–Mister Thrope, 2020
This entry will have little to no sarcasm, and it is about something I’ve never had the need to talk much about, given the choices I’ve made in life. In my experience, black people, out of necessity, know more about white people than white people know about black people. Between explicit and de facto segregation, and the media’s tendency to summarize black people using conveniently facile generalizations, most white people just don’t know that much about black people. I’m no expert on the latter, but I am an expert on what white people say and do when no black people are around.
I grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago. From the time I was little, black people have always been a group to fear and to direct suspicion toward. “The City” was always a place to fear, and if you got caught alone in a black neighborhood, one should expect to be lucky to escape alive.
In high school, we were rivals with another school which had a substantial black population. Once we were on our way a track meet and we were driving next to one of their busses. Everybody freaked out and cautioned each other not to throw any gang signs (as if anybody present knew any). It felt both silly and thrilling.
Sophomore year, friends started to get their driver’s licenses and my track buddies and I went to a now extinct restaurant in Evanston called, The Spot. We accidentally missed the turn off and ended up on the North side. Again, everybody in the car tripped because black people may descend upon the car and rob us. I found out later that we couldn’t get mugged in this neighborhood (Andersonville), if we carried around fists full of cash. But the baseless fear felt real enough at the time
Once in high school I was looking at a desk filled with graffiti, which listed all the jobs black people could do: elevator operator, bus boy, criminal, etc. I could kind of understand the baseless fear of blacks, since people tend to be afraid of what they don’t know. But the slobbering hate demonstrated by this graffiti as well as the general dearth of black people around told me that white people had to teach this to other white people.
Once at the Evanston Relays, we compete against a south side school named Dunbar (years later I would apply to be their assistant principal). On the bus ride back, some kids sang a chant, “Big black hands, big black feet, Dunbar, Dunbar can’t be beat!” This wan’t quite filled with the hatred suggested by the desk graffiti, but its dehumanizing tone wouldn’t get the school a national award for diversity either. In a related incident, our field events coach once told us a joke while we were on the bus: What are the first French words a black man learns? Coupe De Ville. This is just a small set of my recollections, just off of the top of my head. I am just one of the 230 million or so white people who live in this country.
I wish I had risen to the occasion back then and stood up for my beliefs. In college I would do so, like at the protest to a slave auction held at the Acacia house at U. of I, and later at a counter demonstration by the Klan over in Wheaton during my first year of teaching. This also was the early 1980s, before there were substantial moves by activists to address white people’s collective bigotry which enables the use of “racial dog whistles” by the ruling class.
If white people really want to understand racism in this country, they need to conduct an inventory of the origins of their own racism. There are about forty million black people in this country. There IS no expert on forty million individuals. We have to break out of our fear and our certainty that we are better than they are. Otherwise, get used to these riots. I leave you with these questions. if you’re Jewish, would you be so complacent if the last names of unarmed victims of police violence were Goodman, Stein, or Horowitz? If you’re Italian, would you be so complacent if their last names were Spinetti, Bianchi, or Russo? I can go on like this all night, but I think you get the idea. This just a partial list, compiled by NPR of the 101 or so black people killed by police over the last few years (these are just the ones I remember off of the top of my head):
Eric Garner
Michael Brown
LaQuan Mcdonald
Latanya Haggerty
Sandra Bland
Tamir Rice
Breonna Taylor
Freddie Gray
George Floyd
A partial list of black Americans killed by police since Jan., 2015. In all, 1,252 black Americans have been shot and killed by police since January 2015. If you’re white, and this doesn’t elicit shame from you, then you are either immoral or do not believe that black people are human, which make you even more immoral.
Out here.
Bittersweet Abattoir 