‘Black Lives Matter’ or ‘Shut up and dribble?’ That’s the choice America has to make

 That's the title of a piece from Leonard Pitts.  Below is an excerpt which just seems so obvious.  

White people often think you can buy your way out of race. They refuse to grasp that racism doesn’t care how much money you make or how many diplomas adorn your walls. Thabo Sefolosha of the Houston Rockets earns a reported $2.5 million a year; New York City police broke his leg. Danielle Morgan has a bachelor’s degree, two masters and a Ph.D. Campus cops at Santa Clara University knocked on her door and required her to prove her house was her house.

Money is not enough. Education is not enough. Excellence is not enough.

But enough is enough. That’s why the NBA called time out."

Yet watching the Republican Convention this week, it is clearly not obvious to lots of people.  

The sordid history of the gun toting McLoskeys from St. Louis has been chronicled.  Yet they were featured as heroes at the convention.   The 17 year old murderer in Kenosha is being feted as a right-wing hero, yet he killed two protestors and the police ignored him even though people were telling them he was the shooter.   Trump and his storm troopers spent four days trying to stir white fears that black Americans will overrun their neighborhoods and loot and rape and murder.  And that people like me are intent in destroying the United States.

We know why Trump is doing this.  To help him win the election.  Plain and simple.  And because he has no concern for black Americans unless they can help him get reelected.  (A couple of black women shown as Trump supporters told the NYTimes they were told the video was for something else entirely and they aren't Trump supporters.)  To say Trump has no black friends is meaningless, because Michael Cohen has said Trump has no friends period.

Perhaps these fears just reflect what white people know - that whites have treated blacks like shit* since the first Europeans and blacks arrived in the Western Hemisphere.  And they fear that if blacks gain some semblance of equality, they will do the same to whites.  I think this is the fear of those who know they are guilty, know they deserve to be punished.  But the oppressed tend to just want to be treated decently and fairly.  They don't want to act like their oppressors.  They want acknowledgment.  Look at the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa.  Look at restorative justice examples. 

Yes, some oppressed people have turned the tables and become oppressors themselves.  Israel, despite being the home of many holocaust survivors and their children, treats many of their Arab citizens badly.  But these Arabs weren't the Jews' Nazi oppressors.  Most Jews get along quite well with the German government - which did apologize and did give and is still giving reparations to Jewish Holocaust victims.

The simple point that Pitts makes above is that it doesn't matter how rich or educated or important black Americans are.  When they or their children are out in public anonymously, they are seen by many whites (and other people of color even) as trash and are vulnerable to all sorts of abuse from regular people as well as law enforcement and other institutions.  Until that ends, this is a racist society.  And there are two fronts this needs to be fought on:

1.  Individual prejudices - conscious or unconscious beliefs that blacks are inferior, not as competent, dangerous, and any number of other stereotypes all people raised in the US (and elsewhere) have absorbed.  (Any white who would be disturbed to hear their son or daughter wanted to marry a black person carries this sort of prejudice.)
2. Systemic racism - organizational structures and procedures - that set up more and higher obstacles to blacks than to white Americans as they try to pursue the American dream.  Things like Jim Crow and poll taxes in the past, and systematic voter suppression today such as disenfranchising felons and black neighborhoods by deleting them from the voting records or limiting the number of polling places available.  And the kinds of laws and procedures that are aimed at making a disproportionately high number of blacks into felons.  Both  #1 and #2 reinforce each other.  

If you run into folks who don't get this obvious reality, see if you can get them to read.

White Rage, by Carol Anderson, looks at how the Supreme Court used States Rights after the Civil War to ignore disenfranchising blacks in the South through poll taxes, set up laws that resulted in the arrest of blacks for 'loitering' and then taking them as prisoners who were given to white businesses as essentially prison slaves until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  States rights was also the excuse to ignore cases of lynching and other killings of blacks.  How school integration was avoided to leave black students in poorly funded public schools.  And how the War on Drugs continued the policy of imprisoning blacks. (And this continues today as Trump encourages white supremacists to take up guns to protect whites.)

I know, lots of Trump supporters don't read books.  But a number do have college educations, even from prestigious universities.  And if they don't read, let them watch the movie 13th, about the 13th Amendment. 13th is on Netflix and in libraries and covers similar ground as White Rage.

*Sorry, sometimes euphemisms aren't strong enough, the stark truth doesn't come through.  The infrequent use of expletives means that when you use them, they have more impact.  They haven't been 'normalized' and neutered.