave patrols and torturous repercussions when caught. If they attempted to fight back, the penalties would be even harsher.
In 1804, the Haitian revolution came to a close as slaves rose up, overthrew their oppressors, and declared their Independence from France. The Americans, who had declared their independence from Britain just thirty years prior, did not see the Haitian revolution as another triumph of justice, but as a cause for concern. Multiple slave rebellions had been put down in America and the idea of black people taking over was causing widespread fear. Despite their own recent battle to gain freedom, Americans refused to identify with African slaves’ struggle for liberation. Instead of recognizing the fundamental injustice they were perpetrating, they instead adopted more restrictive slave codes and more brutal punishments. While slavery had been originally justified based on the racist idea that black people were naturally docile and unintelligent, they were now being treated like cunning savages intent on bloody revenge. Restrictive slave codes were adopted, prohibiting the education of blacks and limiting their freedom of movement to prevent them from organizing. Participants of rebellions were tortured and killed, and their leaders were publicly hung.
Things reached a fever pitch after the 1821 rebellion led by Nat Turner, a slave who had been groomed as a preacher to pacify other slaves. When Turner used his prowess as a speaker to organize a rebellion that would result in the deaths of more than fifty enslavers over the period of two days, white Americans responded in much the same way as the Romans did to Spartacus’ rebellion. The military was summoned to put down the rebellion, and all who participated were executed, including Turner, who was hung and skinned. False rumors spread about the formation of a slave army in North Carolina, and white hysteria ensued. Angry mobs killed nearly 200 black slaves who had nothing to do with the rebellion over the next two weeks before slaveowners who didn’t want to lose any more property convinced the Virginia state militia to issue an order to end the vigilante justice.
Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison argued that these kind of violent rebellions were inevitable as long as the barbaric practice of slavery continued, but his voice was drowned out by white people who could not look themselves squarely in the mirror. Slave states investigated their options going forward, including sending all the slaves back to Africa, but ultimately decided to double down on the practice and ratchet up the cruelty. Their hesitancy towards continuing slavery had little to do with their recognition of slaves’ humanity, but was instead rooted in fear of the imagined barbarism of black people. They were incapable of empathizing with the slaves’ natural inclination to fight for their freedom, as they were blinded by the reflection of their own monstrosity. This misplaced fear, combined with greed, would ultimately motivate the Southern states to form the Confederacy and fight the bloodiest war in American history in an attempt to continue the practice of slavery.
II. Birth of a Nation & Emmet Till
“No nation, savage or civilized, save only the United States of America, has confessed its inability to protect its women save by hanging, shooting, and burning alleged offenders.”
-Ida B Wells
One of the most horrific aspects of American slavery was the frequent rapings that black women endured. Slaveowners justified this practice with the racist idea that black women were naturally promiscuous, but it was in fact the white men who couldn’t help themselves. When slavery was abolished, white men projected their own barbaric behavior onto freed black men and vowed to protect white women from sexual assault. There was no precedent for such fear of black men raping white women except for the epidemic of rape that white men had inflicted upon black women during slavery.
Propaganda and junk science claiming that black men were hyper-sexual and incapable of resisting their urges to rape white women began to circulate, encouraging the practice of lynching. One of the most effective pieces of propaganda was D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915. The film depicts an imaginary era where white people lived under the reign of Black supremacists and climaxes with a white actor in blackface pursuing a terrified white woman into the woods where she leaps to her death. In response, the victim’s brother assembles a posse of Klansmen to find and lynch the black rapist, and the Klan heroically regains control of southern society. Birth of a Nation was the nation’s highest grossing film for two decades, and was a key factor in the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan.
According to a study by the Equal Justice Initiative, more than 4000 people of color were lynched by whites between 1877 and 1950. While a variety of alleged crimes could lead to a lynching, black men being accused of harassing or raping a white woman was among the most common. In reality, white women were raped much more often by white men than black men, but violent justice was only deemed necessary when black men stood accused. No criminal trial would be carried out and no evidence need be produced — it was mob justice based on the hysteria of white people projecting their own behavior onto black men who only wanted to peacefully enjoy their newfound freedom. Large crowds that included women and children would assemble and cheer as black men were tortured and lynched, and pieces of the victims’ bodies would be cut off and handed out as souvenirs. Despite the violence being carried out in public, police made no attempt to make arrests, and the crowds of participants claimed to have seen nothing. Much like the Romans watching gladiators, a society of people so sick that they tortured and hung people for entertainment was labeling their victims as savages.
In one particularly gruesome case, Emmett Till, a 14-year old black teenager was accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. In retaliation, the woman’s husband and his brother kidnapped Till, gouged out his eye and beat him to the point that his face was unrecognizable before shooting him in the head. Till’s mother insisted on an open-coffin funeral to showcase the brutality for the world to see, but the men who attacked Till were not convicted of any charges. Many years later, Carolyn Bryant, the woman who had claimed Till harassed her, admitted she had fabricated the story and the boy had done nothing wrong. Ultimately, Till was but one of many innocent black men who would face horrible consequences due to white men being unable to face their own sins and instead projecting their barbarism onto the very people they were oppressing.
III. Black Wallstreet & Race Riots
“I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the n- away from the polls; if you don’t understand what that means you are just plain dumb.”
-US Senator Theodore Bilbo
On May 30, 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 19-year old black shoeshiner Dick Rowland ended up alone with Sarah Page, a white 17-year old elevator operator. Due to the only colored restroom being located in the top floor of the Drexel building, Rowland had no choice but to use this elevator. The exact details of what happened in the elevator is unknown, but Page let out a scream and Rowland panicked and ran. In all likelihood, he merely alarmed her by stepping on her foot or bumping into her, and ran in a panic due to the number of black men who were lynched for such transgressions. Rowland would be arrested and charged with attempting to assault a white girl, but a white mob demanded that the police turn him over so they could administer their own brand of justice.
The nearby town of Greenwood was the nation’s most prosperous black community. Inhabited by many successful black businessmen, the town established its own newspapers, theaters, shops, and professional offices and was sometimes referred to as Black Wallstreet. Fearing that Rowland would be dragged out of jail and lynched, a group of black men from Greenwood armed themselves and marched to the Tulsa courthouse to protect Rowland from a white mob that had reached the size of 2000 people by night. When a white man approached a black World War I Veteran, called him the N-word, and asked what he was doing with a pistol, the veteran replied he would use it if he needed to. When the white man attempted to take the gun away, a shot rang out and America’s worst race riot began.
A gunfight ensued in the courthouse, and the outnumbered blacks fled to Greenwood. The incident was immediately perceived as “Negro uprising” by the Tulsa police department, who deputized scores of whites on the spot. A mob of 10,000 whites descended upon Greenwood, indiscriminately murdering its residents and burning the town to the ground. When the dust had settled, approximately six thousand black Greenwood residents had been arrested, and 35 city blocks laid in charred ruins. Tulsa Police Chief John Gustafson was convicted by a grand jury of neglecting his duty, but neither he nor any of the white participants in the riot served a day in jail. Eighty years later, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission investigated and issued a report estimating that between 75 and 300 were killed and 1,256 homes were burned, as well as schools, churches, office buildings, a hospital and a library.
When a black community attempted to protect one of their own from the violence stemming from the unprecedented fear of black men raping white women, they became the victims of the unprecedented fear of a “Negro uprising”. The Tulsa riot would be one of many race riots that occurred as a result of black people attempting to exercise their rights as free citizens. Time and time again, black people were taught that the price of defending themselves from lynching and terrorism would be more extensive mob violence, and that the US government would not protect them or prosecute the offenders. This attitude was based on the preposterous fear that if black people were allowed to build prosperous communities and defend themselves, they would one day take over and exact revenge upon their white oppressors. Imagining themselves one day becoming the victims of the very atrocities they committed, white Americans continued their reign of terror over a group of people who, after so many years of suffering, were much more interested in living in peace than stirring up further conflict.
In 1951, Harvey Clark, a black bus driver and air force veteran rented a home in the all-white town of Cicero, Illinois. He was met with death threats from the local police chief and constant harassment from the community. When he refused to move his wife and two children from the building, 4000 whites attacked the apartment building, burning all the families belongings and doing great damage to the building. 118 rioters were arrested, but none were indicted by the Cook County grand jury, which brought charges of inciting a riot and conspiring to lower property values against Clark, his real estate agent, his landlord and their attorneys.
The Cicero race riot was far from an isolated incident, but part of a larger pattern of white hysteria about the prospect of blacks moving into their neighborhoods. Due to a system of legal and extra-legal methods of discrimination, black people were largely confined to ghettos that were underfunded and lacking in basic services. Naturally, successful black people wanted to partake in the American dream and live in nicer white neighborhoods, but they were seen as an infestation and a threat to their way of life. A group of people who had gatherings to torture and hang people was casting their victims as naturally violent people who would disrupt their peaceful way of life. There was no history of black people terrorizing white neighborhoods, meaning the real source of their fear must have been the reflection of their own savagery.
Nationwide, black people attempted to break the wall of segregation and were met with harassment, arrest, and much worse. To this day, our societies remain heavily segregated, and black people continue to feel unsafe in white neighborhoods due to police terrorism. Just as the government failed to punish the murderous rioters during Jim Crow, the government refuses to hold police accountable for the murder and mistreatment of black people today. While there is less overt housing discrimination today than in the past, we remain heavily segregated due to the economic effects of locking black people out of the housing market for so many generations, a failure of the government to encourage desegregation and address the housing needs of black people, and the continuing psychological tension between two groups with an unresolved history of one-sided violence.
Sick of their mistreatment but afraid to physically fight back, black people tried to exercise their electoral power, but they were thwarted there as well. Poll taxes, literacy tests, outright terrorism, and a great many underhanded legislative tricks were used to suppress the black vote. Blacks were poor due to government policy, but were unable to vote for change due to poll taxes that made voting an unaffordable luxury for many black families. For centuries, black people had been prohibited from learning to read and write, and the government was continuing to stifle their ability to get a quality education, yet they were required to pass literacy tests to secure the right to vote for politicians who would address their lack of educational opprtunities. Worse yet, the literacy tests were purposefully biased and there was no oversight in the grading of them. Many black people who could read and write perfectly failed their literacy tests because of an inability to answer absurd questions designed to make them fail. Politicians and other prominent individuals called for black people to pay a physical price for attempting to vote, and the Ku Klux Klan answered the call while the government did almost nothing to protect its black citizens or punish their assailants. To this day, we see voter suppression in the form of ID laws, voter roll purges, polling place closures, and felony disenfranchisement.
In every instance — race riots, housing discrimination, voter suppression — white people were being driven by a fear, but not of anything that black people had shown themselves to be motivated to do. Whites felt the need to act preemptively because they could only assume that black people would be just as brutal and unjust as them if allowed to be in power. To keep them out of power, they would continue to commit the monstrous acts they were afraid of becoming the victims of.
IV. Mass Incarceration & The Attica Rebellion
“If there are any lives lost in here, and if a massacre takes place…in the final analysis the world will know that the animals were not in here, but outside running the system and the government”
-Attica Inmate Roger Champen
For six hours, prisoner Frank Smith lay naked and spread-eagled on a table with his legs hanging off the side and a football tucked under his chin. Officers told him that if he let the ball drop, they would shoot him, so he lay there for hours with his legs numb, trying not to move as officers struck him in the testicles, dumped lit cigarettes and used shell casings on his body, and spit and shouted threats at him. Smith had been falsely accused of the completely fabricated charge of castrating one of the guards he and his fellow inmates had taken hostage, and was being punished for his savagery. In reality, no hostage had been castrated and Smith had been in charge of security for the hostages and seen to it that no harm came to them at the hands of any prisoner. When he was finally let off the table, he was forced to walk his way through multiple gauntlets of dozens of officers who beat him with batons and ax handles while kicking him and yelling racial slurs. He was finally allowed to enter his cell, where they continued to beat him and call him racial slurs until they eventually left him cold and naked on the concrete floor with no medical treatment for his many injuries.
Smith had landed in Attica correctional facility for the crime of robbing a dice game in his segregated black neighborhood, and was subjected to the inhumane conditions that plagued prisons across the nation. The prison population was made up of mostly black and brown men who were stuffed into overcrowded cells, forced to work hard labor jobs under dismal conditions for token pay, regularly beaten and abuses by guards, underfed, deprived of basic medical care, left to rot in solitary confinement for inordinate period of time, and denied constitutional rights. The prisoners began to organize, with a group of leaders forming the Attica Liberation Faction and sending the following letter to NY Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Penal Commissioner Russell Oswald:
“Dear Sir, Enclosed is a copy of our manifesto of demands. We find it necessary to forward you a copy in order for you to be aware of our needs and the need for prison reform. We hope that the department don’t cause us any hardships in the future because we are informing you of prison conditions. We are doing this in a democratic manner; and we do hope that you will aide us.”
“We the inmates of Attica prison have come to recognize that because of our posture as prisoners and branded character as alleged criminals, the administration and prison employees no longer consider or respect us as human beings but rather as domesticated animals selected to do their bidding and slave labor and furnished as a personal whipping dog for their sadistic psychopathic hate.”
The letter went on to list 28 demands that included parole reform, religious freedom, improvements to the working and living conditions, freedom to educate themselves, changes to visitation rules, improved medical care, and more sanitary conditions. The prisoners knew some of the loftier demands were unlikely to be met, but others could be easily fixed if the Governor or Commissioner would show them just a little bit of empathy. The letter signed off with “These demands are being presented to you. There is no strike of any kind to protest these demands. We are trying to do this in a democratic fashion.”
Oswald began to correspond with the Attica Liberation Faction, asking them to be patient while promising to thoroughly consider their demands. As the correspondence dragged on, Oswald failed to meet even the most basic demands, such as providing clean trays in the mess hall and allowing more than one shower a week during the hot summer months. Meanwhile, the prison staff had begun to punish prisoners for their activism with violent reprisals, segregation, solitary confinement, frequent cell searches, and confiscation of reading and writing materials. Tensions escalated throughout the summer until it exploded on September 9, 1971, and the prisoners used a moment of chaos to take control of the prison and take 39 prison employees hostage. Showing their humanity, the prisoners turned over several guards who had been injured in the initial uprising and provided the remaining hostages with the best treatment possible under the circumstances. To make sure the hostages stayed safe, leaders of the rebellion recruited Frank Smith, one of the prison’s biggest, strongest and most well-respected inmates, to take charge of a detail of bodyguards for the hostages. The prisoners intended to negotiate a peaceful end to the rebellion, offering to turn over the hostages and surrender in exchange for the satisfaction of some of their original demands and a guarantee that they would not face further retaliation in the aftermath.
This event took place within a political climate where the Black Panthers, who merely tried to protect their communities from white terrorism, were being painted as the most dangerous people in the country and a serious threat to national security. As usual, false narratives and white fear were driving the vilification of people who merely wanted to live free from racial terrorism while venerating the real perpetrators. The Attica prisoners, many of whom were in prison for minor non-violent offenses, should have been sympathetic figures — they had endured human rights abuses and were pleading for an end to the abuse while refusing to lower themselves to the level of their tormentors. However, the reaction of the state and local white residents was rooted in fear and manifested in rage. The prisoners were painted as dangerous revolutionaries who had been radicalized by the Black Panthers, and needed to be taught a lesson. The state carried out bad faith negotiations for four days before unleashing a brutal assault on the prison without issuing a final ultimatum so the prisoners could have a chance to surrender peacefully.
The re-taking of Attica would turn out to be one of the darkest chapters in American history. Prior to the assault, guns were distributed to officers without keeping any record, and the commanding officer, Major Monahan, instructed his men, who were already wearing gas masks, to remove their name badges. It had been decided that caving in to the demands of the prisoners was out of the question, as they intended to send a much more brutal message, and had intentionally made themselves unrecognizable to avoid being held accountable afterward.
Despite the fact that the inmates didnt possess a single firearm and were immediately incapacitated by the large amounts of powerful tear gas dumped on the yard where they were all assembled, the police went in guns blazing — some of them armed with shotguns and unjacketed bullets that had been banned in the Geneva convention — resulting in the deaths of 33 prisoners and 9 hostages. Some of those killed were clearly executed after surrender, and many more prisoners sustained serious injuries. Once the prison was retaken, the officers proceeded to mercilessly beat and torture the prisoners. No medical response was planned in coordination with the assault, and injured prisoners were denied medical treatment — instead thrown naked and bleeding into overcrowded cells where guards taunted them with racial slurs. Scores of dazed and injured prisoners were forced to strip and crawl through gauntlets of officers who beat them with blunt objects. Intense abuse would continue for days and weeks after the revolt was over, and some prisoners continued to suffer from reprisals for years after. Officers attempted to beat and coerce false confessions out of inmates, and a massive campaign of misinformation was launched to distract from and justify the atrocities that had been committed. Fabrications like Smith castrating a hostage were used to shape a false narrative that promoted white fear and rationalize the continuation of mass incarceration. A long legal battle ensued and much of the lies and brutality were exposed, but ultimately no one involved in the assault ever faced justice for their crimes against humanity. No officers or government officials went to jail and the Governor who approved the assault, Nelson Rockefeller, went on to serve as Vice President under Gerald Ford.
Ultimately, it had been decided that prisoners demanding human rights was a threat to civilized white society. The same group of people who had lynched, terrorized and thrown black people into prisons with horrible living conditions had decided that they had the moral impetus to teach the inmates a brutal lesson about their place in society. Once again, their fears of the prisoners were not based on actual instances of black people terrorizing whites, and could only have been the result of whites fearing that blacks would one day treat them in the same brutal fashion if they were not violently held in check.
President Lyndon B Johnson’s passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act 1965 served as a pair body blows to white supremacist organizations. The government had finally stepped in and ratified a vast piece of legislation that would prevent them from continuing many of their discriminatory practices and send them a message that times were changing. However, the past was never properly confronted, and white people considered to suffer from the same fear of black retribution. As they adapted to new times, white supremacists found new ways to manifest their fear into violent oppression.
One of the most consequential practices adopted in the aftermath of the civil rights movement was mass incarceration. Due to the language of the 13th amendment, blacks could be sentenced to slavery. Following through on a successful campaign of fear-mongering rhetoric, President Richard Nixon kicked off a war on drugs that mandated the police and courts to throw black people in prison at unprecedented rates. As a result, many black people lost their newly-guaranteed right to vote and ended up providing free labor for wealthy whites in much the same way as their ancestors.
The Attica rebellion took place a mere seven years after the passage of the civil rights act and just two years after the election of Nixon — a direct result of the white power structure’s countermeasures against the Civil Rights Movement. What should have been a watershed moment and pivot point away from mass incarceration only resulted in the continuation of repressive prison policy and over-policing of black communities.
In 2018, the practice of mass incarceration continues, with approximately 2.5 million people sitting in jails, prisons and detention centers on any given day. The USA has both the largest prison population and the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet. According to a study by the Sentencing Project, black people nationwide are incarcerated at a rate of more than five times that of whites — despite making up just 13% of the nation’s population, they make up 38% of the prison population. In contrast, whites make up 62% of the nation’s population, but only 35% of the prison population. Many studies have shown that black and white populations use drugs at very similar rates, yet blacks are many times more likely to be convicted of drug-related crimes, and receive longer sentences than whites when convicted of the exact same crimes. According to a study by the ACLU, people of color make up 43% of prisoners executed since 1976 and 55% of those currently awaiting execution. While whites make up approximately half of all murder victims, 80% of all capital punishment cases involve white victims.
In addition, black people often never make it to jail, as police frequently act as judge, jury and executioner. According to a study by Mapping Police Violence, police killed 1147 people in 2017, but only slightly over 100 officers are killed per year. Blacks are 3 times as likely as whites to be killed by police, and only 30% of black people killed by police are armed. In recent years, there have been several cases of black people being blatantly killed by police who faced no justice, prompting the start of the Black Lives Matter movement. Just like the Freedom Riders, Civil Rights Activists, Black Panthers, and Attica Brothers, BLM has been painted as an extremist group that must be heavily policed. Accordingly, peaceful BLM protests have been met with militarized police who beat, teargas and mass arrest activists who are only asking that we stop devaluing the lives of people based on their skin color. No matter how hard White America tries to spin a false narrative, the evidence that, 150 years after slavery, black lives are still being treated like they don’t matter, is everywhere.
Eric Garner issued his final words “I Can’t Breathe” as he was choked to death while being held down by a gang of police who had stopped him for selling loose cigarettes. Despite a bystander videotaping the entire incident, no criminal charges were filed against anyone involved, and the officer who administered the fatal chokehold was given a promotion to office duty with the NYPD, where he collects a six figure salary. Stephon Clark was shot in the back eight times in his grandparent’s backyard by officers responding to a vandalism call who mistook his cell phone for a gun, and charges have yet to be filed. 12-year old Tamir Rice was killed by police who shot him less than two seconds after arriving on scene. The officers claimed he pointed a toy gun at them and were exonerated of any wrongdoing. Three years after Rice died, police in a Baltimore corruption case would testify to being instructed to carry toy guns in their trunk to plant on people after they killed. Jason Stockley, who was recorded saying “I’m gonna kill this motherfucker, don’t you know it” while in pursuit of motorist Anthony Lamar Smith before executing Smith when he did pull over, was found not guilty of murder in 2017. Most recently, off-duty officer Amber Guyger walked into her neighbor Botham Jean’s home and gunned him down, claiming she thought he was an intruder in her apartment. Because of the long and continuing pattern of injustice, the expectations of any justice being delivered in the case against Guyger are low.
In the aftermath of the Guyger shooting, a search warrant was executed on Jean’s home and the media reported that marijuana was discovered in an obvious attempt at character assassination. Such has become par for the course in police shootings of blacks. The victim is painted as a dangerous criminal, the heroic cops state that they feared for their lives, and the justice system lets the killer walk free. Based on all the evidence, black people have far more reason to be afraid of police than vice versa — cops are armed and know they are likely to be exonerated if they kill black people, while blacks know they are likely to face capital punishment if they kill a cop. The white community, still consumed by fear of black people in 2018, ignores evidence and basic logic as they bend over backwards to rationalize the loss of black life. They still cannot look themselves squarely in the mirror without being scared by their own reflection, and the cycle of violence continues.
V. Immigration & White Genocide
“Our ancestors trounced an empire, tamed a continent, and triumphed over the worst evils in history. America is the greatest fighting force for peace, justice and freedom in the history of the world. We have become a lot stronger lately. We are not going to apologize for America.”
-President Donald J Trump
While the horrible treatment of African-Americans is our ongoing national sin, our original sin was stealing the land from Native Americans and committing genocide upon them. Because they didn’t keep Native Americans as slaves, whites are not reminded of their crimes against them as often as with black people, but the crime is still having an obvious effect on our national psyche. Just as we see white masses live in irrational fear of black people taking over the country and forcing them into slavery, they fear brown people from the south invading the country and committing white genocide.
It was chilling to watch Donald Trump rise to the presidency on a racist campaign where he called for the construction of a giant border wall, referred to Mexicans as rapists and murderers, and made southern border security into the top national security issue. The events that have transpired in the year and half since his election have been even more disturbing. Trump has referred to immigrants as “animals” and an “infestation” while inflating the ICE budget and instructing their agents to deport and detain undocumented immigrants at unprecedented rates. People who have lived here peacefully for decades are being picked up while at work, going to court, or dropping their kids off at school and shipped off with only the clothes on their back. In may 2018, Trump called for a zero-tolerance policy and the government ripped more than 2500 children away from parents at the Mexican border and detained them without making any plan of how to reunite the families. Despite a federal order for the Trump administration to reunite all five year old children within fourteen days, and all other minors within thirty days, nearly 500 children, 22 of whom are under five, remain separated three months later. Reports of child abuse in detention facilities have surfaced and the country has witnessed a total lack of oversight, transparency and accountability for the care of these children. Trump’s base, comprised of mostly white people who claim to believe in “family values”, support his cruel immigration stance, referring to undocumented immigrants as “illegals” who forfeited their human rights by attempting to cross the border.
While we have seen a clear escalation of anti-immigration rhetoric and policy under the Trump administration, the vilification of latinx immigrants in America is nothing new. In reality, both legal and undocumented latinx immigrants commit crime at lower rates than white citizens and make up a huge part of the workforce for low-paying, labor-intensive jobs like farming, construction and cooking. They pay taxes to the government, yet do not benefit from many of the privileges of citizenship. For their contributions to American society, whites label latinx immigrants as violent criminals who come to America to steal jobs and taxpayer dollars while voting illegally and terrorizing innocent white people. While this extreme fear of immigrants is not rooted in reality, it is nonetheless a very real sensation. As evidenced by Trump’s rhetoric about “taming the continent”, White America has largely failed to own up to its original sin and insists on viewing their ancestors as heroes. Accordingly, they are unable to see the humanity of the people their ancestors slaughtered for the land all Americans sit upon. But no matter how much they lie to themselves about their past, they cannot shake the psychological scars that come from the commission of evil. Instead of healing, the cycle of fear and violence continues in 2018, and immigrant families who came here looking to work hard and create a better life for their family are paying the price.
The same dynamic plays itself out in the form of refugee bans and Islamophobia. Many of the humanitarian crises across the globe are the result of American imperialism and endless wars, yet we refuse to take responsibility for our sins. America has inflicted incredible damage onto Muslim countries by funding authoritarian regimes, using propaganda to start wars for oil, and unleashing endless drone strikes, yet we see fit to widely label them as terrorists based on the actions of a minority of extremists. Innocent civilians who are suffering because of our foreign policies are painted as dangerous and kept out of our country in the name of national security. The political rhetoric of today about “strong borders”, “law and order” and defending the religious freedom of christians is nothing but a dog-whistle to whites that their respectable way of life is under attack and must be defended. Consumed by fear and stubbornly insisting on seeing themselves as righteous, white Americans feed the sickness within themselves and add to considerable amount of blood already on their hands by voting for more violently racist policies.
As stated by Martin Luther King, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” We cannot change the past, but we are capable of putting it behind us by finally facing it. By building a society upon a foundation of genocide, slavery, racial terrorism, and imperialism, we made ourselves sick from within. This toxic energy can be released in a healthy manner for those willing to take an honest look in the mirror, but those who insist on living in an alternate reality will continue to be haunted by the lingering shadow of their own monstrosity.
