Six months ago, the world erupted in anger over the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white police officer.
The shooting sparked a series of protests by residents who claimed that the police department was racially biased. At the time, many white people around the United States claimed that this wasn’t the case: They commented in the news and on social media that the situation is Ferguson wasn’t about race, and that troublemakers were injecting race into a situation to make it worse.
In short: They were claiming that we should ignore race.
As it turns out, the protestors in Ferguson were right. In a report released by the Department of Justice, they found that in the city of Ferguson, with a population that is 67 percent black, the police department (97 percent white) has had “a pattern and practice of disproportionate stops and arrests of blacks without probable cause.”
The findings of extreme racial disparities in how the Ferguson police operate have prompted the DOJ to conclude that the Ferguson Police Department was “routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black citizens.”
Speaking of those civil rights abuses, it’s worth mentioning the statistics found in the DOJ report. In Ferguson, 85 percent of vehicle stops were of black drivers. Of citizens jailed for more than two days, 95 percent were black. All police dog attacks were against black citizens. And 92 percent of cases with warrants had black suspects.
Most glaringly, though, 88 percent of usages of force and 93 percent of arrests were against the black citizens of Ferguson by their own police department. MSNBC noted “while blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be stopped while driving, they were 26 percent less likely to be found with illegal contraband.”
Not only do the numbers reflect the racial attitudes of the nearly all-white police department, but so do the comments made by officers in interdepartmental emails (which are part of the public record).
One officer in 2008 commented that then President-elect Obama wouldn’t be president for long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years?” Funnily enough, that black man got re-elected as the president of the United States and then ordered a DOJ review of that officer’s department. Other emails included a cartoon of African-Americans depicted like monkeys, and a third “described black women having abortions as a way to curb crime.”
Let me be very clear: This situation is about race. All of these civil rights violations, including the killing of an unarmed teenager and the tear-gassing of peaceful protestors, are the product of a learned system of racism and disregard for the constitutional rights of all of the citizens the Ferguson Police Department is sworn to protect. Not merely the white citizens.
The prevailing response I heard after commenting on the Michael Brown shooting and subsequent protests was that I was “race-baiting” and “making this about race.”
I was right.
It is high time in America that we have a discussion about race. Conservatives love to argue that America is an utopia where bad things don’t happen, and when they do, we shouldn’t talk about them because that will only make them worse. While it may feel uncomfortable for a while, talking about a problem inevitably helps to solve it.
Just like a disease, when left ignored, it will only lead to more complications.
Racism is not over in the United States. The politics of this country are still the politics of skin color. The problem is that even with concrete data from a disinterested party, there will still be a brigade of idiots who claim that “this isn’t about race.” To those people I posit a simple question: What else could this be about? White America needs to come to terms with its privilege.
I will leave other kinds of privilege for another column because they certainly exist and deserve equal discussion. As for racial privilege though, white America is significantly less likely to be searched, jailed, arrested or sentenced than anyone who is not white.
I fail to see why some people do not understand what this situation is about. Are they sufficiently ignorant or, perhaps, willingly blind?
Either way, by ignoring race as a factor, they are contributing to the problem rather than working towards a solution. As a white citizen of America, I think we should be using the privilege we have to call out the inequalities that are obvious in the criminal justice system that adversely affect our non-white fellow citizens, who deserve equal protection under the law.
We are not ‘more equal’ than anyone else and their lives matter. Black lives matter. The sooner America wakes up to this fact, the sooner we can actually have a working discussion about it. And the sooner we can find an America where people truly are equal under the law.