The specter of racism in America: Hidden in plain sight
The trouble with institutional racism is that it’s very easy to deny and very difficult to prove, even when its existence is painfully obvious.
We can’t prove (at least not yet, and maybe never) that the killing of Michael Brown — an unarmed black teenager who was shot at least six times by a white cop in Ferguson, Missouri — was racially motivated. The police department in that community will undoubtedly deny it forever, barring the discovery of some damning evidence.
Instead: The young man was a suspect in a robbery, right? And then he assaulted a police officer and reached for the officer’s gun, didn’t he?
Didn’t he?
At this point, who knows. It’s the word of uniformed law enforcement agents (many of whom, incidentally, now don military gear instead) versus the word of eyewitnesses.
Absent such ironclad proof of a racial motive, the public is left to grapple with a laundry list of circumstantial evidence, much of which is laid out masterfully by John Oliver in this segment.
Take, for example, the fact that the population of the town of Ferguson is two-thirds black, while its police force is overwhelmingly white. Or the fact that cops in that town and region have a well-documented history of targeting minorities for searches and arrest. Or the fact that St. Louis is one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in America, which invariably serves as both a foundation and fuel for these types of incidents.
Sure, at least for now, we can’t prove that the police officer in Ferguson repeatedly and fatally shot an unarmed teenager just because he was black. But this tragedy and its aftermath bring up issues that we can’t escape just because we lack proof of institutional racial bias. And Ferguson, Missouri, is hardly the only current example of relevance in this realm.
Barack Obama, our nation’s first non-white president, is sadly another. It’s not just that his opponents don’t like his policy agenda, or that they try to obstruct or sabotage it unrelentingly for political gain; it’s that they seek to de-legitimize the man himself at every turn.
Watch this clip of Chris Matthews, and accuse him of spewing off a partisan diatribe if you must — but he’s absolutely correct when he says that talk of Obama’s birth certificate, or impeachment for unspecified reasons, or nullification of duly-passed laws are all thinly-veiled attempts to render the president himself illegitimate for reasons that so very few are honest enough to utter.
Blogger Andrew Sullivan takes the idea a step further:
[From the beginning], Obama faced a unanimous and relentless nullification Congress. If he favored something, they opposed it. Despite Obama’s exemplary family life, public grace and composure, and willingness to compromise, they decided to cast him as a tyrant, a radical, a traitor and an incompetent. Their demonization of a decent, pragmatic man simply disgusts me to the core. And, sorry, if you do not smell any whiff of racism in all of this, you’re a better person than I am.
I agree with Andrew on all of those points except the very last one (bolding mine). You’re not a better person if you don’t smell a whiff of racism in the GOP’s vilification of Obama. You’re a hopelessly naive one. Perhaps intentionally so.
Again, no one can prove unequivocally that the Republican Party displays a historically unprecedented level of intransigence toward Obama because of racism. Sure, there are volumes of circumstantial evidence that suggest as much. But if ironclad proof is what you’re seeking, then you’re desperately missing the point.
Look at the GOP’s feverish drive to enact restrictive voter ID laws, which, by any rational standard, are deliberately racist, even as proponents halfheartedly and disingenuously try to argue that they’re necessary to preserve the “integrity” of elections. Here again there may very well be no irrefutable proof of racist intent behind such legislative proposals — just as there’s no proof of a voter fraud crisis — even if their outcome is indeed racially discriminatory.
Or consider the Voting Rights Act, which was dismantled by the Supreme Court last year so that a series of states could have carte blanche to implement even more hideous voter suppression laws. Will officials in even one of those states openly concede that racism plays a role in such policies? Do we as Americans require such an admission to know damn well that it does?
That’s the sort of question all of us should be asking as we gaze wearily toward the streets of Ferguson, a town none of us had even heard of until a week ago.
Are we going to fixate on which side told the truth in full, or where the proof lies in this specific case?
Or are we going to use this tragedy — as well as the misdeeds of our law enforcement agencies, and the developments in the chambers of our statehouses and judicial buildings — to acknowledge that racism is still a toxic, destructive force in American society?
Don’t obsess over every gritty detail of Ferguson or other racially charged issues to ignore the bigger picture: The civil rights era may be history, but the injustices that gave rise to it certainly aren’t.
