“A different ‘culture'”
by digby
I know that I am racist in a million different ways. I’m a white woman of a certain age who grew up in America. It’s inevitable that my attitudes were shaped by my own privilege and that my racism is so deeply a part of my personality that I can’t see it.
This person, however, has more of it and much closer to the surface than that. He shouldn’t have been a cop:
I asked him if he agreed with Randolph that the neighborhood’s main problem was the absence of jobs. “There’s a lack of jobs everywhere,” he replied, brusquely. “But there’s also lack of initiative to get a job. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” He acknowledged that the jobs available in Ferguson often paid poorly, but added, “That’s how I started. You’ve got to start somewhere.”
Good values, Wilson insisted, needed to be learned at home. He spoke of a black single mother, in Ferguson, who was physically disabled and blind. She had several teen-age children, who “ran wild,” shooting guns, dealing drugs, and breaking into cars.
Several times, Wilson recalled, he responded to calls about gunfire in the woman’s neighborhood and saw “people running either from or to that house.” Wilson would give chase. “It’s midnight, and you’re running through back yards.” If he caught the kids, he checked them for weapons, then questioned them. He recounted a typical exchange: “ ‘Why you running?’ ‘Because I’m afraid of getting caught.’ ‘Well, what are you afraid of getting caught for?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, there’s a reason you ran, and there’s a reason you don’t want to get caught. What’s going on?’ ” Wilson said that he rarely got answers—and that any contraband had already been thrown away. Once, he arrested some of the woman’s kids, for damaging property, but usually he let them go. In his telling, there was no reaching the blind woman’s kids: “They ran all over the mom. They didn’t respect her, so why would they respect me?” He added, “They’re so wrapped up in a different culture than—what I’m trying to say is, the right culture, the better one to pick from.”
This sounded like racial code language. I pressed him: what did he mean by “a different culture”? Wilson struggled to respond. He said that he meant “pre-gang culture, where you are just running in the streets—not worried about working in the morning, just worried about your immediate gratification.” He added, “It is the same younger culture that is everywhere in the inner cities.”
That’s from a fascinating New Yorker article about the man who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri last year.
It is racial code language. There is just no other way to see it.
When I was working in the film business we used to package films together to sell to territories around the world. I would routinely be told upfront that buyers in other countries did not want to even look at what they called “urban films.” This was, obviously, code for films about black people. (And yes, they called them “urban” even if they were historical or were about Africa.) Everyone was terribly polite about all this, saying it was nothing to do with black people, it was simply a “culture” difference. It’s always something …
Read the whole thing. It’s fascinating. It doesn’t answer the ultimate question of what happened that day. He doesn’t share what was was going on in his mind. But it’s obvious that his attitudes informed his thinking. This is what this country needs to deal with.
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