dimensionallava
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Do you think were living in a "post-racial America"?
I am tired of fighting racists: This is what white people tell you when you write about race in America - Salon.com
In the last week of December, a grand jury decided not to place the two police officers who were involved in the killing of Tamir Rice on trial for committing a crime. Since that decision, members of the White Right have continued and escalated their hateful attacks on Tamir Rice.
Case in point. One prominent right-wing “news” website features hundreds of comments about Tamir Rice. They include screeds such as:
“Until White America looks at Tamir Rice and sees their own children, there will be no racial justice in the U.S.” Much of “White America” raises their children so they in no way resemble Tamir Rice. We pay law enforcement to keep Tamir Rice at arm’s length.”
“Until White America looks at Tamir Rice and sees their own children…I think that when America looks at Tamir Rice and sees their own children, we will have the economic activity and life expectancy of Bangladesh, or some other impoverished hell-hole.”
“Comply – Don’t Die”
“When you have a whole (mostly) race who have no respect for authority of any type they are going to have issues when they come into contact with people in authority.”
“Whites don’t need cops to kill their children to understand, blacks kill white children enough as it is.”
“Tamir Rice was 12. He was also 5’7’’ 175#’s and walking around a playground in a high drug and crime area brandishing a realistic pellet gun. He was in the act of committing Agrievated Menacing by pointing a pistol in peoples faces. He then reached and puled his pistol when the police arrived. The evidence was incontrovertible. It was on video and he pulled his weapon. It is a tragedy, but his crack whore mother who lost custody of Tamir years ago will certainly gin up everything she can to fleece the citizens of Cleveland for as much money as she can get.”
“Probably saved numerous black lives by taking this stupid gang banger off the planet. Pray America wakes”
“Until Black America quits raising little thugs. No change.”
“To many in the black community, personal responsibility is to them like holy water and crosses are to a vampire.”
“Black Americans, The most racist and entitled people on the planet. Cut the dole, Kill the thugs and most of this will go away. Then start on the queers. Roll me back to the 50’s.”
Why would someone feel this way about a child killed by the police for the “crime” of playing with a toy gun in public in an “open carry” state where brandishing real weapons in public is not illegal? Where is the empathy, care, or concern about a 12-year-old boy whose life was stolen in a manner so cavalier and mean spirited that the police left him to bleed to death on the ground? Why so much hostility toward a person they do not know?
The extreme and ugly anti-black sentiments that are summoned in response to the killing of Tamir Rice are not isolated events. They have been seen in response to other black and brown victims of police thuggery as well. There is an important dynamic that often goes uncommented upon: white rage and racism are not actually being directed at the literal person of Tamir Rice.
The white collective imagination is instead focused on symbolism, what it imagines “blackness” to be, and how being “black”—and especially black and male—is a target for anger, fear and insecurity. The person Tamir Rice is not hated; the idea of Tamir Rice the “black male” is.
As I wrote about in an earlier essay on Tamir Rice, black people have historically and in the present been viewed as poisons in the (white) American body politic. In the not so recent past, such attitudes fueled white racial pogroms and the thousands of lynchings committed by white people against African-Americans.
Sociologist Ivan Evans makes the following observation in his book “Cultures of Violence”:
What Southern Protestantism bequeathed to the twentieth century was a moral justification for concentrating subsequent violence on African Americans. Like the revamped theology of Afrikaners after 1910, Lost Causism in the South provided the glue to hold together a demoralized white community that was divided by class, anxious about its women, and fearful of the social and political equality that would flow from the emancipation of African Americans.
This is a frightening insight, one that accurately describes America both in the postbellum era of lynching, as well as the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
I am tired of fighting racists: This is what white people tell you when you write about race in America - Salon.com