THE LONGEVITY OF RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES

 A mass murder in the heart of a major southern US city recently  brought to the fore once again the lasting effects of racism on US society, a century and a half after the bloody Civil War that ended the kidnapping and enslavement in that country of millions of black Africans.

Victims of the Emanuel AME massacre

Despite the hard-fought battles of the US civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the undeniable advancement that, against all odds, African Americans have achieved in the last fifty years, no objective analysis of American society today can conclude that deep-rooted racism is no longer an issue there, or that black society as a whole has achieved overall equality with white society. And the massacre of nine African Americans carried out by a lone white gunman at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, earlier this year is not an isolated case of continuing racial unrest in the US, but rather, a high-profile symptom of underlying wounds that may have superficially scarred over but that continue to rend the American social fabric beneath the surface of “political correctness”.

Urban art has made victim Freddie Gray's face part of the 

landscape in the Baltimore ghetto

Indeed, in recent months the US has suffered some of its worst racial unrest since the 1960s. Worse still, the bulk of the strife has been the result, not of discrimination among civilians, but of unequal, unfair and brutal treatment of African Americans by white police authorities. One of the latest instances of such unrest was when race riots broke out in Baltimore, Maryland, and effectively shut that city down for several days. What sparked them was the death at the hands of police of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man, arrested allegedly for possession of an “illegal weapon” (a charge highly questioned by the State’s Attorney). The death of Gray, who suffered a severed spinal cord during his detention and transport by police, sparked a series of increasingly violent protests in Baltimore, which resulted in 34 arrests, 15 police officers injured and major property damages.

Unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown lying dead in the street 

in Ferguson, Missouri. 

Previously, Ferguson, Missouri, had been the scene of ten days of protests and rioting after a white police officer there shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown multiple times, killing him. A grand jury  ended up swiftly acquitting the officer of any wrongdoing, which led to a federal investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, and brought the Saint Louis area and Missouri as a whole under the scrutiny of civil rights advocates, the press and the United States as a whole. Fresh demonstrations took place in Ferguson last week, on the first anniversary of the Michael Brown killing, indicating unrest is far from over there.  

"I can't breathe!" Eric Garner kept gasping. He couldn't. He died. 

In mid-2014, a 43-year-old African American named Eric Garner, accused of selling bootleg cigarettes, was strangled to death while New York police used an illegal choke-hold to control him as they were attempting to handcuff him. In another incident last year, Los Angeles policemen shot and killed an unarmed, 25-year-old mentally challenged black man named Ezell Ford, while in Cleveland, police gunned down a 12-year-old African American boy named Tamir Rice, who was carrying a toy firearm replica BB pistol. And yet another resounding case, earlier this year, was that of 50-year-old African American Walter Scott, pulled over for a routine check by police in North Charleston, South Carolina. Although the policeman was only stopping him for a non-functioning third brake light, fearing arrest for failure to make child support payments, Scott jumped out of his car and ran from officer Michael Slager, who fired eight shots at the fleeing man from behind, hitting Scott five times and killing him. It seems incredible, seen from any even remotely neutral stance, that Officer Slager should have taken such extreme action when, as far as he knew, the only “crime” Scott had committed was having a non-functioning tail-light, and clearly, since he was fleeing, Scott posed no threat to the policeman. One can only speculate that in Slager’s mind, if the guy was running away and black, there must be a reason worth shooting him. And despite 150 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 50 years since the peak of the civil rights movement, that’s an attitude that apparently hasn’t changed much among certain segments of the US population since the Civil War. 

Scott bolted. Slager killed him...over a broken tail light.

Nor are such cases of excessive force uncommon in the United States, as witnessed by a plethora of news stories, reports, scholarly papers and essays dealing with the problem―one that makes African Americans, and particularly young black males, no matter what their social station―almost as fearful of encounters with white police as they were before the civil rights era brought “equality” (at least on paper) to the African American population. A number of organizations, including the US Department of Justice carry out periodic reports on use of violence by police authorities against civilians.

Drawing from these and other sources as well as from its own reporting, the liberal British newspaper, The Guardian, this year decided to do an independent study of incidents of use of lethal force among US law enforcement officers. The newspaper called the project “The Counted” and published its first conclusions in June. According to the report, the trend for 2015 indicated that police in the United States would kill over a thousand civilians by the end of the year, since already by then the number of civilians shot dead by police had reached 500 (about a hundred a month). Other reports since The Guardian’s publication have borne the trend out, with between 600 and 700 police-related shooting fatalities having been reported by August.

What is more telling about the British newspaper’s report, however, is the breakdown in figures: Police in the US are killing people at more than twice the rate they were in 2013 (461 police-related killings for that entire year). So far this year, 28.2% of all people killed by police in the US have been African American. While nearly half of the people shot to death by police so far in 2015 were non-Hispanic whites, the proportion of African Americans killed takes on new significance when you consider that the non-Hispanic white population of the United States outnumbers the black population by five to one.  By comparison, the ratio of ethnic Hispanics in the US to non-Hispanic whites is less than four to one (with Hispanics and Latinos making up the largest ethnic minority in the country at more than 17 percent of the population. But only 14.8% of the fatalities in the use of lethal police violence were Hispanics/Latinos (relatively high, but only half the proportion of African Americans).

The Guardian indicates, furthermore, that one in five of the people shot dead by police so far in the US this year was unarmed. But breaking those figures down, over 30% of the unarmed people killed were black, while only just over 16% of those killed who weren’t carrying a weapon were white.

While, in all fairness, there could be any number of mitigating factors (social, economic, regional, etc.) affecting these figures and other indicators of changing and/or stationary race-related social phenomena in the United States, the underlying scars of racism in American society as a whole seemed to become instantly clearer following the Charleston AME church massacre, which was, without a doubt, an attack on African Americans by a young man with a white supremacist agenda. It was, in fact, as if that violent incident had suddenly drawn back the thin skin of political correctness and left the raw nerve of racism quivering in plain sight. And the manifestation of it came in the form of an impassioned debate about the unquestionable symbol of white supremacy championed by the South in the Civil War: namely, the Confederate flag, better known as the Stars and Bars.

Stars and Bars waving in front of the South Carolina Statehouse.

While South Carolina authorities of almost every stripe were quick to come out with words of comfort and condolence for the families of the nine victims of the AME church killings and to tell the world that there was no longer any room for racism there or anywhere else in the South, their words rang hollow and many of them shuffled their feet, cleared their throats and sought to justify the unjustifiable when it was suggested that perhaps that flag should finally come down from the mast on the State Capitol grounds. It wasn’t the first time it had been suggested, demanded, implored. But this time the power of outrage was so great that voices at every level were able to ask, “Now will you finally take it down?” And ultimately, after long and bitter political debate, South Carolina did indeed lower that flag for the last time and stow it away in a museum, where for those on one side of the debate it will remain a symbol of “the glory of the South” and for others a symbol of hatred and discrimination as charged with negativity as the swastika of Nazism.

But that debate continues to echo in the South and elsewhere in the United States. What that debate over the Confederate flag underscored was how political correctness has led to the creation of myths to make that symbol “tolerable” to the public at large, through efforts to whitewash it and the Civil War as being anything other than what they truly represented: a diametrical split in the social and political fabric of the Unites States of America over a single burning issue: the right or prohibition of one race to own the members of another race and to buy and sell people of color as if they were livestock. It was also about the fundamental belief of slave owners and the political elite of the South that the white man was superior to any other and especially to the black man.

That it took so long (from 1861 to 2015) for public officials in South Carolina to admit the impropriety of continuing to fly the very symbol of white supremacy and to continue to bask in the former glorification of a society whose wealth was based on the institutionalization of slave labor is a clear sign that not only that state, but the US as a whole still has a long road ahead toward building a discrimination-free society. Fair laws and politically correct manners have gone a long way toward that goal, but shouldn’t mask the deeper issues of educating successive generations to unlearn every vestige of white supremacist thought.     

In my recently published book, War: A Crime Against Humanity, I wrote in one chapter about racism and its relationship to war. It seemed to me ironic that the United States, a nation that, along with France, led the world in a democratic revolution against centuries of tyranny, was the same nation in which slavery and racism had torn the social fabric down the middle. In one passage, I wrote:

“Nowhere was the struggle for legal and social equality and for the laws to enforce it more patent than in the United States, which, because of its long history of slavery and the Civil War that ended it, remained racially divided and legally and socially imbalanced between its white and black populations. It wasn’t until the advent of the civil rights movement in the 1950s that Americans were able to come to grips with this controversial issue and substantially reformulate their society to drop all perceived racial barriers and embrace citizens of all colors…

“Today, even when Americans have elected their first black president, the United States continues to seek to fine-tune anti-racist measures and weed out the remnants of racism….Despite progress on the road to worldwide anti-racism, the ghosts of racist theorists like Herder, Gobineau, Chamberlain and, particularly, [Madison] Grant live on in the attitudes of some of the world’s richest nations, even when their political and diplomatic discourse has become increasingly anti-racist since the end of World War II. Since biblical times, tribes, nations and empires have sought to convince themselves that they are ‘the chosen people’, ‘the best nation on earth’, ‘the most powerful empire in history’. And running counter to this is the idea that all other peoples are inferior to the ones who are ‘destined to greatness’…

“In order for the world to eventually become a place of peace where war becomes unthinkable, scientific logic and sociological wisdom must win out, eventually convincing people all over the world that the planet Earth is a ship at sea in a vast universe and that we are all equal stakeholders in its future. This is the great equalizer, then, that we are all interdependent and equally subject to extinction if we fail to put aside our prejudices and to learn to work together for the common good of Mankind, and in a world without slavery, torture, racism or war.”