Color
The tension between seeing individuals and seeing demographics
It may be asking too much to hope that American society is ever going to be completely colorblind. The history is probably just too thickly entangled.
It ought to be so simple. Most of us have personal associations, perhaps friendships, with people of other races, and it’s nowhere near the fore of our considerations in dealing with them. Why is it so difficult to extend that to a wider scope?
For that matter, why is it so difficult to surmount categorization of individual human beings in any way?
The rapper also implored activists to “know” what they’re “protesting about” before they advocate a cause. “It’s a bunch of facts that we think we know that we don’t know,” he said.
“I think when we see these situations, I think we also have to understand that we have to get very specific,” Wayne told rapper Fat Joe via Instagram Live, according to Rap Up. “We have to get so specific and what I mean by that, we have to stop viewing it from such a broad view, meaning we have to stop placing the blame on the whole force and the whole everybody of a certain race or everybody with a badge.”
“We have to get into who that person is,” he continued. “If we want to place the blame on anybody, it should be ourselves for not doing more than what we think we’re doing.”
But we’re not there. That’s the cold, hard truth.
The point at which we are, given what’s occurred this week, makes it impolitic to point out, at least for any white person to point out, that considerably more white Americans die from being shot by police than do black Americans. It renders one open to the charge of insensitivity, of minimizing what’s going on, even though it’s just objective information.
On the other hand, the question of how assumptive we can be in creating what-if scenarios is not, it seems to me, handily dispensed with. Bob Driscoll at The Dispatch makes a compelling case that George Floyd’s race had everything to do with his death, but there’s a lingering rejoinder that shouldn’t just fade away: Can we be sure?
. . . as a lawyer with some familiarity with the relevant law, I can tick through a list of high-profile police misconduct cases that weren’t prosecuted, as well as those that were, and find that most reached the “correct” result applying existing legal standards. On one very important level, “the system” worked in such cases—a criminal prosecution was or was not legally warranted. It is easy under such circumstances to look at unrest or even rioting in minority communities in response to a decision not to charge and wonder: “What are people complaining about? The legal outcome was correct!”
But the answer is simple, if troubling: The law, even applied correctly, doesn’t remedy what we know is wrong. We can hope that the George Floyd killing can provide some insight into the feeling of frustration in many minority communities surrounding policing issues, because we can see, or at least sense, the depth of the problem. Assuming the system properly tries and convicts the kneeling officer of some serious offense, will you feel any better about George Floyd’s death? I won’t. As a lawyer, I can easily analyze the narrow question of whether one officer’s conduct was legal. But that analysis is independent of the uncomfortable truth that it is hard to imagine that George Floyd wouldn’t be alive if he were white. That truth is one that our society, our culture, all of us, not just our law enforcement officers, must confront. Even if the legal system convicts one officer of one crime, that does not relieve us of our responsibility to confront our country’s truth about race. We sense that some responsibility—not legal responsibility, mind you, but something else—rests with all of us when we know, just know, that our society has shaped our law enforcement’s view of black men, black men’s view of law enforcement, and has further shaped the individuals involved through millions of encounters, presumptions, fears, and interactions that combine to make the nightmare on the video spring to life.
It is impossible to conclude that even a fully functioning and just legal system that produces the legally correct results can soothe the discomfort felt watching George Floyd stop moving before our eyes. Recognizing that law doesn’t contain all the answers should help us understand why, in those instances where that same legal system rightly exonerates the police in the death of a black man, the community where that man grew up doesn’t necessarily care as much about the “correct” legal answer in terms of use of force policy or federal civil rights law. Whether or not an individual officer is guilty or innocent may provide an answer of sorts, but it’s not to the question they are truly asking. The question on their minds is too often “would this man be dead if he weren’t black?”
Is it possible that this perspective relies too heavily on assuming what is in the hearts of hearts of our fellow human beings? Is it not true that every cop, just like every person under arrest, is an individual soul?
Then there is the consideration that any principle, in order to not remain an abstraction, has to be demonstrable in the space-time world we all inhabit. It has to withstand, or at least exist coincident with, the messiness of that world, its jagged contours, recognizable patterns and the commotion whereby those patterns get jostled. Equality under the law and sameness of DNA does not preclude people grouping themselves by custom, tradition and commonality of appearance.
It would be willful blindness to overlook the plain fact that black America has a distinct culture within the overall culture. We see it in speech patterns, cuisine, formation of social bonds, the way religious faith gets expressed, the way sports are approached, and most definitely in music.
This last area is the one I’ve contemplated the most. I teach such courses at our local Indiana University campus as jazz history, blues history and overall history of African-American music. I play jazz, blues and soul music professionally. I wrote a novel set in Indianapolis in 1948 in the clubs and ballrooms along Indiana Avenue. All the main characters, as well as the historical figures I bring in, are black.
And I’m white.
I doubt I’d seek to publish and publicize such a book today. Not because I don’t think I’m qualified to say anything about black music history, but because I wouldn’t want to invite the controversy that would surely erupt.
(I made an interesting observation when I was publicizing it shortly after its release. I had a booth in the book-signing area at Indiana Black Expo and, while several types of people bought it, the most common type was sharply dressed young black professional women. They’d pick it up and check out the cover, and grin slightly, as if to say, “Sure, I’m game. Let’s see what this middle-aged white guy has to say about The Avenue.”)
But why hasn’t that culture-within-a-culture come to be regarded in the same way as, say, the ongoing viability of a Korean, or Arab, or Hungarian subset of the American fabric?
The obvious and most important answer is that no nationality, ethnic group or other race has been subjected to the dual oppressions of racism and bigotry that black Americans experienced for centuries. That factor figures prominently into the shaping of black culture.
On the other hand, there are two other impulses at work in our society that must be acknowledged: white progressive patronization and virtue signaling, and black refusal to assume the victim mantle.
It can be easy for a white person given to viewing life through a social-justice lens to automatically harp on the systemic-bigotry perspective without stopping to consider a viewpoint such as Lil’ Wayne expresses above.
Conversely, there is no small number of blacks who bristle at this notion that blacks collectively need some kind of hand up. That was at the root of the resentment toward Joe Biden’s you-ain’t-black remark.
Black conservatives are by no means a majority of black Americans, but they are a force to be reckoned with. Their contributions to the defense of free-market economics and Judeo-Christian morality are invaluable. They see collectivist policy initiatives as a type of modern bondage. (There is even a Trumpist contingent. That’s not to my taste, but it’s interesting to observe.)
Then there’s the matter of how human fallibility fits into all this. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a white Democrat sociologist, wrote a 1965 report on the state of the black family that, in essence, said, that while the civil rights struggle deserved focus, attention needed to be paid to several statistical trends that were going in the wrong direction. The report came in for opprobrium at the time, and has ever since, but the statistical trends he identified have only gotten more pronounced.
Black interaction with particular white demographics bears examination as well.
In the racially tumultuous year of 1963, Jewish intellectual Norman Podhoretz wrote a piece in Commentary magazine that brought to the surface some inconvenient sociocultural truths:
To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negroes were better off than Jews - indeed all whites. A city boy’s world is contained within three or four square blocks, and in my world it was the whites, Italians and Jews who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole, better athletes.
Another Jew, one from a well-to-do Chicago family, also saw blacks as tougher than his own demographic, but found that enticing rather than alienating. Michael Bloomfield, the first hotshot white blues guitarist, found out about black music from his family’s domestic help, and once he made the discovery, there was no turning back. In a 1975 interview, he describes how he saw black culture as a way out of what was otherwise going to be a stultifying future:
What I first wanted to be was a greaser, like a Carl Perkins or a Jerry Lee [Lewis] or a Gene Vincent. I guess he was the greasiest that ever lived, like a black-leather guy. But I found, living in Chicago was that, even funkier than that was to be colored. I mean, if you couldn’t be a greaser, man, well, these people kicked ass. They fought, which is something a Jewish kid like me just never did, you know.
There’s obviously a lot going on in the black aspect of American history that eludes a broad-brush treatment.
Let’s try to prevent the current moment from using that broad brush to sweep away the richness and nuance that at some point has to be grappled with.
Americans - human beings - come in a variety of colors. Let’s accord each of them the respect of holding them accountable for the decisions that shape their participation in this ongoing messy experiment called our society.