On Friday, a jury in Minnesota acquitted Jeronimo Yanez, until recently a police officer, of manslaughter in the shooting death of Philando Castile. The details of the case may be found here, but in summary Mr Castile was shot seven times while reaching for his driver's license, as ordered by Mr Yanez, after having informed the officer in good faith that he had a legally registered firearm in the vehicle. Mr Yanez responded to that information inappropriately and created a confused, ambiguous situation in which he panicked.
Stories like this are commonplace. John Crawford III, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner among many others have died in police interactions under circumstances ranging from fishy to egregious. In none of their cases was an officer held responsible in any legal way for their deaths.
It has been said frequently on the right that events like these are seized by the opportunistic to inflame racial tensions. The truth is that not only the events but the controversies surrounding them are symptomatic of a racial divide in our country that has existed from the beginning. The fact of the matter is that the high ideals of the country that declared in its founding document that "all men are created equal" have been paired with a social system that has been consistently and explicitly white supremacist.
The fact that the previous statement is still a matter of contention in public debate is a staggering indictment of our collective understanding. The ugliest moments in our national history all have been openly motivated by a sense of white racial superiority, from slavery to the systematic deception and destruction of Native Americans, to Jim Crow, to exploitation of Chinese laborers, to brutal repression in the Philippines, to Japanese internment and beyond. It continues today with the backlash to the civil rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. Not only that, but the moments of greatest internal division and conflict have been precisely those moments at which some important aspect of white power has been directly challenged. The Civil War and Civil Rights Movement stand as obvious examples, but it should unnerve us more than it does that the most efficient predictors of how someone voted in 2016 are negative attitudes toward racial and religious minorities.
Call it America's mid-life crisis. After 241 years, America has realized it isn't the country it always thought it would be. The conflict between our principles and our practice has at times become uncomfortably open, but we have always found it easier to address the symptoms than the disease. That is no longer a plausible way out. Current demographic trends indicate that within 25 or so years white people will no longer be a majority of the US population. America can be a democracy, or it can be a country ruled primarily by and for white people. It cannot long remain both.
It must be said that those who are representatives of the interests of primarily white populations recognize the situation. There is scarcely any other possible explanation for Voter ID laws that are written explicitly to be restrictive against the minority vote, or lobbying for intense restrictions on legal immigration in spite of explicit evidence that current immigrant communities are assimilating just as quickly as their predecessors. While I doubt that those who champion these policies are in general quite so nefarious or direct - though there are a number who are - one can hardly fail to notice that their collective effect is to politically empower white communities at the expense of others. The mind will always find a palatable justification for the convenient conclusion, but that does not make the policies themselves any less brazen.
Thus, like the person dealing with a proverbial mid-life crisis, America has a choice to make. We could acknowledge that we aren't who we thought we were, accept that, and make the changes we would like to make going forward. On the other hand, we could also stubbornly cling to a notion of ourselves that bears no resemblance to reality and make ourselves more ridiculous than we already are. Historically at its best moments America has found a way to face up to a distressing truth and embrace the difficult work of improving the world. At its worst, it has hidden behind comfortable delusions and refused to address festering problems.
One of the most enduring legacies of Barack Obama's presidency will have been the inspiration and empowerment of an entire generation of black activists, who saw a black man in the presidency and realized that the world they and their children deserve is possible. I am not qualified to pronounce on this directly, but I believe it is a safe statement to make that the patience of nonwhite communities is finite. The longer that White America shoves its head in the sand, the more difficult it will be to have the interracial dialogues that need to be had for progress to be made without significant violence. We, and by we I mean white people, need to start listening to what people of color are saying and take it seriously before we stop talking to one another at all.
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