A post-racial US?

S P SETH

The recent killings in the US of some unarmed African-Americans, some of them children, is not just a police matter but raises questions about the underlying racism pervading the country’s mainstream white establishment. How else does one explain the jury verdicts where the concerned cop (s) is clearly seen to be targeting an African-American for no clear reason or offense but still found to be not guilty! There is gratuitous police violence against African-Americans because the police can get away with it. There is a shared mainstream view, though not always articulated explicitly, that an African-American is more often than not trouble and prone to commit serious crimes. This kind of prejudice is borne out by the high incarceration rate of African-Americans, nearly six times more than the whites. The larger white community is either supportive or indifferent to the way the African-Americans are handled by the police. Take the case of Eric Garner, who was killed by the New York police in a chokehold when he was not even resisting arrest and pleaded that he was unable to breathe. He was selling loose cigarettes, prone to police harassment which eventually cost him his life.

Apart from recent shootings, which got highlighted, the random shooting and arrest of African-Americans is part of the country’s day-to-day reality. And it is a continuation of the historical process of keeping the blacks under control by asserting white domination, though there have been variations on this theme since the abolition of slavery. It has been ‘humanized’ through the civil rights legislation of the sixties. But the country’s white establishment has always found new and more ‘refined’ ways of getting around the legislative constraints to keep the African-Americans in their place. In an article in the New York Review of books, Darryl Pinckney is quite categorical that, “America has always felt the necessity of keeping its black male population under control. Behind every failure to make the police accountable in such killings is an almost gloating confidence that the majority of white Americans support the idea that the police are the thin blue line between them and social chaos.”

This is illustrated in an early scene in the acclaimed Hollywood movie, Crash. It shows a black couple sitting in their car by the side of a road when approached by a white cop in a patrol car, asking its male driver to produce his driving license and other relevant documents. The driver complies, but his wife continues to express her verbal annoyance, despite being told by her husband to shut up because he has a better sense of where it might end up. The cop then asks the woman to get out of the car and starts touching her all over to ‘check up’ if she might be carrying a concealed weapon, which of course she is not. The cop then suggests that the couple might be charged with performing a lewd sexual act in public, which again was false. The husband gets out of this situation by apologizing for the said sexual aside. Having shown and asserted his and the police power, the cop lets them go. Which illustrates the process of indignity and humiliation that many African-Americans have to go through in one form or another to perpetuate the system and to know their boundary.

When Barack Obama became the country’s President, which to this day hasn’t really been accepted by some important segments of the white establishment, it was becoming clear early on the severe constraints under which he would be operating. An important constraint was that any sympathetic utterance by him about matters relating to African-Americans would be maliciously interpreted. For instance, take the case of African-American Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates who was arrested by a white cop when trying to push open the jammed door of his house, taking him as a burglar. Which led Obama to call his arrest “stupid”, creating a prolonged outrage by many among the whites for siding with an African-American against a white cop. Obama sought to end this by arranging a “beer summit” between the professor and the cop, with the President acting as a host. One can only imagine the awkwardness of the occasion with the President of the country expending his valuable time and energy to appease his outraged white critics.

From this time onwards, Obama was a lame duck president on issues that affected African-Americans. But with all the caution that he could muster, his critics would not spare any occasion to question his impartiality when he even made the mildest comment sympathetic to African-Americans. In the case of the young unarmed African-American boy, Trayvon Martin, who was killed by a vigilante “volunteer”, Obama commented, “I can only imagine what these parents are going through, and when I think about this boy I think of my own kids…you know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Obama’s innocuous remark created another furore leading, Newt Gingrich, a presidential aspirant, to comment, “Is the President suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it wouldn’t look like him? ” In other words, instead of inaugurating a post-racial era, the election to presidency of Barack Obama as America’s black President simply tended to highlight the deeply entrenched racial divide in the United States.

Obama jocularly recently commented on such deep racial prejudice against him at a White House Correspondents Association dinner. He said, “Let’s face it, Fox,  [the hate-Obama television kingdom] you will miss me when I’m gone [because]… It will be harder to convince the American people that Hillary [a likely Democratic presidential nominee in 2016] was born in Kenya.”  One only has to imagine how painful it would be for the country’s first black President to be seemingly making fun of all that he had to put up with (and still doing it) because he didn’t fit into the mold, and the kind of political jugglery he needed to perform to seek acceptance, but without much success!

If this is what the black President of the country has to go through, one shudders to think what ordinary African-Americans go through every day in the US. The recent shootings of some unarmed African-American boys and that of Eric Garner in a police chokehold in New York gives a good sense of what still goes on in the supposed post-racial United States. In a recent article in the New York Times, based on several studies on racial bias against African-Americans, Harvard Professor Sendhil Mullainathan concluded, “ Ugly pockets of conscious bigotry remain in this country, but most discrimination is more insidious [urging that] we should look inward—and examine how…we discriminate in ways big and small.” In other words, it is a much deeper problem notwithstanding the quiet satisfaction of many Americans that they buried the ghost of racism with Obama’s election as the country’s first black President. In other words, Martin Luther King’s much quoted speech about “I have a dream….” is still a dream. 

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au