Growing up black in the US

S P SETH

When it comes to race relations, the US continues to have a terrible record. It is difficult to believe that a country, which professes to be the champion of human rights elsewhere in the world, continues to so shabbily treat its own Afro American citizens. A number of recent incidents of black deaths from police shooting and, worse still, the police officers responsible for such killings being let off, simply make no sense. Take the case of the 12-year old, Tamir Rice, who was playing with his toy gun in a park when shot dead by police. And the two officers involved in his shooting will not be charged, the prosecutor in the case dismissing the incident as a “perfect of storm of errors.” Well, it wasn’t for his parents. A Cleveland jury’s decision not to lay charges “devastated” his mother, Samaria Rice. She claimed that the prosecutor, Timothy McGinty, had “deliberately sabotaged the case”. Earlier, police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner had been let off without charges, which had caused massive protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and in New York.

At the time of the Ferguson protests, Darryl Pinckney wrote in the New York Review of Books,  “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.” In other words, this is part of the social psyche of white America and the system is designed to uphold it, with prosecutors like McGinty making sure that it is not derailed. If the 12-year old Tamir Rice were a white kid playing with a toy gun, he would still be alive.

New York Times editorially commented that, “Tamir Rice of Cleveland would be alive today had he been a white 12-year old playing with a toy gun in just about any middle-class neighborhood in the country on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 2014.”  It goes on, “But Tamir, who was shot to death by a white police officer that day, had the misfortune of being black in a poor area of Cleveland, where the police have historically behaved as an occupying force that shoots first and ask questions later. To grow up black and male in such a place is to live a highly circumscribed life, hemmed in by forces that deny your humanity and conspire to kill you.”

This is not just the story of one black kid in Cleveland but it encapsulates the story of growing up black in America. Irrespective of your social class, now that there is a growing black middle class in America, it is still the colour of your skin that will be a determining factor in whether you will live or die or end up in prison when confronted by police or reported to police. The statistics are frightening. Constituting about 13 per cent of the US population, blacks represent over 50 per cent of its prison population. According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), African Americans constitute 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated people, and have six times the incarceration rate of whites. Nearly one in three black males will end up in jail at some point or the other in their lives. Which will scar them for the rest of their lives in terms of employment prospects or any useful and productive role in society. And those who manage to escape jail or police shooting do it out of sheer luck, and not because of the customary precaution dinned into them by their parents about how to avoid a situation with the police. Because, no amount of preparation/precaution will prepare a black male for this because the color of his body has marked him out as a constant danger signal.

In a powerful book titled, Between The World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates, an Afro American writer and a national correspondent of the Atlantic, has done an incisive reportage and analysis of what it means to be black in America. And this he seeks to do in the form of a letter to his adolescent son, which constitutes his book. First, he raises the question: why is race such an integral part of white America? Coates writes, “Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism--- the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them--- inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature… the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.”

The strongly embedded belief in the superiority of white America goes back to the days of slavery. And it was designed to enrich white America by treating blacks as commodities to be traded and exploited. Indeed, “ ‘ White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our [black] bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching) and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, ‘white people’ would cease to exist for want of reasons.” And it is this belief and its implementation over the centuries that made America rich. As Coates writes, “At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American roads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies---cotton—was America’s primary export…”

And after the Civil War, fought ostensibly to set blacks free from slavery, they were still in bondage in one form or the other. The narrative of Civil War was toned down or modified to accommodate southern states to let them continue with lynching and rounding up blacks, and to deprive them of their right to vote. And now more and more Republican governed states are enacting measures to make it difficult for blacks to vote, with white America increasingly worried about losing their preponderant control of the country. This fear was dramatically and disastrously enacted in the recent massacre of black parishioners attending a church service, where the white killer reportedly said that he was doing it because the blacks were raping white women and taking over the country.

And as long as this fear and the consequent need to dominate black lives with spectacular violence is part of white America’s psyche, the country’s Afro American citizens will continue their struggle to highlight that Black Lives Matter. And that struggle might not always remain peaceful.

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.