In the aftermath of last weekend’s police shooting in Atlanta of Rayshard Brooks, some interviewee noted the differences in how police behave towards citizens in white neighborhoods and black ones. In white neighborhoods, they are more polite, more restrained. In minority neighborhoods, they are rougher, more authoritarian and unforgiving. Rookies pick up the difference in style from training officers and internalize it. It’s not formally taught. It’s acculturation.
Jon Stewart, longtime host of ‘‘The Daily Show,’’ speaks to that in his New York Times magazine interview. Stewart, 57, offers an eye-popping metaphor for how police function in this country. There’s more to what precipitated the George Floyd killing in Minneapolis than a lack of sensitivity and de-escalation training or a move to community policing. How we do policing is just a symptom. We as a society never address the why of policing:
The police are a reflection of a society. They’re not a rogue alien organization that came down to torment the black community. They’re enforcing segregation. Segregation is legally over, but it never ended. The police are, in some respects, a border patrol, and they patrol the border between the two Americas.
India officially abolished its caste system in 1950. Yet it persists today. Two thousand years of Indian culture don’t vanish with the stroke of a modern pen. Hundreds of years of whites treating black people as America’s untouchable class do not either. The Civil War did not end it. Nor did Brown v. Board of Education. Nor the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts one hundred years later.
Last month, I referenced an interview about the COVID-19 crisis with Sujatha Gidla, a conductor for New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). The author of “Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India” explored the roots of the caste system and what made her Dalit family “untouchable” and other Indians high-caste Brahmins.
Gidla gave a fascinating 2017 interview on that to journalist Sheryl McCarthy of the City University of New York. No amount of education or prosperity can change an untouchable’s status in Indian society. It is why she emigrated to the United States where she found more opportunity but also common cause with African-Americans.
Stewart cites comedian Chris Rock on the persistence of America’s own caste system:
Look, every advancement toward equality has come with the spilling of blood. Then, when that’s over, a defensiveness from the group that had been doing the oppressing. There’s always this begrudging sense that black people are being granted something, when it’s white people’s lack of being able to live up to the defining words of the birth of the country that is the problem. There’s a lack of recognition of the difference in our system. Chris Rock used to do a great bit: ‘‘No white person wants to change places with a black person. They don’t even want to exchange places with me, and I’m rich.’’ It’s true. There’s not a white person out there who would want to be treated like even a successful black person in this country. And if we don’t address the why of that treatment, the how is just window dressing.
Bethel, Ohio (Pop. under 3,000) lies southeast of Cincinnati. Last weekend, a small group held its own Black Lives Matter protest. They were met by the defensiveness Stewart mentioned from white people, many of them bikers, angry about black people getting “specialty” rights.
Observe [timestamp 29:45]:
Raw Story reports:
“I knew there were counter-protests but I never dreamed that grown men would grab our signs and our person. It felt like we were walking a gauntlet,” said 63-year-old Lois Dennis. “I saw a side of America that shamed me.”
“You’re in the wrong town,” said one man carrying an American flag. “Get this on your phone — this ain’t Seattle. You’re not in a Democratic state here. We don’t put up with that sh*t. All lives matter.”
“This is a f*cking Republican state, b*tch,” shouts an even louder man. “We don’t play here.”
White. Beefy. Belligerent. Armed. Easily threatened by opposing views. It’s a type.
Demographic changes mean white people may soon (or eventually) be just another minority in this country. These people know how this country treats minorities. They and their ancestors have been doing most of the “treating” for 400 years. As Stephen Stills once said, they’re scared shitless.
No matter how far down they are on society’s social ladder, some people want someone lower than them. They need someone lower than them. Someone they can look down on and say, well, at least I’m not THEM. Black people have filled that role for centuries. Not as long as India’s untouchables maybe, but the principle is the same.
Police enforce that class barrier, Stewart believes, and he may be right.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.