1.
A few local teens organized a protest march through our suburban community recently to protest racism and police violence in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The primary organizer was a 20-year-old African American, Timiir Summers, who graduated from the local high school and now attends college.
Summers has lived in our community for 15 years, and he told me in an email a couple days after the local march that the local police have been supportive and protective, and that he has not been the target of discrimination in town “because of the color of my skin.” However, he added, “there are plenty of days that I feel that I could be next. In today’s society African-American male and females are looked down upon and fear for their life.”
I posted an essay on the march to my Patreon page and linked it to a local Facebook group. My argument was simple: “Racism does not respect borders. It does not respect income levels. It has burrowed deep into the soil and, like a weed, must be yanked out by the roots.” It is present everywhere, even in our relatively affluent, multiracial and multiethnic suburban community, and in ways we might not be able to see.
Most of the responses were from recent graduates, who described an atmosphere in which racism was buried under the surface but very definitely an issue in our community. But one, from a white man a bit older than me (I’m 57), offered a glimpse into the kinds of obstacles the push for racial justice will face as we move ahead.
He is someone who has been active in the community for years, has been involved with kids in sports, and he wrote that he had “seen negligible racism in 50 years” of living in the community. Students pushed back on his reply, and his tone shifted some. He “never really saw it,” he said, but “of course, most know how I feel about (it), so they don’t want me to see it.” He then described an incident in which a group was “arguing over their ethnicity.” He “told them to knock it off,” that we are “ALL AMERICANS” (his caps), which they got, he said. As he walked off, they chanted “USA, USA.”
The lesson he is offering, I think, is that we just need to “knock it off,” that the way we end racism, end discrimination — to paraphrase U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts — is to just stop being racist, to stop discriminating. And that may make sense to him, given that he is, to quote Jason Isbell, a “white man living in a white man’s world.”
2.
A white man’s world. The phrase is an uncomfortable one, but accurate, pointed.
Isbell is “alt.country,” a musical genre that may best be described as an edgier version of country- or southern-rock. The song rides along a jangly guitar riff, a set of minor chords, and Isbell sings it apologetically, his voice reinforcing the lyrics’ argument that this use of the phrase “white man’s world” is far different than therapy Rudyard Kipling used “white man’s burden.” I say argument, though we often pretend that art lacks a rhetorical element, that the singer, the poet, the novelist, while creating their own piece of the world, are also engaged in a kind of criticism and re-creation.
“White Man’s World” is a lament, an explanation, a critique. And in it, Isbell makes clear his own — and by extension our — complicity in the systems of white supremacy that govern so much of how this nation is structured and operates.
I’m a white man looking in a black man’s eyes
Wishing I’d never been one of the guys
Who pretended not to hear another white man’s joke
Oh, the times ain’t forgotten
Isbell uses and remakes a well-worn rock and country trope, the highway, to call attention to our ignorance (in the sense of ignoring): “I’ve got the bones of the red man under my feet / The highway runs through their burial grounds / Past the oceans of cotton.” This is both an accurate description of the geography of much of the south, and a metaphor for the ways in which we see without actually seeing.
This ignorance is the “white man’s” race card, our way engaging in a kind of identity politics without acknowledging how much we actually benefit from our identity. And it angers many, because it implies a moral failing. Whites in the United States, writes Robin DiAngelo in White Fragility, “live in a society that is deeply separate and unequal by race, and white people are the beneficiaries of that separation and inequality.” White Americans are “insulated from racial stress,” and “come to feel entitled to and deserving of our advantage.” We don’t admit it, may not even understand it, but when questioned we balk, get our backs up, argue. “Are you calling me a racist?” we’ll ask defensively. “You must be the racist.”
This is where DiAngelo’s phrase “white fragility” comes in. Whites often view critiques of “our racial worldviews as a challenge to our very identities as good, moral people, and “we perceive any attempt to connect us to the system of racism as an unsettling and unfair moral offense.”
When I started posting my initial responses to the George Floyd’s murder and the protests and violence that followed, posts in which I supported the protesters, I was told I was posturing, that we were the ones who are racist and not the people who decried the protests and refused to see anything systemic about Floyd’s death, as if this incident were isolated, that a larger pattern apparently did not exist.
This was “about George Floyd,” and George Floyd alone, one former classmate wrote, “because for every George Floyd there are thousands of perfectly fine and clean arrests.”
I can’t blame all cops, or “the system” or racism, or anything else except the cops involved in this case. We don’t blame all black (or white) people when they commit a horrendous crime, so why are all cops, or the system blamed for a few bad apples? This killing was wrong. The looting after, was wrong. To throw around words like “White supremacy” in this case (to me) you lose all credibility.
He went on to say that if he “saw a Chinese man, a Black man and a Hispanic man sitting on a park bench one Sunday afternoon, (he) would just see three men, but the more advanced thinker like (me) would actually see the struggle and pain of the Chinese, African American and Hispanic population and feel empathy for these poor souls.” He’s not the racist, he proclaims, I am. He doesn’t see race. I do.
Guilty as charged. I do see race. I see injustice. I see the history. I see how it distorts human interaction, how it has been used to structure society and continues to control so much of our interactions — from who we associate with and where we live, to the schools we attend and the jobs we do. We can’t just wish this stuff away. They exist. They are real, and we have to acknowledge how we, as whites, benefit from all of this.
That’s what makes “White Man’s World” such a powerful and jarring song. It makes all of this explicit, owning up to something we prefer not to admit: that whiteness exists and that it has functioned as the racial “norm for humanity,” in DiAngelo’s words.
3.
I can see my own experience in Isbell’s lyrics. I also wish “I’d never been one of the guys,” but I have been, as so many of my white friends have been. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I may not have been the one to tell the joke, but there have been too many times in my 57 years when I didn’t stop the joke from being told, when I haven’t pushed back against my family or friends.
I own that. But it’s important to place my inaction into a broader context, to consider how my whiteness — even as a Jew who has faced antisemitism — has functioned in my life.
There were only two black families on my block growing up, not many more in our broader housing development, a few black students in my grade school, and a few in my high school. It was the 1970s, a time of white flight from the cities, a time when whites used their middle class status, earned through decades of public policy, to reinforce the segregation that existed across the country, in the north as well as in the south.
I was just shy of my 8th birthday when we moved from Rockaway Beach in Queens, NY, to central New Jersey. South Brunswick was still in a transition from farm to upscale suburb. Between 1950 and 1970, when we arrived in South Brunswick, the community grew from about 4,000 residents to 14,000, yet it continued to be mostly white, and it stayed mostly white until the last two decades, when an influx of Asian Indians altered the complexion of the community. Still, just 9 percent of the population is black even today — which may be the highest that figure has ever been.
Race was not something we talked about, because we didn’t have to. Only the black kids had to worry about it, We knew there were words that were off limits in public, knew there were things you avoided saying except among your closest friends and family. That. hidden language was as close as we got to acknowledging race, and not in a way designed to move society toward a more equal and just footing.
The writer Ibram X. Kendi — echoing writers like James Baldwin — says there is no such thing as “not racist.” There are racists and anti-racists. What Kendi, author of Stamped From the Beginning and How to Be Antiracist, means is that one cannot just claim not to be racist, to say “I don’t see color,” because race and skin color are embedded in the social structure of America. If you are not actively pushing against this structure, you are tacitly supporting it and benefitting from it. The issue isn’t intention or words, but actions.
Growing up in a white community as a white boy and later as a white man provides me, for better or worse, with a lens through which I view the world. This is not unusual. We all have these lenses, though they differ for each of us depending on our circumstances. There is the lens of religion or ethnicity, the lens of class, of gender, of sexual orientation, and so on. Whites sometimes forget that we see the world through a lens of whiteness and, buy burying this notion in the language of colorblindness, we perpetuate the systems that endanger black lives like George Floyd.
Think about the phrases All Lives Matter as a retort to Black Lives Matter. Its language is race neutral — all lives and not just some, is the argument made by those who use it. But All Lives Matter assumes that we are starting on a level playing field, that the systems of oppression we put in place well before this republic was even founded continue to structure our lives.
The best critique of the phrase I’ve seen is a photo making the rounds on social media of a sign that says simply:
We said Black Lives Matter.
We never said only Black Lives Matter.
Wow know all lives matter.
But black lives are in danger.
The differences are subtle, but obvious to African Americans and their allies. Many in the white community bristle at the BLM slogan, and I would argue it is because they view it through the lens of their privilege, through their assumptions and expectation. Most whites expect they will be treated fairly, that the political and economic system will reward effort and talent, that that we live in a meritocracy. We rarely have had to think about this.
I remember being pulled over on a dark, farm road. There was marijuana in the car and it’s likely the pot smoke rolled out of the car in a cloud when we opened the window to the police officer. It was the early 1980s, during the war on drugs. There were several of us in the car, all of us white. He questioned us, asked what we tossed out of the car, made it clear he could arrest us. He didn’t. We can speculate as to why, but I wonder whether the incident would have ended differently had we been black. Would the officer have allowed us to drive off into the night?
I can’t answer that, but I can guess. I’ve heard the stories — Miles Davis repeatedly pulled over in his Lamborghini, a student of mine hassled in his driveway, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrested in front his own house as he tried to unjam the front door.
4.
The lens. Think about the responses to Trayvon Martin’s death, which more or less broke down along racial lines. Conservative, law-and-rider types immediately saw this 17-year-old kid who was minding his own business as a threat. Certainly, George Zimmerman did, despite Martin having done nothing more than buy a pack of Skittles and an ice tea and then walk through a neighborhood where his black skin made him stand out. We can debate what happened in the moment. We can talk about the fight that allegedly ensued, but Trayvon likely would be alive today had Zimmerman not seen the black teen as a threat.
These lenses are a legacy of white supremacy, just one among numerous ways race separates us, imposes expectations on us, and structures our lives, especially the lives of black and brown people. Racism, despite the popular assumption, is not just about hate. It is embedded in our institutions, including the police, including our schools and jobs, and it is why we are watching Americans take to the streets in the thousands, perhaps millions — even as a pandemic has crippled our economy and killed more than 110,000 people in the United States alone.
The murder of a 45-year-old black man by a police officer in Minneapolis as three other officers either helped or stayed silent was the precipitating event. The spark. But what fueled the fire — and, yes, there has been literal fire — was a set of interlocking gears that are part of the larger system of white supremacy that governs how this country operates.
I’ve struggled with how to approach this, because I know many good officers. They may even make up the lion’s share of all police. But I also don’t think this is a case of the proverbial — and misused — “bad apple.” The police are part of this larger system, functioning as the punitive arm of the state, of capital and white supremacy, as the shock troops of order designed to manage the population and keep them — us — in line. Perhaps I’m being hyperbolic, but it’s hard not to come to this conclusion when you see police beating protesters and the press and shooting rubber bullets and incendiary devices into crowds.
Three parallel ideologies have guided the expansion of the United States into a world empire: State-sanctioned violence, white supremacy, and capitalism. They are, in Martin Luther King Jr.s formulation, the three evils or the three legs of the stool hat upholds American exceptionalism. They are intertwined, each enforcing the other, each growing stronger by the other’s presence. Add the insularity of so many police departments and you have a recipe that causes grave harm to poor communities, especially poor communities of color.
The protests have surprised many, but they could have been predicted, should have been predicted. George Floyd’s murder is not an aberration, but just another example of how the existing system is failing not just African Americans, but all of us.
In early 2015, I invited local activist Tormel Pittman to speak to my journalism class. It was only a few months after the grand jury refused to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner was murdered by police in Staten Island. Pittman described for my class a system designed to manage the population rather than protect it, and he made clear that it was not the color of the police that mattered.
A lot of cops aren’t thinking about, “I’m going on the police force to shoot somebody.” They’re thinking about their families, their benefits. They’re thinking about getting their kids into college. The corruption comes after they sign up. I’m not going to sit here and beat up police officers and say they join the police force to beat up black people. Honestly, I don’t think a lot of them are. But I think the corruption comes in from them having to keep their jobs, the do-as-you’re-told mentality. You don’t go against the blue wall mentality. I think all of that creates that. They’re definitely put in an awkward position from the door.
What Pittman is describing erases race but only for officers and only in circumstances where officers are under threat from outside the force. It’s why you will see black and brown police officers participating in he same kind of violence as white officers and why it does not make their behavior any less a part of the broader system of white supremacy than a white officer like Derek Chauvin, who murdered George Floyd. Police often say they bleed blue, a phrase indicating how deeply ingrained and internalized the occupier mentality that James Baldwin described in the 1960s still is.
But police are just the tip of the iceberg, extensions of the nation’s flaws, its race and class biases, the power class’ desire for order and control. Police were first empowered in America’s northern cities to protect wealth and in the south to capture runaway slaves. They’ve been used as strike breakers, shock troops against protesters, and occupying forces — all in the service of white supremacy and American capitalism.
5.
The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor — and all of those on the long list of murdered black men and women — were made possible by our tacit support for the broader system. You can see it in the news coverage, which only focuses its attention on police abuses if they are caught on camera. And you can see it in the way police are portrayed on television and in film. Kelly Lawlor points out in U.S.A. Today that TV has long been rife with “stories that portray cops mostly as heroes and protagonists and black people as the criminals they lock up.” Think the CSI franchise, NCIS Los Angeles, and S.W.A.T., shows that elevate law enforcement to superhero status. In film, there is Dirty Harry, Lethal Weapon, and the various buddy movies made over the years. Even Beverly Hills Cop, which flips the race script, glorifies police violence as necessary. “You feeling lucky, punk?” works as an applause line, because so many movie-goers wish it were so. TV and film both reflect and influence how we see the world, and the popularity of the police genre says a lot about what we value.
And police are valued far more in this culture than the victims of their violence. Think about how conservative media have framed this — as purely about George Floyd and Derek Chauvin. Chauvin has been painted as a bad guy, has a record of complaints, but narrowing the lens on Chauvin lets the other officers with him and all around the country off the hook.
In recent days, my gaze has gravitated from Chauvin and Floyd to Tou Thao, the officer who was filmed standing by, watching, doing nothing. What was he thinking as Floyd yelled out for help? Why didn’t he step in? Why haven’t we, as a nation stepped in? The answer, as Pittman told my class, is the culture of conformity in police departments and a broader culture of white supremacy that expects police to act in this manner.
Thao is us. We’ve sat back and watched for decades as offices like Chauvin, Daniel Pantaleo, Darren Wilson, and the hundreds of others have engaged in brutality. There have been small reforms in the six years since Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed by police, but nothing has really changed, aside from the names of the dead. It’s because we — the white majority — have not been directly affected. These murders have occurred in largely black and brown communities that have long been over-policed, far from the quiet suburbs inhabited by a largely white population.
Police violence is state violence, sanctioned not just by our government but by all of us. When a police officer kills someone in custody or shoots at a moving vehicle or knocks a protester unconscious, he or she is doing it in our name and with our blessing — unless we speak out. This sanction is evident in the money we spend, the politicians we elect, the culture we consume, and it is disingenuous of us to pretend otherwise. Were that the case, our televisions wouldn’t present us with glorified tough cops who make their own rules and often serve as judge and jury and we would not be facing the regular specter of communities set ablaze because one of their own has been killed by police.
I know I’m generalizing, but one must generalize some if we are to recognize the larger patterns and forces in play. We have tasked the police with being, in James Baldwin’s words, an occupying force. And we are watching today as the occupied push back, as they say “enough.” Of course, they have been saying this over and over and over, going back to Baldwin and Malcom X and Dr. King, to Rodney King, to Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and now to George Floyd.
I want to be optimistic, to say these protests are different, that we might actually see some change, but I can’t be. Small-bore reforms, which are all our political system seems capable of offering, will not address what is really happening. We can license police. Ban choke holds. Beef up civilian review boards. Expand training. Diversify our departments. These are useful ideas, but they will only go so far, and do not get to the root of the problem which is the intertwined evils of white supremacy, capitalism, and violence.
There is a need for what Jelani Cobb, who teaches journalism at Columbia University, describes on The Frontline Dispatches podcast as a “kind of gigantic systemic overhaul in so much of the country.”
“You are never going to have a time,” he said, “where you have bad housing, bad education, poor quality of employment in low wage work, but have pristine policing.”
This history gives the lie to what DiAngelo calls the ideology of individualism, that each of us live and die only by our own efforts and nothing else, and to the notion that racism is nothing more than individual and intentional acts of hate and not something systemic.
A police officer friend questioned my condemnation of Minnesota officials use of the “outside agitator” trope and calls for angry protesters to stand down without any promises that police would do the same. He agreed that change was needed — while raising the black-on-black crime canard, which rarely gets raised except to delegitimization criticism of police in these circumstances — but drew a line.
“When darkness comes are the protests still about the memory of George Floyd?” he asked, as though Floyd was the only concern of the protesters. “I part ways at this fork in the road. The burning of stores, the looting of stores in one’s community splits the message on justice it does not unify it.”
But unity cannot happen without justice. As I told him in my response, the police must, at some point, “look inward” at their own behavior.
“The country needs to look inward. It has to accept responsibility for the racism that is more than individual hate and infects our institutions — schools, housing, economy, policing.”
I won’t condone violence, but I also do not feel that I’m in a position to preach to the people who rightly view themselves as being oppressed. There have been small reforms in the six years since Michael Brown and Eric Garner were killed by police, but nothing has really changed, aside from the names of the dead. It’s because racism is at the core of American society and culture, because we value money more than life and especially more than the lives of people of color, and because we remain committed to state violence as a solution to all our ills.