When
a society marginalizes and demonizes a segment of its population, and
basically leaves it to rot at the bottom of the heap, is it any
surprise that once in while, some of those people will respond by
saying, "Fuck you!" and grabbing some lawless profit, some
loot, in a carnival of violent redistribution? I'm surprised it
doesn't happen more often. People are making a big deal of the
characterization of the Baltimore rioters and looters as "thugs."
But being that we're talking about inner city Baltimore, and assuming
inner city Baltimore is akin to the inner city Southern California
I'm familiar with, some percentage of the rioters and looters surely
were "thugs" in the sense of inner city gang member type
"criminal toughs," people willing to use force or the
threat of force to their advantage. Some of the rioters and
looters might proudly identify as thugs – some gang members do.
Anyway, rather than talk about the word I want to talk about the
people. Inner city gang members and "thugs" are a half-rung
above prisoners in the social hierarchy. Apart from going to prison,
they have nothing to lose. Why wouldn't they take advantage of a
period of lawlessness to grab some loot? They're not claiming to be
churchboys. (And of course there are "churchboys" and
others growing up in the same neighborhoods who won't grab an
opportunity to riot and loot.) But the point is that even if they are
thugs, it doesn't justify the ugly us-versus-them attitude expressed
by public officials and all the "respectable" media
blatherers.
Gang
members and thugs in black and Hispanic inner city neighborhoods
aren't THE problem, they're OUR problem. THEY'RE US, AMERICA!
We're
talking about people who are the current inheritors of our society's
continuing legacy of hundreds of years of marginalization and
demonization and worse. Think about this: almost every white person
in America, if one of us is walking down the street and we see two
young black men coming down the sidewalk from the other direction,
toward us, we are instinctively 'alerted' to the possibility of a bad
experience – it's a tense moment, we are afraid something might
happen. (Some would feel apprehension if it was two young white men
approaching, but less than if they were black.) Many of us white
people feel terrible that we have these 'alerts,' but it is built
into us by the society we grew up in; it's programming. And just to
be clear, that programming, that 'alert' is a negative, race-based
stereotype built into and perpetuated by our society. In other words,
it's racism built into and perpetuated by our society. And
it's racism built into and perpetuated by our selves. Which is
not necessarily an easy thing to confront head-on.
Now if society is
doing that to us (the
non-black people), try to think about what it's doing to the
people being demonized. Some of them, not surprisingly, lash
out in violence once in a while. And some of them use violence more
often and in pursuit of lawless profit, figuring that when you have
nothing else, why not use your unasked-for ability to instill fear in
people to your advantage? And of course most crime victimizes the
people around them (the other black people in their neighborhoods),
but whenever a single black guy uses the fear-instilling stereotype
to intimidate or victimize a white person, that white person, having
been raised with the built-in fears of this 'type' of person will
instinctively attribute the person's acting in accord with the
stereotype not to the actual individual who chose to act that way,
but to the 'type' – scary black man – that society tells the
white person to fear. Unintentional racism is lived through the past
and into the future.
To
recognize the facts about racism throughout the history of our
society, right up to the present, is not a justification or excuse
for rioting and looting, but recognizing these facts is necessary to
understand what's going on in a deeper way than most white Americans
have been willing or able to do up to now. White America needs a kind
of deprogramming that includes acknowledging the many moral wrongs of
our past and the ways in which those wrongs of the past have
persisted through time into now. Meaning now is the time to do
something about the many moral wrongs of America's past.
