A biased eye incites a mean heart but a compassionate hand repairs the broken
This will be my last article on the Black History Month. We exit the month as we entered – a people with small answers to large questions. This bewildered inadequacy is not confined to Black America. It applies to the entirety of our race. A small number of black people have reached their individual promise lands. They bask in fortune, fame and even power. Yet, for the vast number of us, being black means being in retreat. For most, yesterday looks better than tomorrow. It is a sad thing when the future appears leaner than the past. Sadness is compounded by the knowledge that the past has been a wholly inferior one. Yet, the danger lurks that we shall go further adrift. This need not happen. To prevent our continuing decrease, we need better understand forces arrayed against our betterment, especially diathesis of a collective psychology that directs us to think less of ourselves than while placing others on a pedestal that needn’t exist.
Let’s return to the Jordan Davis trial for it offers striking lessons applicable on a wider scale. Since my last column, the verdict has been rendered. It is a case study in logic contorted by the ill advices of racism. The jury convicted the middle-aged white shooter, Michael Dunn, of attempted murder of the three black youths his ten bullets missed. Three of those ten shots entered Jordan Davis that life might leave him. The jury did not convict Dunn of murdering the lone person he shot.
For shooting the unarmed Davis, the jury could not make its mind that Dunn committed illegal homicide. What a grotesque message this conveys for it carries an implicit invitation to kill. Better for a white man to quickly kill a perceived black assailant than miss the dark target. The black man might flee and later present conclusive evidence of never posing a threat to his erstwhile shooter. Such a threat would exist only in the mind of the gunman because hatred had conditioned him to see a black man as a violent felony in progress. Centuries ago, slave-holding whites slept in fear of an insurrection among the bondsmen. That a dark-skinned human being might fight for his freedom after being involuntarily thrust into servitude was something more than a curious notion. It was unalloyed evil. Slavery is gone but the racial fear, that was both born of it and that gave birth to it, remains. The old hatred permeates the modern air. It walks the streets, nigh ubiquitous for it enters almost every chance encounter between white and black men. It stokes fearful anger in whites and suspicious apprehension in those blacks aware of the crimson history between the two races. Blacks ignorant of that history fall bewildered, unable to comprehend while they always are on the wrong side of the unemployment line, a judge’s gavel, or a vigilante’s gun.
Dunn said his life was threatened by Davis. He claimed the boy held an object that resembled a firearm or a stick. Nothing corroborates this assertion. The lone confirmed evidence was that the two engaged in a shouting match. Yet the jury gave Dunn a pass on the murder charge because they wanted to believe Davis, by virtue of his blackness, got what he deserved and Dunn, by virtue of his race, had ample reason to shoot as he did.
We are left with the travesty of a man being convicted for missing the other youths but not for killing the one he shot. The jury did not want to believe this middle class, middle-aged white man could be guilty of murdering a black youth out of sheer annoyance simply because this lesser human being had the effrontery to argue with him. Racial stereotypes do not permit this conclusion. Social and political myths abound regarding the violent nature of black men. By social convention, Davis was guilty of assaulting Dunn. Forgetting or being ignorant of this social myth, Davis would pay with his life. This was too high a price simply for not recognizing the evil barriers society had imposed against his humanity.
Had Davis and his companions been white youths, Dunn never would have reached for let alone discharged his weapon. Had Dunn been a black man who killed a white youth in the same circumstance, the jury deliberation would have been swift and sure. The shooter would have been convicted of the worst type of murder. This jury simply could not grasp the fundamental truth that a white man might lethally and illegally aggress a black youth. They dared not admit a white man could harbor illegal ill will to a black man. That would upset the cart. According to common perception, illegality and violence always flows the opposite way. For a black man to be attacked by a white man, the former must have provoked the latter. Consequently, the shooter could take the witness stand, bemoaning he was “the victim” and acting in hurt amazement that he would be compelled to stand trial to defend his lethal deed.
The facts of the case did not fit this tidy construct. Thus, the jury decided to keep faith with racist convention and ignore the truth.
A deeper truth is that historic reality aligns with this case more so than with the stereotype. Historically, blacks have been targeted and killed by people like Dunn more so than people like Dunn had to worry about being killed by the likes of Davis. Whites have killed more blacks in racist outrage than blacks have killed whites. In the history of America, white men have been the most deadly of racist predators. Based on actual fact and history, that Dunn would murder the black Davis was always the more likely outcome, if only for the hue of the victim’s skin. Yet, this historical reality is not the image that first jumps into the collective consciousness. Imagine a street criminal in America. Imagine a murderer. Imagine a drug dealer. The likely first image to surface is that of a black man. The truth is different. Blacks are no more likely to murder or traffic drugs than whites.
This inaccurate image is not by chance. It has been carefully engineered so that whites subconsciously abhor blacks and disassociate themselves from them. It has been created also that blacks find manifold ways to degrade themselves and to believe that things white are things superior.
The power of images is devastating. CNN interviewed one of two black people on the Davis jury. The young female juror asserted that Dunn, the shooter, was a good guy and that race played no part in the case. The poor woman denied almost the entirety of American social history in the space of that brief interview. Ignorance can be more deadly than any bullet. Her statements reveal a fundamental flaw common in the race. A diminishing number of us want to be black in terms of political, cultural and social orientation. These people want to blend in to larger society; they want to homogenize into a great and bland nothingness. They seek not the pride of diversity. They grope for the comfort of submission. They want to be accepted as human beings whose skin happens to be black. They seek to turn sinister tragedy into a love story simply by calling it a different name. Thus, they seek to jettison our historical legacy and duty before the legacy has been completed and before our collective duties have been fulfilled. The quest for equality is not over for it has not been won. However, too many of us find it too uncomfortable and difficult to talk about. It is too stubborn a problem, thus better to ignore the thing and move along as best one can.
As such, blackness is in retreat. We no longer press for greater justice. Our leaders seek not to inspire us to eradicate this obstacle or demand those on the other side of the barrier to seek greater humanity by dismantling the trap rather than making it more subtly powerful. We now are taught to manage racism. We are to live under its shadow. That is our plight. The best we can do is to position ourselves under the thinnest aspect of the menacing cloud. Since that space is keenly limited, we compete against each other in a winless war to minimize the racism we feel individually instead of gathering our collective strength to combat the injustice so that none will have to endure its sting. We have resigned ourselves to defeat because we have given up the fight. We have accepted the broken image of ourselves to the extent that we no longer believe anything can be fixed or that things need fixing.
Thus, the pitiable black female juror mostly excused Dunn and saw nothing in him but respectability and good while Dunn despises the very essence of the woman. Dunn is a racist. Before the incident, he had penned letters to friends, asserting the more he came into contact with blacks, the more he hated them. From his lips streamed a flow of invectives against our race when he talked freely. Given his racist disposition, this case should have been prosecuted as a civil rights matter, a hate crime under Florida law because this case was about race. Instead those charged with prosecuting the matter, decided to whitewash race from the trial. They purposely avoided bringing it up. In doing so, they tried a case that did not exist. They turned the search for justice and some modicum of truth into a lie. To distill race from an instance where an obvious racist shot an unarmed black youth is like building a house of wind and air. Nothing of weight and substance can live in the air perpetually, even an eagle has a nest which it inhabits. Those in charge of the case discarded the very essence of the thing they purportedly sought. They feigned toward justice but their objective was to preserve the racist covenant. Maintaining the racist social constellation was more important to them than justice. Preserving the social constellation profited them. Justice would not have done so.
The Davis case is a microcosm of race in America and much of the world. Most whites deny their racism. They are comfortable and do not want to make the adjustments justice and right require to correct the evil imbalance. When asked to alter their ways, too many now claim to be victimized. They are like the errant driver who, after striking a hapless pedestrian on the roadside, stridently complains how the inconvenient it was for the walker to have damaged their car by not moving out of their way.
World over black people have lost courage. It is no longer fashionable to speak of race as an active determinant in the political economy. Those who do are labeled troublemakers or regressive. Those words are mere labels used to disguise the truth. The work for justice and equity is half-done. Left unattended for many years, even that work is becoming unraveled for many of us. Most black Americans have lost ground economically in the past decade. There are more black men in jail than in university in America. This augurs ill for the future; nothing in the offing that suggests the change needed.
President Obama met establishment black leaders in February. The gathering was more symbolic than real and more cynical than symbolic. The policy measures announced to salvage black males from the rigors of prejudice were so pitifully small and piecemeal that one had to wonder if the gathering was to solve a problem or just to take credit that such a meeting was held at all on this subject. This was the first such meeting the president held after six years in office. Still, the session was tepid and modest. The real reason for the session was to energize established black leaders to stoke the black community to vote during the congressional elections later this year. The Democratic Party needs their votes to stave Republican gains, thus averting a repeat of the Republican onslaught that occurred during the last (nonpresidential) congressional elections in 2010. That we now have a black president dangling false carrots before our nose shows equality to be quite real. Black politicians can be as calculating and cold-hearted as their white counterparts. What they offer the black community is ersatz hope so the people exert themselves, not for the common benefit but, to safeguard the jobs and positions of this elite.
This is a terrible bartering of the people’s welfare in exchange for the continued luxury of a cozy establishment.
The people deserve much better. No race has suffered more in the past centuries yet received so little for its suffering. We now exist in that awful space where most of our people are so confused they can’t distinguish their self interests from what are not. Our people work hard the world over; but, they mostly labor to the greater benefit others than themselves. The harder we labor, the more we lose and fall behind. If we are to survive and, at some point, thrive, we must first return to the point we see the world and how it operates in terms of race, in terms that are often starkly black and white. Until then, we shall live in someone else’s world. We shall suffer the consequences of existing in a place not intended for us and incur the slings and bludgeons that happen to those who let others define their human worth. Until then, Black History Month is nothing to celebrate or even commemorate as if we have reached our destination. It is never prudent to stop to celebrate one’s homecoming before reaching home. We have too far to go. Until then, Black History Month and every month for that matter should be times when we open our eyes to clearly view the challenge at hand then begin to talk in bold, unashamed terms about how to complete the journey initiated by those figures and personalities of our prouder past.
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