But this article is not about race.
It’s easy to talk about race when a Charleston church is bloodstained and the murderer of nine Black people says that it is about race. When America is having Jim Crow flashbacks of four young girls killed in a Selma church bombing.
It’s easy to talk about race when according to the NAACP Criminal Fact Sheet “five times as many whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites.” When according to Pew Research, Black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than whites.
It’s easy to talk about race in America when even white people are using the “r”-word and justice looks color-coded. But that’s not what this article is about.
It’s about a Spanish newspaper, El Pais , quoting Tory Russell. “This is not America’s or the Black community’s problem. It is a global problem of people who feel oppressed.”
It’s about a tipping point where people all over the world know about the policeman’s Billy club, government gone wild, and that proverbial straw.
The recent demise of Baltimore’s young Freddie Gray, a Black man mysteriously dead after an illegal arrest, set Baltimore ablaze. But the much publicized, “justified” extra-judicial killings of countless Black men were Baltimore’s excelsior and Freddie Gray was just the match. Police perpetrators are usually spared the orange jumpsuit. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement reported that as of November 2014, 91 percent of the police shootings were found “justified”. Ten police were actually charged but there were only two convictions of manslaughter. I might mention that in Baltimore City, the Baltimore Sun reported that since 2011 the city has paid about US$5.7 million in compensations for police violence against citizens.
But I’m not buying the notion that hordes of roving Black people will seek justice by killing random white people in a race war. However, the idea of a violent revolt against “white privilege” that has been simmering since they called Harriet Tubman, Moses, is a fear that lingers just beneath the thin veil of the racial divide.
Is there a racial divide in America? According to the media sound bytes and self-appointed spokespeople, yes there is. But racial dialogue cannot be had by TV talking heads hawking the next shiny thing. Is the threat of a race war just a sexy sound-byte, or is there truth in advertising?
Also, interracial marriages are on the rise. The Pew Research Center reported, “8.4 percent of all current U.S. marriages are interracial, up from 3.2 percent in 1980.”
It is also worth mentioning that America elected a Black president for two terms, birth certificate and drones notwithstanding.
First of all the facts of police shootings are in dispute with regard to race. Nicholas Kristol, syndicated columnist, wrote in an article entitled “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” that Blacks are 21 times more likely to be shot by police.” Fox news says the opposite. The facts are that we don’t know the facts. Extra-judicial killings are self-reporting, so all the data depends on police telling on themselves. Often they don’t.
The facts may be foggy, but what becomes clear is that justice is not being served. If we stop pummeling each other over race, maybe we can see the other moving parts of this dilemma. If we talk about a paid vacation (suspension with pay) for police officers who kill, we might be able to get to the root of the problem. Better yet, the policeman’s “blue wall of silence” is a subject that can really shed light.
Baltimore, you are not alone. Charleston, the world is watching. The struggle for justice has no borders. I offer that the Dylann Roof shooting was a catalyst for unity, not division. The resounding cry for justice comes from Haitians in the Dominican Republic, Africans in waterless villages, Palestinians living in apartheid conditions. The fight for racial justice that captured the imagination of people of all ethnicities and political persuasions in the ‘60s is a spark that has inspired voices for the voiceless all around the world.
Racial differences in the U.S. cannot be denied, but the greatest tragedy is the lie that we the people do not have a common fight. Americans can ill afford to tempt the tipping point of injustice, Black or white. Police misconduct, jobs, the prison industrial complex, failing schools, economic meltdown, evaporating rights, unconstitutional laws, and the price of a loaf of bread: America’s problems are of Titanic proportions. Viewing these riots merely in racial terms is myopic. It’s just rearranging chairs on an embattled ship.
Auset Marian Lewis’s journalism has been published in over 50 media outlets from coast to coast and abroad. She was the first female African American columnist for the Wilmington News Journal. Her poetry and fiction have won awards and she has been invited to speak in venues on radio and TV from Yale University to homeless shelters in Baltimore, Maryland. Lewis has written two books: A Settling of Crows and From My Lips to God’s Ear: The Joanne Collins Story.
