Epidemic of deaths of unarmed blacks deserves debate

By Rabbi Ben Kamin

ENCINITAS, California — The epidemic suffered by black folks, usually unarmed, mostly men, being assaulted and killed by uniformed peace officers was not ventilated during the recent Republican primary debate.   It is rarely addressed by the nation’s first African American president except in the aftermath of yet another smoldering incident—when he revisits his sober, cadenced chastisement of our penchant for violence and then casts his eyes down and departs the podium with pale disappointment.

It is a year after the inexplicable killing of teenager Michael Brown on a residential Missouri street—a year after his lifeless body was left to rot for hours in the hot sun of our collective racial detachment.   Ferguson city officials have paved over the blood stains; the nation, stomaching one such slaying after another, continues to pave over the stains of our collective disgrace.

The placards and chants of “Hands Up,” “Don’t Shoot,” and “I Can’t Breathe!” fall and fade in our jaded amalgam of blue and red states now smitten with a celebrity driven presidential derby that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with kitsch.

The fact that 24 unarmed black men have been killed this year by police (The Washington Post) is simply not an urgent matter for the vast majority of us white folks.  On the other hand, the news that an overblown billionaire presidential candidate may have disparaged a superstar blonde news anchor about her menstruation cycle is remarkably topical.  We don’t even know how to prioritize our blood issues.

One year after Ferguson, fifty years after Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream!,” African Americans feel less at home, less safe, less secure that any time in decades—this haunting sense is corroborated in several recent polls.  White Americans concur, albeit to a lesser degree, that race relations are so tattered that one can hardly recall the pounding rush of the Civil Rights Movement.

Black lives don’t really matter—not in the national body-psyche of this society.  The last time they really mattered, actually counted, was when white slave traders hoisted their chained, naked bodies on wooden platforms in the public squares of Baltimore, Charles Town, and New Orleans and sold them to plantation and industrial businessmen from Illinois to Florida.

You can’t really become enraged by the current urban combat against black people if you don’t know the history.  Few of us white folks are even aware of the massive betrayal of African American soldiers, pilots, and seamen in the aftermath of World War II.  They came home after fighting the fascists, expecting to share in the fruits of the victory.

Instead, they were systematically segregated once more again, denied equal access to the suburban prosperity that spread.  Their children remained ghettoized in separate, inferior school houses that were unheated.  Their textbooks were hand-me-down volumes discarded by white school districts after being worn out and marked up.  Their brothers, fathers, and uncles were too-often lynched; their sisters and mothers kidnapped and raped.  Painfully few of the white culprits were ever brought up on charges, let alone punished.

We are much more fascinated with the sensationalist vanities of indulgent white celebrities than we are focused on the scandalous suffering of helpless black citizens.  Until that mindset changes, the editorial and armchair hand-wringing about the heartbreaking social chasm between the races will remain gratuitous and dangerous.

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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer.  You may comment to him at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com