The Eyes of History
July 5, 2020
The majority of Trump supporters would probably go out of their way to make sure that a black person who walked into his or her all-white local bar felt comfortable. Aside from the 25% or so who are actual, proud white supremacists, the rest probably have friendly, helpful, and supportive relationships with black and brown co-workers. Some may even have the cliché black friend.
It’s understandable then that many would feel unfairly maligned by Adam Serwer’s must-read 2018 piece in the Atlantic, “The Cruelty is the Point” which compares the spirit of the cult of Trump with the smiling, joyful camaraderie of Jim Crow-era lynchings, as captured in the black-and-white photos exhibited in the Museum of African-American History and Culture. Trump supporters couldn’t possibly be like those ghoulish racists gloating over the torture and death of another human being, they believe, because, they’re good people. Kind to their neighbors. Active in their communities. Dedicated to their families.
But it’s highly likely that the smiling white people pictured gloating over charred and mutilated black bodies thought that they were good people too. Many were probably the first to help a neighbor mend a fence. Many were active in their churches. They probably cared deeply for their children. Most of their lives were not spent lynching, and were instead spent singing, laughing, joking, praying. They probably assumed their tickets to heaven were all but guaranteed. But their images are now emblematic of the worst of our nation’s history. They are our villains. And based on the sadistic cruelty they acted out, condoned and encouraged, they deserve that label.
Given that these images were captured in the South in the beginning of the 20th century, most of those pictured were probably exceedingly proud of their racism, but it’s not impossible to imagine that there were also some among them who would’ve proverbially clutched their pearls if someone accused them of being racist—people who would’ve pointed out their friendly interactions with black people, citing times they were kind to black children or black servants. And then they might’ve defended themselves by saying, “I don’t have a problem with blacks—I only have a problem with the ones who are criminals!”
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If you ever wondered what you would’ve done during the Jim Crow era…
Throughout his public life, Martin Luther King Jr. was accused by racist whites of being racist himself. The political leaders of the South were adamant that the act of identifying racism was in and of itself racist. They maintained that pretending racism didn’t exist was the most acceptable and least racist thing to do. The status quo was just fine, and anyone who said otherwise was stirring up hate.
Not much has changed in the past 60 years. In 2020, Conservatives’ approach to “solving” systemic racism is much like their approach to the Covid-19 pandemic (which disproportionately affects minority communities): refuse to identify it, pretend it’s not an issue, let it run rampant and unchecked, and then try to label it as something else when the bodies pile up.
Some of the people who say “All Lives Matter” may genuinely hope and believe that we’ve achieved equality in the United States. But most probably understand on some level that “All Lives Matter” is intentionally dismissive of black people’s pain and the history of injustices they’ve suffered and continue to suffer. Most understand that it’s basically telling black people to just f*ck off and stop complaining when members of their family or community are killed for no reason. And yet they say it anyway.
The following is just a small sample of how the modern incarnations of the “but I’m nice to the good black people!” lynching spectators use their social media platforms to condone and virtually take part in perpetuating violence against African Americans.
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“He got what was coming to him…”
In the wake of George Floyd’s horrific public lynching under the knee of a Minnesota cop and his accomplices in blue, opinions have been posted that the protests and outrage over Floyd’s murder are unwarranted or overblown because of his past brushes with the law. “He’s not a saint,” the reasoning goes, as if only saints should be spared horrific public executions.
A person can’t logically argue that protests demanding justice for George Floyd’s murder are unnecessary without also admitting that he/she thinks that Floyd’s excruciating public murder wasn’t really that bad. Most of these victim-blaming posts highly exaggerate or outright lie about Floyd’s past dealings with the law. Regardless, dredging up Floyd’s past arrest record in an attempt to justify his murder is a victim-blaming tactic that the smiling crowds at Jim Crow-era lynchings would understand all too well. This argument attempts to make the case that it’s okay for police officers to presume to have the moral imperative to size up a person, judge him or her as a career criminal and execute that person on the spot.
But, one has to wonder if they would think it was okay if that same “justice” were administered to white people. Since it almost never happens, it’s difficult to imagine, but the “All Lives Matter” people should try. Would it be equally justified for an officer to kill an Irish- or Italian-American from South Philly outside of a Wawa for a nuisance crime like passing a fake $20 bill or selling loose cigarettes, based on an assumption that he must’ve had previous brushes with the law? Or do they think officers should consider certain factors when they make that assessment as to who is more likely to have a criminal past, and therefore whose life, well…matters?
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The data diversion
Another way “non-racists” attempt to preemptively thwart any movement toward meaningful reform of our justice system is to use numbers showing that overall, cops kill a greater number of whites than blacks. This smokescreen tactic intentionally misses the point. These numbers conveniently fail to factor in that white people make up a larger percentage of the U.S. population, and they conveniently ignore other studies that indicate that percentage-wise, blacks are more than 2.5 - 3.5 times as likely to be killed by police.
But being dragged down that rabbit hole of competing numbers isn’t even relevant. No one is criticizing police officers for killing a violent person when the officer or innocent civilians are in genuine danger—no matter what the criminal’s race is. The heartbreak and outrage that fuels the Black Lives Matter movement stems from the number of innocent/unarmed/restrained/non-dangerous black people who are disproportionately killed based on a presumption of guilt, and whose grieving families rarely achieve any measure of justice in the court system.
If anyone wants to “prove” that whites and blacks are treated equally by the justice system, they need to cite examples of extreme police brutality against relatively innocent/unarmed whites. Who is the 12-year-old white boy killed for carrying a toy gun? Who is the white man shot by a skittish police officer after revealing—as he was supposed to—that he had a legal gun in the car? Who is the 25-year-old white man arrested by six officers for carrying a (legal-sized) knife, handcuffed and thrown in the back of a police vehicle to emerge with a life-ending broken back? Who is the 23-year-old white man on the autism spectrum killed by police and paramedics for wearing a ski mask, when he was only trying to walk home from the convenience store?
And even if the video evidence we’ve seen so far is wrong, and police officers are just as likely to make the snap judgment that a white person’s life doesn’t matter, wouldn’t all the reforms the Black Lives Matter movement is fighting for help white people too? If chokeholds are used with equal lethality on black and white suspects, then outlawing them would help white people too. If police are just as likely to barge into apartments in white neighborhoods in the middle of the night, guns a-blazing, and kill white women in their beds, then a ban on no-knock warrants would help whites too. If a militarized police force regularly sweeps white neighborhoods and funnels troubled white boys into the prison system, then an emphasis on neighborhood counseling and support services would help young white people onto the right path too. If blacks have ALREADY achieved equality in this country, then enacting these measures shouldn’t be any big deal to white people.
And yet many white people are outraged at the thought of any meaningful reform. Methinks they doth protest too much. One oft-quoted (but unattributed) saying is, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” The “All Lives Matter!” people are giving themselves away by vehemently opposing any measures that could lead to equal justice.
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The completely unrelated example of black crime
During the time when the Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests were in full swing, a number of people on Facebook posted articles detailing the tragic deaths of good officers who were killed in the line of duty during the past decade, with a particular emphasis on those who were killed by African American criminals. A Facebook “friend” of mine posted an article about a black teenager in Maryland who was just convicted of the vehicular homicide of a 29-year-old white female police officer a year earlier. Given that my “friend” posted this article accompanied only with the “thinking-face” emoji, and she doesn’t appear to have any connection to the case or the victim, I’m not 100% sure what her point was, but I have a few theories.
Perhaps she was trying to “own the libs” and declare herself the victor in an argument literally no one was making. “See! Black people kill cops too!” as if anyone had ever argued that black criminals were never responsible when cops were killed in the line of duty.
Worse, maybe she was trying to indicate that, if a black person killed a white officer in Maryland, that somehow made it reasonable and justifiable for a sadistic officer in Minneapolis to choke the life out of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes. By extension, this logic seems to say that the tragic killing of a young white officer in Maryland should give any officer anywhere in the country license to kill any black person in retaliation…as if, because of one good officer’s murder, black lives across the country really shouldn’t matter. The ghoulish smiling ghosts of the Jim Crow-era lynch mobs would be proud of this logic. After all, it didn’t really matter to them which blacks were killed.
But maybe (hopefully) that’s too harsh of an interpretation, and there was a different point to posting this article. Maybe it was meant to highlight how cops don’t protest (or RIOT!!!) when one of their own is killed in the line of duty. But if that was the point of posting the article, it immediately backfired, because the article states that the defendant—who was 16 at the time of the crime—is likely to face life in prison. His life is essentially over. What more justice could one possibly want for the slain officer, aside from a public lynching of the now-17-year-old? There’s no question that according to our justice system in the United States, Blue Lives Matter. As they should.
But imagine if the justice system were reversed, and we treated cop killers the same way we treat the cops and self-appointed vigilantes who kill unarmed/non-violent blacks? What if the 17-year-old defendant in this case had been found “not guilty” and released, based on the assumption that he must’ve had a legitimate fear for his life when he killed the officer? What if this kind of thing happened repeatedly, to the point where police officers could never trust the court system to fully honor a slain officer’s life? If this were the case, police across the nation would protest loudly and fiercely, demanding justice for their own. And they would be justified in doing so.
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We all need to be better
I’m only a couple of degrees of separation from Botham Jean, the black man murdered in his Dallas apartment by off-duty officer Amber Guyger in September 2018. A friend/former co-worker of mine was Jean’s colleague at PriceWaterhouse Coopers, and described him as a hardworking, big-hearted person who always made people smile. Guyger was convicted of Jean’s murder, which at least achieves some measure of justice. But, unlike the life-sentence likely to be received by the black 17-year-old convicted of killing a police officer in Maryland, Guyger received a mere ten-year sentence, which means she’s likely to be released in five. Meanwhile, Botham Jean will be dead forever.
Thinking about this case, I realize that, as liberal and anti-racist as I think I am, I still have some work to do when it comes to my own biases. When I first heard the bizarre story that Guyger had barged into Jean’s apartment thinking it was her own, my immediate thought was that she must’ve been drunk or on some kind of drugs/medication. From everything I’ve read since then, that wasn’t the case—Guyger was returning from a 13-hour work shift. But this forces me to face up to my own biases, because if Jean had been murdered by a black man—whether or not he was a cop—I’m sorry to admit that I most likely wouldn’t have mentally looked for an excuse for him, and I probably wouldn’t have been as willing to consider drunkenness/drug use something that would make him more sympathetic.
That brings us to one of the most recent (for now) examples of a black life instantly snuffed out by white officers, Rayshard Brooks, who was shot dead in Atlanta. His case isn’t as cut-and-dried as the case of Botham Jean, who was home eating ice cream when he was murdered. Brooks was drunk and resisting arrest, at which point he grabbed one of the officers’ tasers and fired it in their general direction as he was running away.
There’s little doubt that Brooks should’ve received jail time for that. A few months? A year? Two years? But certainly not death. And if white people like myself might be willing to consider inebriation as a reason for some kind of leniency in the case of Amber Guyger, a white woman who shot an innocent man dead in his own home, shouldn’t we also feel a certain measure of sympathy for a man who fired a non-lethal weapon in the direction of officers and harmed absolutely no one? At least enough sympathy to believe that he shouldn’t have died because of his drunken lapse of judgment?
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How do you want to be remembered?
In the future, if the Museum of African-American History and Culture features an exhibit on the George Floyd protests and this era in general, the exhibits may highlight the virulent white backlash against the idea that black people should be treated equally under the law. If the museum should choose to display internet memes and posts, they may include the victim-smearing lies and innuendos that “non-racist” white people posted in an attempt to make Floyd’s murder seem justified. They may include the blatant data manipulations that disingenuously attempt to sidestep the issue at hand and try to convince people that they shouldn’t believe their own eyes when it comes to recent public lynchings captured on video.
The white people whose social media profiles accompany those posts may be immortalized as people who are so fearful of losing their elevated status that they lash out at any attempt by African Americans to achieve equality. It won’t matter that these same white people may have been courteous to the black people they encountered as they went about their daily lives…if they were friendly to the black stranger who walked into their local pub…if they had a nice relationship with a black co-worker…or even if they had a black “friend.” Those examples of kindness or tolerance won’t give anyone a pass in the judgment of history, if those same people use their social media platforms to malign the victims of racial violence and continue to fight against measures to end systemic racism. In this age of ubiquitous video technology, we’re ALL witnesses to public lynchings. We can either be outraged and fight for accountability for the individuals and the racist systems responsible for these atrocities, or we can condone the cruelty and fight to maintain the status quo that allows it. Everyone needs to ask themselves which side of history they’d like to be on.
