Dispatches from the Race War. Tim Wise
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same was true with the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. Most black folks agreed with O.J.’s acquittal (even though many believed he was guilty), because the racist history of the lead investigator set off alarm bells about planted evidence and misconduct by the LAPD. While most whites thought such concerns irrational, black suspicions were borne out a few years later when the Ramparts Division scandal broke, during which it was revealed that LAPD officers had engaged in a pattern of evidence-planting and fraud to procure convictions. In other words, systemic abuse by law enforcement, about which black America is all too aware, is the cause of black suspicion in cases like that of Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, or, for that matter, Mark Fuhrman and O.J. Simpson. Solve the first, and you won’t need to worry much about the second.
For far too many of us, our only angst is directed at people of color. It is their feelings about cops we can’t abide, and their demands that their lives matter and ought not to be snuffed as readily as they often are, that set us on edge. Yet if we’re having a hard time dealing with how people of color feel about the system, maybe we should consider how much harder a time they are having living with it. Their perceptions are rooted in their experience. If we would like for the perception gap to be narrowed, the experiential one must be closed first.
Black America knows that black males are far more likely than white males to be killed by police, even when unarmed and posing no threat to the officer, solely because they are perceived as dangerous in ways white men are not. They know that white folks can parade around with guns in public places—real ones, unlike the toy possessed by Tamir Rice or the air rifle held by John Crawford—and not be shot, tased, or abused by officers.
They know that a white man can point his weapon at officers, refuse to drop it when told to do so, and even demand that the officers “drop their fucking guns,” as happened last year in New Orleans and still remain a breathing carbon-based life form. They know that a white guy can shoot at cops with a BB gun and not be violently beaten or killed for his actions, as happened in Concord, New Hampshire, last year. They know white guys can shoot up a Walmart, as happened recently in Idaho, and be taken into custody without injury; or point a gun at firefighters in Phoenix and not get shot when the cops arrive. They know that a white man like Cliven Bundy can hold law enforcement officers at bay with the help of his family and scores of supporters, who point weapons at federal agents and threaten to kill them, and not be shot or arrested.
Black America knows that white supremacy among police, whether or not it animated the actions of Darren Wilson that day in Ferguson, is pervasive and always has been, no matter how little white America may believe it. They know from the recent cases in which white officers were exposed for sending around racist e-mails, videos, or text messages, as in Florida, San Francisco, or, for that matter, in Ferguson—or posting racist updates on their Facebook walls in dozens of cases exposed across the country. They know it from the way police manage to justify any killing of a person of color, even blaming a 12-year-old like Tamir Rice for his death at the hands of a Cleveland officer who was previously found unfit for service.
In short, to be black in America is to have a highly sensitive racism detector, not because one is irrational but because one’s life so often depends on it. It is to have little choice but to see the patterns in the incidents that white America would prefer to see as isolated. It is to have little choice but to consume the red pill (to borrow imagery from The Matrix), so as to see what’s going on, even as white folks remain tethered to a blue pill IV drip, the reliance on which renders us impervious to the truth.
If that red pill occasionally shows its consumers an image that isn’t entirely accurate, that doesn’t change the fact that it generally provides insights far more profound than those afforded the rest of us. Rather than bashing black people for seeing the connections and presuming them present, perhaps we would do well to remove the blue pill IV and substitute the red for a while. Maybe then we could begin to see what folks of color see. Perhaps then we could understand their rage. At the very least, perhaps we could manage to be a little less smug about the exoneration of an officer who, whatever his crime or lack thereof, still took a young man’s life.
As a nation, the eyes of our whites are misleading us.
Time for some new lenses.
II.
TRUMPISM AND THE POLITICS OF PREJUDICE
FOR EIGHT YEARS, it seemed as though those of us who write and speak about race had one job: to convince white people that racism and racial division in the United States were still problems. Or instead, that they were problems neither created by Barack Obama nor solved by him. Although presumptions of post-raciality tended to temper over his eight years in office—as one might expect, given the racial flashpoints mentioned in the previous section’s essays—as reality set in, a new white narrative emerged. Yes, racial division was a problem, but now it was one made worse by Obama himself. He is the one who divided us.
He inserted himself into the Henry Louis Gates debacle in Cambridge. He said that if he had a son, he might have looked like Trayvon Martin. He initiated consent decrees against police departments with histories of racist abuse and misconduct, meaning he had taken the side of the protesters in places like Ferguson. His first attorney general, Eric Holder, accused Americans of being cowards when it came to talking honestly about race, and white people heard Holder blame them, even though he had never specified the color of those lacking courage.
It was a strange argument, especially coming from many of the same people who had proclaimed his election as proof that racism was dead. After all, if Obama had killed racism by having won the presidency, then it must have existed before him. He could not be its author. But inconsistency aside, this became the new mantra: Obama was the divider-in-chief. So naturally, outraged by his divisiveness, white people would be looking for a unifier, someone to bring us together and bind up the wounds of a nation torn apart by the likes of its first black president, right?
No, not right. Not right at all. Quite the opposite. White America, instead, returned to type, exceptions duly noted, with an overwhelming majority opting to throw their support behind a has-been reality television character and mediocre real estate developer, Donald Trump. Though he posed as a champion of the working class, Trump’s actual history with working people was one of fraud and deceit: failing to pay subcontractors and driving them to the brink of destitution in the hopes of procuring a settlement in court for their work. But his treatment of working-class folks didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he hated the right people: Muslims and immigrants from Mexico, first and foremost.
He began his campaign with a harangue about Mexican immigrants being rapists and drug dealers, though some might be “good people.” He went on to insist that a Mexican American judge overseeing the lawsuit against his phony and fraudulent “University” couldn’t be fair-minded precisely because of his ethnicity. He bragged about sexual assault, made fun of persons with disabilities, called for a complete shutdown of Muslim migration to the U.S., and promised to erect a wall on the nation’s southern border and somehow force Mexico to pay for it.
It was this combination of bigoted and hateful stances that propelled him to victory. Ultimately his voters either voted for him because of these things or, at the very least, were willing to say that racism, xenophobia, sexism, and assorted bigotries were not deal-breakers for them. Either way, the result was the elevation to the presidency of a man who traffics in prejudice to gain and keep power. That is all Trumpism is about.
Apparently, millions of white Americans were shocked by the outcome on election day 2016. I was not. Surprised? Oh, sure, I didn’t actually think Trump was going to win. But my expectations that he would lose were never rooted in a faith that the American people, and particularly white folks, would reject the politics of prejudice itself. I figured Hillary Clinton would win solely based on get-out-the-vote efforts and the weight of Trump’s self-inflicted wounds as a clearly execrable human being. But I always knew white people were capable of this. To not know that would be to ignore the entirety of U.S. history, and that of some other ostensibly white nations, which have done this and a whole lot worse.
After the dust had settled,