By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — Now that a clear, ghastly pattern of white police offers, heavily armed, killing black men (and boys) at an alarming rate is spiraling, we anguish. Not all of us, but many. People of all races are asking: what is going on in our country?
African American parents are terrified for their sons. The families of police officers are defensive about their husbands, wives, and children who are in uniform, patrolling hostile streets, and too often confronting people (white and black, incidentally) who are indeed dangerous, stoned, desperate, and in need of proportional restraint. Some of these targeted folks are also innocent—they lay bleeding on the pavement because perception, strained by primal fear, became a grim reality.
One has to be naïve or worse if one believes that a black man comes into this brutal scenario with any advantages.
Please note: each case is unique to its circumstance and to the facts, the fears, the challenges, the intimidations, and to human imperfection. But the collective fact is indisputable: there is an urban war going on in American streets and human beings of color are winding up dead. This bloody coda is not a question of legality. It is a question of mortality.
Some of these victims were unarmed; in one case, in Cleveland, the decedent was a boy carrying a toy gun. How does a peace officer justify such a killing? How does a society rationalize it? How in God’s name does a grand jury that has seen a video of an asthmatic man, profiled by his color and physique, pleading for a breath, exonerate a squad of armed officers who resolve whatever was going on lethally?
I don’t have the answer. But if we white folks simply do not think of black folks as human persons, (the abundance of white convicts rightfully sitting in our jails have criminal records, but their membership in the human race is not up for debate), then we will continue sliding down this slippery slope of racial horror and two justice systems.
To paraphrase Dr. King, if I am wrong about this, then the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If am wrong about this, then the Bible is just a rumor. If I am wrong about this, then Christmas is just a bunch of frothy holiday music and the most cynical mercantile opportunism ever devised in a culture that now disdains even the notion of values.
No, I don’t have the answer. Just a lot of pain and indignation. I think it might be a grim blend of two things: we have completely professionalized the military after years and years of endless indecisive wars that are actually catastrophically misguided business ventures. Corporations that build armaments and big banks that subsidize the process have been enriched and global terror has actually been emboldened.
Are we looking for a domestic substitute (the black man) upon whom we can re-position our need to beat somebody?
It is now widely known that many US police forces are downright militarized. This unchecked assault on black men is a transfer of white feelings of futility against “the other.” It is a collective, gathering obscenity–given sanction by amoral and complicit grand juries.
The other piece, almost too frightful to say, is that we were not ready for a president of color. He won in 2008 because we deified him. Then when he turned out to just a man, we immediately began to build a golden calf beneath his mountain out of racial insecurity and primal American superiority neuroses.
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the hate.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com
I heard a lot of people say that racism in America didn’t exist anymore. Then they would say “well, maybe it’s still going on in the south, but its fine everywhere else; it’s mostly in the closet.” Reaaaly? Well, closet racism is still “racism.” Still there lurking, waiting for the right opportunity to raise its ugly head; being passed on through the generations. The only way one can understand being a Black man in America, is to BE a Black man in America; with the memories of ills done to generations past showing him early on that he’s not thought of as “just like everyone else.” There’s an automatic association of “black” = crime/criminal.
For example: Some years ago, two of my then teen aged stepsons (who are of Black and Mexican heritage) were walking to the corner store one afternoon (won’t say what city, it’s not about “putting down a city’s police department), were stopped by police and asked what were they doing, and where were they going… This has happened on several occasions, not just with them, but with their black friends as well (yeah, because all black males are trouble makers, and did time, or looking to do time – heavy sarcasm here). They asked their White and Asian friends if this had ever happened to them; their response: Nope. These young men told me that it reminded them of what they learned in history class, about how free blacks and slaves had to carry papers showing that they were freedmen, or a pass to show that they belonged somewhere, or to someone.
On one Saturday, one of them was walking to the mall when a van with a White family (young children in the back) pulled up next to him, the woman driving asked him if he had any drugs that they could buy from him (yeeeeeaah, cuz all black people carry drugs…eyes rolling here). There’s many, many more just from my own experience, let alone from what my family could recall; years and years of it. As a Black Jewish woman, I see it from both sides of the line; but still, even I can’t know what it’s like to be a Black man. But Black men are in my family, including my grandfather and all those before him; my father, brother, some of my nephews, and even my “mixed” sons. The deck is already stacked against them from birth. BUT, I tell them, it doesn’t mean that they can’t succeed despite the adversity; it will only make them stronger and better able to handle the hard knocks of life (not to let it get them down)…which in turn will make success all the more sweeter.