As the curtain opens on another school
year and on the start of another course on race and law, I have pondered the
mournful plethora of real life examples to present to students about the nature
of race, racism and law. We start
the course by talking about how the black-white binary, the notion that issues
of race in the United States are framed around a two-tiered hierarchy wherein
blacks are diminished and whites are exalted, is still very much useful for
understanding both historic and contemporary United States racism. Yes, there are other people of
color. And of course their voices
count. But at the beginning and at
the end of the day, some of the most pernicious, ongoing, and intractable race
prejudice is that perpetrated against black people.
We need not look far for examples.
There is, of course, the fatal shooting
of an unarmed black youth named Michael Brown by a white police officer in
Ferguson, Missouri. There
is also the choke hold death of an unarmed man named Eric Garner by a white
police officer in Staten Island, New York, a choking that persisted even though
Garner called out, “I can’t breathe.” A few weeks ago a Dearborn Heights,
Michigan white homeowner was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to
a minimum 17 years in prison for shooting in the face and killing Renisha
McBride, a 19 year old black woman who knocked on the man’s door for help after
an auto accident. The
New Yorker magazine, in describing McBride’s death, related it to the
shooting of Trayvon Martin by a white vigilante and recounted how McBride’s
killing, even in all of its horror, was “a cliché with a casualty,” another all
too commonplace killing of an unarmed black person by an armed white civilian
or white police officer.
These are, of course, examples of some
of the worse cases in black-white relations. Cases that involve racist
practices but do not result in deaths would have to be, by necessity,
classified as less bad. As we see situations such as the revelation that yet
another NBA owner has engaged in racially “insensitive” comments about black
people, we are left to feel grateful that nobody’s dead. If an
owner feels comfortable enough to write in an e-mail to numerous people
that his “theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites,” or that he
wants some white cheerleaders or that he “balked when every fan picked out of
crowd to shoot shots in some time out contest is black,” this is merely an example of his “subtle
biases and preconceptions when it comes to race.” I suppose anything less subtle would have to involve signs
at the game saying “No blacks allowed.”
In the middle of all of
this is the continuous insistence by some people that we are living in a “post-racial”
climate where diversity is a given. But what goes under-discussed and
un-discussed is the specious nature of these claims. Even in neighborhoods and
institutions boasting racial diversity, there are often gaping divides. There
is the careful, cool exclusion of non-white families from neighborhood events
and activities (“Oh, you didn’t get the flyer for the block party? Maybe it
blew away; it was so windy….”).
There are the school-within-a-school strategies that result in virtually
all-white classrooms in overwhelmingly minority schools. There are the stony silences when
black people pass by on the street or arrive in all-white settings, the absent
greetings not because of forgetting who you are but choosing not to demonstrate
remembrance. Sometimes it feels
like child’s play, really. In
fact, my 12 year old recently laughingly observed that only one of her numerous
white former classmates acknowledged knowing her after her recent few years’
absence. That she laughs instead
of cries about it instills a sad sense of pride in my wounded parent heart. She
knows already to look beyond the game being played if she expects to be happy.
But this bitter game is played by children and adults alike, this faux
diversity. It’s a game with
sometimes fatal consequences.
