Police Authoritarianism and White Defensiveness

    I find it difficult to express how angered I have been by the reaction to the Skip Gates arrest, and some other racial incidents recently.  I am starting to feel like our language has truly been turned inside out.  Suddenly, the word “racist” has come to mean pointing out racism. Obama’s statement that it is “just a fact” that there is a long history of discrimination against blacks and Latinos by law enforcement, which should be remarkable only for its obviousness, is suddenly “playing the race card.”  The fact that, to use the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates , “officers are well within their rights to arrest you for sassing them,” is terrifying, and has gotten lost in the “was too!”/”was not!” bicker over whether the officer was racist.1  I have been absolutely appalled by how many whites have rushed to the officer’s defense.  I don’t know what’s in Officer Crowley’s heart; I can’t say whether he’s racist or not.*  But the fact of the matter is that he arrested a man for talking back to him.  We cannot let this fact get lost in the discussion.  This is far from uncommon, and it indisputably happens more to members of less-powerful groups than it does to wealthy white ones. 

    I desperately wish that we could take this incident and turn it into a discussion of issues that are distinct but overlap so much they are frequently thought of as the same thing.  The first is police authoritarianism.  The second is the unjust and unequal treatment of minorities by the state.   They are so often talked about as the same thing because the authoritarianism of the police is disproportionately directed at minorities.

    These are two enormous problems. And if anything is ever going to be done about them, white people must stop being so defensive, so quick to see ourselves as unfairly slandered or even discriminated against.  This is visible any time a white person reacts defensively to an accusation of racism directed at another white person they do not even know, about a situation they haven’t witnessed or studied, and that has nothing to do with them.   What this shows is that it is easier for them to identify with the one accused of racism than with the alleged victim of it.   And that alone should tell us how far we have to go.

    The most grotesque example of this I’ve seen recently was in the emails of Dr. David McKilip, a Florida physician and conservative activist who has been organizing against health care reform .   He sent an email around to his mailing list depicting Obama as a tribal witch doctor , complete with loincloth, headdress, and a bone through his nose.  When this became public and initial criticisms started to come in, he wrote this to his mailing list:

Here they come. The first of what likely will be many emails accusing me of being a rascist (sic) for forwarding this email of Obama as a witch doctor.
…
So Talking points memo is apparently painting me as a racist for sending around a picture that points out that health care will get worse if the government takes it over…

Don’t let them bait you. I will choose to ignore them and always talk about the issues.

In his mind, sending around a picture suggesting Obama as a “primitive” African tribal witch doctor isn’t racist or race-baiting; it’s objecting to that picture that is baiting.  And what frightens me is not just that he can write such a thing, but that there will be millions of Americans who agree with him. 

In this post I have focused mainly on whites’ reactions to the Gates arrest and to accusations of racism in general. But so much more needs to be said, about police and authority and gender and race.  It’s hard to know where to begin.  But I hope this is a tiny little fragment of a start.

*And in fact I don’t even think this is a useful framing; the history of America means we breathe in racism our entire lives and can’t help but be affected by it.  Good intentions (or a lack of bad intentions) don’t mean that we don’t have racist beliefs and assumptions that affect our actions.  And, of course, it’s about more than individuals – people who sincerely struggle against racism can belong to racist institutions.