My Home Town, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

September 23, 2016 Victor El-Khouri 2 Comments

Please, accept my apologies.

The chairperson of the Trump campaign in Mahoning County, Ohio (a volunteer position) recently said that there was no racism in this country until Obama was elected president.

Mahoning County includes Youngstown, which is where I grew up.  The chairperson, one Kathy Miller, is about my age (although I don’t recognize her).  She didn’t live in my neighborhood, but we probably went to schools run by the same administrative entity.

I don’t know how she can say there was no racism in Youngstown in the 1960s.  I remember people yanking their kids out of public schools if a person of color started to attend class.  I remember people moving to the suburbs if people of color moved into a house nearby.  I remember the casually demeaning remarks people would make — in supermarkets, at the hairdressers, at the country club swimming pool, at my father’s office — when they assumed that, as white people, we all agreed.

White people don’t see racism when it doesn’t affect us.  We have to look for it, or have it pointed out to us.  And even then, we get defensive and say it’s not our fault, it’s Theirs.  You know.  Them.

This colors (you should pardon the expression) our perception of the events in Charlotte.  After a police officer killed a black man, there were initial reports that he was unarmed.  Then, there were reports that he was armed.  This happened just a few days after another unarmed black man with his hands in the air was killed by a police officer in Tulsa.  In the Tulsa case, the city released the video footage showing the killing.  In Charlotte, they haven’t yet done that.

In Tulsa, there have not been violent protests.  In Charlotte, there have been.

Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that.  In Charlotte, there have been peaceful protests disrupted by violent people.  Some of those violent people might consider their actions to be a form of protest, and some might simply see an opportunity to rage.  No matter.  Protesters and police officers are both getting hurt in the process.

As a white middle-class college educated person who benefits from the luxury of many kinds of privilege, I realize that my understanding of this situation is not necessarily on point.  My experiences and the values with which I was raised have led me to embrace non-violent resistance as the ideal way to promote social justice.  While I would like to say I believe this because I’m morally superior, I’m aware that I also want to stay alive.  I have a lot to lose.

If I thought the police were going to shoot me no matter what I did, I might want to act out more violently.  I might think that there was no reason for me not to break store windows and steal expensive electronics.

For years, we’ve read dozens of stories about unarmed African Americans killed by the very people who are supposed to protect us.  And rather than trying to solve this problem by, maybe, finding other ways to communicate with criminal suspects that could leave them alive to prove their innocence, we blame the victims.

On Bloomberg television, the Reverend Al Sharpton (I know!) said the difference between Tulsa and Charlotte is that people could see the videos, and the authorities acted quickly to arrest the shooter.  He said that if the video in Charlotte showed that the victim did, in fact, have a gun as the police claim, that would make a difference in how protesters perceived the events.  We should not be happy that someone died but we would understand the police response.

I don’t think this is a matter of party politics.  I think that progressives and conservatives can agree that innocent people should not be shot, and that even people who might be guilty of petty crimes should not be killed about it.  We can agree that every citizen has something to contribute to society and has a right to enjoy its benefits.

There are fringe elements who are racist and sexist and homophobic and anti-Semitic and Islamaphobic et al.  These fringe elements have a right to free speech, and the rest of us have an obligation to free speech right back at them.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, might need to be medicated to watch the debates on Monday.