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<h1 class="content__headline js-score" itemprop="headline">Gary
Younge: Farewell to America
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Wednesday 1 July 2015 <span class="content__dateline-time">01.00 EDT<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-farewell-to-america">http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/01/gary-younge-farewell-to-america</a></small></small></b><br>
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<p><span class="drop-cap"><span class="drop-cap__inner">F</span></span>or
the past couple of years the summers, like hurricanes, have had
names. Not single names like Katrina or Floyd – but full names
like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown. Like hurricanes, their
arrival was both predictable and predicted, and yet somehow,
when they landed, the effect was still shocking.</p>
<p>We do not yet know the name that will be attached to this
particular season. He is still out there, playing Call of Duty,
finding a way to feed his family or working to pay off his
student loans. He (and it probably will be a he) has no idea
that his days are numbered; and we have no idea what the number
of those days will be.</p>
<aside class="element element-rich-link element-rich-link--tag
element--thumbnail element-rich-link--upgraded"
data-component="rich-link-tag" data-link-name="rich-link-tag">
<div class="rich-link tone-special-report--item ">
<div class="rich-link__container">
<div class="rich-link__header">
<h1 class="rich-link__title"><a class="rich-link__link">The
Counted: people killed by police in the United States
in 2015 – interactive</a></h1>
</div>
<div class="rich-link__standfirst u-cf"> The Guardian is
counting the people killed by US law enforcement agencies
this year. Read their stories and contribute to our
ongoing, crowdsourced project </div>
<div class="rich-link__read-more">
<div class="rich-link__arrow">
<svg width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><g fill="none"
fill-rule="evenodd"><path
class="rich-link__arrow-icon" d="m12 0c-6.627 0-12
5.373-12 12 0 6.627 5.373 12 12 12 6.627 0
12-5.373 12-12 0-6.627-5.373-12-12-12m.21
19l-.637-.668
4.888-6.326h-11.465v-1.01h11.465l-4.888-6.333.637-.668
6.79 7.158v.685l-6.79 7.157"></path></g></svg> </div>
<div class="rich-link__read-more-text"> Read more </div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</aside>
<p>The precise alchemy that makes one particular death politically
totemic while others go unmourned beyond their families and
communities is not quite clear. Video helps, but is not
essential. Some footage of cops rolling up like death squads and
effectively executing people who posed no real threat has barely
pricked the popular imagination. When the authorities fail to
heed community outrage, or substantively investigate, let alone
discipline, the police, the situation can become explosive. An
underlying, ongoing tension between authorities and those being
policed has been a factor in some cases. So, we do not know
quite why his death will capture the political imagination in a
way that others will not.</p>
<p>But we do know, with gruesome certainty, that his number will
come up – that one day he will be slain in cold blood by a
policeman (once again it probably will be a man) who is supposed
to protect him and his community. We know this because it is
statistically inevitable and has historical precedent. We know
this because we have seen it happen again and again. We know
this because this is not just how America works; it is how
America was built. Like a hurricane, we know it is coming – we
just do not yet know where or when or how much damage it will
do.</p>
<p>Summer is riot season. It’s when Watts, Newark and Detroit
erupted in violence in the 1960s, sparked by callous policing.
It’s when school is out, pool parties are on and domestic life,
particularly in urban centres, is turned inside-out: from the
living room to the stoop, from the couch to the street. It’s
when tempers get short and resentments bubble up like molten
asphalt. It’s when, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, deferred
dreams explode.</p>
<p>This is not my desire; it is my prediction. You can feel it
building with every new Facebook post, viral video and Twitter
storm. You can hear it from conversations with strangers at post
offices, liquor stores and coffee shops. It is an unpleasant
prediction to make because, ultimately, these riots highlight a
problem they cannot, in themselves, solve; and it is an easy one
to make because, as one bystander in Baltimore put it when
disturbances flared there earlier this year: “You can only put
so much into a pressure cooker before it pop.”</p>
<p>This is the summer I will leave America, after 12 years as a
foreign correspondent, and return to London. My decision to come
back to Britain was prompted by banal, personal factors that
have nothing to do with current events; if my aim was to escape
aggressive policing and racial disadvantage, I would not be
heading to Hackney.</p>
<p>But while the events of the last few years did not prompt the
decision to come back, they do make me relieved that the
decision had already been made. It is why I have not once had
second thoughts.<strong> </strong>If I had to pick a summer to
leave, this would be the one. Another season of black parents
grieving, police chiefs explaining and clueless anchors opining.
Another season when America has to be reminded that black lives
matter because black deaths at the hands of the state have been
accepted as routine for so long. A summer ripe for rage.</p>
<h2>* * *</h2>
<p><strong>I arrived in New York just a few months</strong> before
the Iraq war. Americans seemed either angry at the rest of the
world, angry at each other, or both. The top five books on the
New York Times bestseller list the month I started were: Bush at
War (Bob Woodward’s hagiographic account of the post-9/11 White
House); The Right Man (Bush’s former speechwriter relives his
first year in the White House); Portrait of a Killer (Patricia
Cornwell on Jack the Ripper); The Savage Nation (a rightwing
radio talkshow host saves America from “the liberal assault on
our borders, language and culture”); and Leadership (Republican
former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s post 9/11 victory lap).</p>
<p>There has barely been a quiet moment since. First there was the
jingoism of the Iraq war, then the re-election of George W Bush
in 2004, Hurricane Katrina, disillusionment with the Iraq war,
the “Minutemen” anti-immigration vigilantes, the huge
pro-immigrant “¡Sí se puede!” protests, Barack Obama, Sarah
Palin, the economic crash, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party,
Obama’s reelection and the current rise in anti-racist activism.
Being a foreigner made all these phenomena intriguing.
Politically and morally, I picked sides. But, when reporting, it
was more like anthropology. I saw it as my mission to try and
understand the US: why did poor white people vote against their
economic interests? How did the descendants of immigrants become
xenophobic? Why were people disappointed in Obama when he had
promised so little? The search for the answer was illuminating,
even when I never found it or didn’t like it.</p>
<p>But the cultural distance I enjoyed as a Briton in a foreign
country felt like a blended veneer of invincibility and
invisibility. I thought of myself less as a participant than an
onlooker. While reporting from rural Mississippi in 2003, I
stopped to ask directions at the house of an old white couple,
and they threatened to shoot me. I thought this was funny. I got
back into my car sharpish and drove off – but I never once
thought they would actually shoot me. How crazy would that be?
When I got home, I told my wife and brother-in-law, who are
African American. Their parents grew up in the South under
segregation; even today, my mother-in-law wouldn’t stop her car
in Mississippi for anything but petrol. They didn’t think it was
funny at all: what on earth did I think I was doing, stopping to
ask old white folk in rural Mississippi for directions?</p>
<p>Yet, somewhere along the way, I became invested. That was
partly about time: as I came to know people – rather than just
interviewing them – I came to relate to the issues more
intimately. When someone close to you struggles with chronic
pain because they have no healthcare, has their kitchen window
pierced by gunfire or cannot pay a visit to their home country
because they are undocumented, your relationship to issues like
health reform, gun control or immigration is transformed. Not
because your views change but because knowing and understanding
something simply does not provide the same intensity as having
it in your life.</p>
<p>But my investment was primarily about circumstances. On the
weekend in 2007 that Barack Obama declared his presidential
candidacy, our son was born. Six years later, we had a daughter.
For the most part I have kept my English accent. But my language
relating to children is reflexively American: diapers,
strollers, pacifiers, recess, candy and long pants. I have only
ever been a parent here – a role for which my own upbringing in
England provides no real reference point. One summer evening, a
couple years after we moved to Chicago, our daughter was
struggling to settle down and so my wife decided to take a short
walk to the local supermarket to bob her to sleep in the
carrier. On the way back there was shooting in the street and
she had to seek shelter in a local barbershop. When the snow
finally melted this year one discarded gun was found in the
alley behind our local park and another showed up in the alley
behind my son’s school. My days of being an onlooker were over.
I was dealing with daycare, summer camps, schools, doctor’s
visits, parks and other parents. The day we brought my son home,
<a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/opinion/05herbert.html"
data-link-name="in body link" data-component="in-body-link"
class=" u-underline">an article in the New York Times</a>
pointed out that in America “a black male who drops out of high
school is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison than
one with a bachelor’s degree”. Previously, I’d have found that
interesting and troubling. Now it was personal. I had skin in
the game. Black skin in a game where the odds are stacked
against it.</p>
<h2>* * *</h2>
<p><strong>Obama’s ascent, I was told by many</strong> and
frequently during his campaign, would change these odds.
Whenever I asked “How?” no one could say exactly. But his very
presence, they insisted, would provide a marker for my son and
all who look like him. I never believed that. First of all, one
person cannot undo centuries of discrimination, no matter how
much nominal power they have. Second, given the institutions
into which Obama would be embedded – namely the Democratic party
and the presidency – there would only ever be so much he could
or would do. He was aspiring to sit atop a system awash with
corporate donations in which congressional seats are openly
gerrymandered and 41% of the upper chamber can block almost
anything. He was the most progressive candidate viable for the
presidency, which says a great deal, given the alternatives, but
means very little, given what would be needed to significantly
shift the dial on such issues as race and inequality.</p>
<p>Pointing this out amid the hoopla of his candidacy made you
sound like Eeyore. I was delighted when he won. But somehow I
could never be quite as delighted as some people felt I should
have been. When Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina
Democratic primary – in the first southern state to secede from
the union, which sparked the civil war, where the Confederate
flag still flies above the state capitol and a white supremacist
recently gunned down nine parishioners at a black church – the
crowds chanted “Race Doesn’t Matter”. (An odd rallying cry,
since it was precisely because he was a black candidate that
they were shouting it; it’s not like Hillary’s crowd would have
shouted the same thing if she had won.)</p>
<p>The symbolic advantages of Obama’s election were clear. For two
years I pushed my son around in his stroller surrounded by a
picture of a black man framed by the words “Hope” and “Change”.
A year or so after Obama came to office, my son had a playdate
with a four-year-old white friend who looked up from his Thomas
the Tank Engine and told my son: “You’re black.” It was a
reasonable thing for a child of that age to point out – he was
noticing difference, not race. But when my son looked at me for
a cue, I now had a new arrow in my quiver to deflect any
potential awkwardness. “That’s right,” I said. “Just like the
president.”</p>
<p>But the substantial benefits were elusive. Obama inherited an
economic crisis that hurt African Americans more than any other
community. The discrepancy between black and white employment
and wealth grew during his first few years and has barely
narrowed since. In 2010, I used this anecdote in a column by way
of pointing out the limited symbolic value of having a black
president. “True, it is something,”<a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/mar/14/america-race-gender-obama-diversity"
data-link-name="in body link" data-component="in-body-link"
class=" u-underline"> I wrote</a>. “But when Thomas is safely
back in the station and the moment is over, it is not very much.
Because for all the white noise emanating from the Tea Party
movement, it has been black Americans who have suffered most
since Obama took office. Over the last 14 months the gap between
my son’s life chances and his friend’s have been widening.”</p>
<p>This last statement was as undeniably true as it was apparently
controversial. I had not claimed that my son was likely to do
badly, simply that his odds for success were far worse than the
kid he was playing with, and that they were further
deteriorating. <a
href="http://www.studentimpactproject.org/reports"
data-link-name="in body link" data-component="in-body-link"
class=" u-underline">A study in 2014</a> found that a black
college student has the same chances of getting a job as a white
high-school dropout. “As the recession has dragged on,” <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/us/01race.html?_r=0"
data-link-name="in body link" data-component="in-body-link"
class=" u-underline">the New York Times pointed out</a> just a
couple months before my son’s playdate, the disparity between
black and white unemployment “has been even more pronounced for
those with college degrees, compared with those without.
Education, it seems, does not level the playing field – in fact,
it appears to have made it more uneven.” But insisting that
racism would have a material effect on my son’s life ruffled
some readers’ feathers.</p>
<p>“Nonsense,” wrote one commenter. “Your middle-class status
means his future will have more in common with his white friends
than any poor black kid.” Another – a Guardian contributor, no
less – also chimed in: “For you to claim shared victimhood on
skin colour alone is highly disingenuous. Your son is highly
likely to do OK, to say the least. He has most of the advantages
in the world.”</p>
<p>Such responses betrayed complete ignorance about the lived
experience of race in a country as segregated as the United
States. Class does makes a big difference, of course: this is
America. We have healthcare, jobs, university educations and a
car; we live in a community with reasonable schools,
supermarkets and restaurants. In short, we have resources and
therefore we have options.</p>
<p>We do not, however, have the option not to be black. And in
this time and this place that is no minor factor. That is not
“claiming shared victimhood”, it is recognising a fact of life.
Class offers a range of privileges; but it is not a sealant that
protects you from everything else. If it was, rich women would
never get raped and wealthy gay couples could marry all around
the world.</p>
<p>To even try to have the kind of gilded black life to which
these detractors alluded, we would have to do far more than just
revel in our bank accounts and leverage our cultural capital. We
would have to live in an area with few other black people, since
black neighbourhoods are policed with insufficient respect for
life or liberty; send our children to a school with few other
black students, since majority-black schools are underfunded;
tell them not to wear anything that would associate them with
black culture, since doing so would make them more vulnerable to
profiling; tell them not to mix with other black children, since
they are likely to live in the very areas and go to the very
schools from which we would be trying to escape; and not let the
children go out after dark, since being young and black after
sunset makes the police suspect that you have done or are about
to do something.</p>
<p>The list could go on. None of this self-loathing behaviour
would provide any guarantees, of course. Racism does what it
says on the packet; it discriminates against people on the
grounds of race. It can be as arbitrary in its choice of victim
as it is systemic in its execution. And while it never works
alone (but in concert with class, gender and a host of other
rogue characters), it can operate independently. No one is going
to be checking my bank account or professional status when they
are looking at my kids.</p>
<p>Trayvon Martin was walking through a gated community when
George Zimmerman pegged him for a thug and shot him dead.
Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator, was in one of
Charleston’s most impressive churches when Dylann Roof murdered
him and eight others.</p>
<p>I have not only never met an African American who thought they
could buy themselves the advantages of a white American; I have
yet to meet one who thinks they can even buy themselves out of
the disadvantages of being black. All you can do is limit the
odds. And when one in three black boys born in 2001 is destined
for the prison system, those odds are pretty bad. Having a black
man in the White House has not changed that.</p>
<h2>* * *</h2>
<p><strong>Most days, the park closest to us</strong> looks like
Sesame Street. White, black and Vietnamese American kids
climbing, swinging and sliding. Occasionally, particularly late
on weekday afternoons, teenagers show up. Like adolescents the
western world over, they are bored, broke, horny and lost. They
don’t want to stay at home, but can’t afford to be anywhere that
costs money, and so they come to the public space most
approximate to their needs, where they squeeze into swings that
are meant for smaller kids and joke, flirt and banter. Very
occasionally they swear and get a little rowdy – but nothing
that an adult could not deal with by simply asking them to keep
the language down because there are little kids around. Oh, and
in this park the teenagers are usually black.</p>
<p>Their presence certainly changes the mood. But the only time it
ever really gets tense is when the police come. The better
police chat with them, the worse ones interrogate them. Either
way, the presence of armed, uniformed people in this children’s
space is both unsettling and unnecessary. The smaller kids and
those new to the park imagine something seriously wrong must
have happened for the police to be there; the older ones (by
which I mean those aged seven and over), and those who are
already familiar with the drill just shrug: the cops are in our
park again. It is difficult to tell which response is worse.</p>
<p>Once, when some adolescents were hanging out relatively quietly
one afternoon, I struck up a conversation with a white woman.
Her son was roughly the same age as mine, we both lived nearby
and neither of our kids would have to cross a road to get to the
park. We were discussing at what age we thought it would be
appropriate to let our boys come by themselves. “The thing is,
you just don’t know if it’s going to be quiet or if the junior
gangbangers are going to be hanging around,” she said, gesturing
to the youths on the swings.</p>
<p>I was stunned. Whenever I have written about police killings at
least one reader reminds me that black people are most likely to
be killed by black people. This is both true and irrelevant.
First, because all Americans are overwhelmingly likely to be
killed by assailants of their own race, so what some brand “<a
href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/15/the-trayvon-martin-killing-and-the-myth-of-black-on-black-crime.html"
data-link-name="in body link" data-component="in-body-link"
class=" u-underline">black-on-black crime</a>” should, more
accurately, just be called crime. But also because black people
are not, by dint of their melanin content, entrusted to protect
and serve the public. The police are. Over the last decade I
have reported from many impoverished neighbourhoods, populated
by all races, where I have felt unsafe. That hasn’t made me fear
black people or any other racial group; it has just made me
loathe poverty and gun culture in general, since it is that
toxic combination that both drives the crime and makes it
lethal.</p>
<p>This woman and I were looking at the same kids but seeing quite
different things.</p>
<p>“What makes you think they’re going to become gangbangers?” I
asked. She shrugged. The conversation pretty much dried up after
that.</p>
<p>There is a section of white society – a broad section that
includes affable mothers who will speak to black strangers like
me in the park – who understand black kids as an inherent
threat. Beyond the segregated ghettos where few white people
venture, the presence of black youth apparently marks not just
the potential for trouble but the arrival of it. When George
Zimmerman saw Trayvon Martin, he didn’t see a 17-year-old boy
walking home from the store. He saw someone “real suspicious”,
“up to no good”, whom he assumed bore some responsibility for
recent burglaries.</p>
<p>“Fucking punks,” he told the police, referring to Trayvon.
“These assholes, they always get away.”</p>
<p>Indeed black children are often not even regarded as children
at all. In Goose Creek, South Carolina, police demanded DNA
samples from two middle school students after they were mistaken
for a 32-year-old suspect. After the killing of Tamir Rice – the
12-year-old shot dead by police in Cleveland after someone
reported him brandishing what they assumed was a “probably fake”
gun – a police spokesman said it was his own fault. “Tamir Rice
is in the wrong,” he said. “He’s menacing. He’s 5ft 7in, 191
pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures.
He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body.” When testifying before the
grand jury into the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Darren Wilson described his assailant more like an animal than a
18-year-old: “He looked up at me and had the most intense
aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a
demon, that’s how angry he looked.” Even after Wilson shot Brown
he continued to depict him as both physically superhuman and
emotionally subhuman. “He was almost bulking up to run through
the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting him. And
the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I
wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”</p>
<p>The evidence is not merely anecdotal. A study last year
published in the American Psychological Association’s online
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology revealed that white
Americans overestimated the age of black boys over the age of 10
by an average of four and a half years; white respondents also
assumed that black children were more culpable than whites or
Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with serious
crimes. “Children in most societies are considered to be in a
distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the
need for protection,” <a
href="http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-older.aspx"
data-link-name="in body link" data-component="in-body-link"
class=" u-underline">wrote Phillip Atiba Goff</a> PhD, of the
University of California, Los Angeles.<strong> </strong>“Our
research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for
their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the
assumption that children are essentially innocent.” My son is
tall for his age; these are the things you worry about.</p>
<p>It wasn’t long before my wife and I began to notice the degree
to which some white adults felt entitled to shout at black
children – be it in the street, or on school trips – for
infractions either minor or imagined.</p>
<p>Last summer, on the afternoon I arrived home from reporting on
the disturbances after Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson,
Missouri, there was a barbecue and music at the local park. I
took the kids. The park has a water feature that shoots wet jets
from the ground and sprays kids in fountains from all sides as
they paddle around. The younger ones peel down to their
underwear while the older ones just pile in whatever they have
on. It was a scorching day and my son and several other kids
were having a water fight – a tame affair with very little
collateral damage for those not involved beyond the odd
sprinkling. At one stage, while in hot pursuit of his main
rival, my son splashed a woman on her leg. She yelled at him as
though he’d hit her with a brick.</p>
<p>I’d seen the whole thing and ran over.</p>
<p>“What’s the problem?” I said.</p>
<p>“Look. He’s covered me in water,” she shouted.</p>
<p>I looked. She was barely wet. But even if he had …</p>
<p>“You’re standing in a children’s park, on a hot day, next to a
water feature,” I said. “Deal with it. Just stop shouting at
him.”</p>
<p>“Don’t you tell me what to do,” she barked.</p>
<p>“Now you’re shouting at me,” I said. “Just stop it.”</p>
<p>“Who the hell are you?” she yelled.</p>
<p>“I’m his dad that’s who.”</p>
<p>“You’re nobody, that’s who you are,” she bellowed. “Nobody.”</p>
<h2>* * *</h2>
<p><strong>One of the first stories I covered</strong> on my
arrival was the funeral of Mamie Till Mobley, the 81-year-old
mother of the late Emmett Till. In 1955 Mamie sent her
14-year-old son, Emmett, from Chicago to rural Mississippi to
spend his summer holiday with family. She packed him off with a
warning: “If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white
person goes past,” she told him, “do it willingly.”</p>
<p>Emmett didn’t follow her advice. While in the small town of
Money, in the Delta region, he either said “Bye, baby” or
wolf-whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. Three days
later his body was fished out of the Tallahatchie river with a
bullet in his skull, an eye gouged out and his forehead crushed
on one side.</p>
<p>Raising a black child in a racist society poses a very
particular set of challenges. On the one hand, you want them to
be proud and confident of who they are. On the other, you have
to teach them that they are vulnerable precisely because of who
they are, in the knowledge that awareness of that vulnerability
just might save their life. We are trying to raise
self-confident children for long lives, not hashtags for
slaughter.</p>
<p>Explaining the complex historical and social forces that make
such a dance necessary is not easy at the best of times. Making
them comprehensible to a child is nigh impossible without gross
simplifications and cutting corners. Once, during our 10-minute
walk to daycare, my son asked if we could take another route.
“Why?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Because that way they stop all the black boys,” he said.</p>
<p>He was right. Roughly twice a week we would pass young black
men being frisked or arrested, usually on the way home. He was
also four, and until that point I was not aware that he had even
noticed. I tried to make him feel safe.</p>
<p>“Well don’t worry. You’re with me and they’re not going to stop
us,” I told him.</p>
<p>“Why not?” he asked.</p>
<p>“Because we haven’t done anything,” I said.</p>
<p>“What have they done?” he asked.</p>
<p>He had me. From then on we took another route.</p>
<p>When I interviewed Maya Angelou in 2002, she told me that the
September 11 attacks of the previous year were understood
differently by African Americans. “Living in a state of terror
was new to many white people in America,” she said. “But black
people have been living in a state of terror in this country for
more than 400 years.” It is that state of terror that has been
laid bare these last few years.</p>
<p>The American polity and media episodically “discovers” this
daily reality in much the same way that teenagers discover sex –
urgently, earnestly, voraciously and carelessly, with great
self-indulgence but precious little self-awareness. They have
always been aware of it but somehow when confronted with it, it
nonetheless takes them by surprise.</p>
<p>The week I arrived, in December 2002, the Senate minority
leader, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott, resigned from his
leadership position after he said in a speech that America would
have been a better place had the segregationist Strom Thurmond
won the presidency in 1948. The mainstream media saw nothing
outrageous in this – as if it was just the kind of thing a
conservative southern senator might say. It took bloggers to
make it a story. As I write, some southern states are debating
whether to keep the Confederate flag flying on state grounds in
various guises – as though it took nine people dying on their
doorstep to understand its racist connotations.</p>
<p>It is as though the centuries-old narrative of racial
inequality is too tiresome to acknowledge, except as a footnote,
until it appears in dramatic fashion, as it did after Hurricane
Katrina or the protests in Ferguson. At that point the bored
become suddenly scandalised. In a nation that prides itself on
always moving forward, the notion that they are “still dealing
with this” feels like an affront to the national character.
That’s why Obama’s candidacy had such a simple and uplifting
appeal to so many Americans. As the radical academic and 1970s
icon Angela Davis explained to me in 2007, it represented “a
model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference,
the change that brings about no change”.</p>
<p>This most recent episode of racial awakening has lasted longer
than most. For the last couple of years the brutal banality of
daily life for some people in this country has become visible
and undeniable to those who have no immediate connection to it.
But nothing new has happened. There has been no spike in police
brutality. What’s new is that people are looking. And thanks to
new technology (namely the democratisation of the ability to
film and distribute), they have lots to look at. As a result, a
significant section of white America is outraged at the sight of
what it had previously chosen to ignore, while a dwindling but
still sizeable and vocal few still refuse to believe their eyes.</p>
<h2>* * *</h2>
<p><strong>I’ve never found it particularly useful</strong> to
compare racisms – as though one manifestation might be better
than another. Every society, regardless of its racial
composition, has overlapping and interweaving hierarchies.
Insisting on the superiority of one over another suggests there
are racisms out there worth having – a race to the bottom with
no moral centre.</p>
<p>In June 1998, as the public inquiry into the murder of Stephen
Lawrence laid bare one of the more insidious examples of British
racism, news arrived from Jasper, Texas, about the murder of
James Byrd. Byrd, an African American, had been picked up by
three men, one of whom he knew and two of whom were white
supremacists. Instead of driving him home, they took him to a
remote country road, beat him, urinated on him and chained him
by his ankles to their pickup truck before dragging him for more
than a mile until his head came off. Then they went for a
barbecue.</p>
<p>The next day, during an editorial meeting at the Guardian which
featured a discussion of the Lawrence inquiry followed by the
Byrd murder, one of my colleagues remarked, of Byrd’s killing:
“Well at least we don’t do that here.”</p>
<p>“That will be of little comfort to Doreen and Neville
Lawrence,” I thought.</p>
<p>I have more cousins in the US than in Britain. They are doing
fine. At one stage I fully intended to immigrate here. While
that plan no longer stands, it still doesn’t strike me as
insane.</p>
<p>While I have been in America, I have not been shot at,
arrested, imprisoned or otherwise seriously inconvenienced by
the state. I do not live in the hollowed out, jobless zones of
urban economic despair to which many African Americans have been
abandoned. I have been shouted at in a park, taken different
routes to school, and occasionally dealt with bigoted officials.
(While driving through Mississippi to cover Katrina I approached
a roadblock that all the other journalists had easily passed
through, only to have a policeman pat the gun in his holster and
turn me around). These experiences are aggravating. They are not
life-threatening.</p>
<p>I am not Michael Brown. But then Michael Brown wasn’t Michael
Brown before he was shot dead and had his body left on the
street for four hours; Eric Garner was just a man trying to sell
cigarettes in the street before he was choked to death in Staten
Island; Tamir Rice was just a boisterous kid acting out in a
park before a policeman leaped out of his squad car and shot him
within seconds. Being shot dead by the police or anyone else is
not the daily experience of black people in America.</p>
<p>But what became clear following the Department of Justice
report into the Ferguson police force was just how extreme and
commonplace these aggravations could be. To cite just a few
examples: between 2007 to 2014, one woman in Ferguson was
arrested twice, spent six days in jail and paid $550 as a result
of one parking ticket for which she was originally charged $151.
She tried to pay in smaller instalments - $25 or $50 a time -
but the court refused to accept anything less than the full
payment, which she could not afford. Seven years after the
original infraction she still owed $541 – this was how the town
raised its revenue. It was not a glitch in the system; it was
the system.</p>
<p>Then there was the 14-year-old boy that the Ferguson police
found in an abandoned building, who was chased down by a dog
that bit his ankle and his left arm as he protected his face.
The boy says officers kicked him in the head and then laughed
about it after. The officers say they thought he was armed; he
wasn’t. Department of Justice investigators found that every
time a police dog in Ferguson bit someone, the victim was black.</p>
<p>Then there was the man pulled out of his house by the police
after reports of an altercation inside. As they dragged him out
he told them: “You don’t have a reason to lock me up.”</p>
<p>“Nigger, I can find something to lock you up on,” the officer
told him.</p>
<p>“Good luck with that,” the man responded. The officer slammed
the man’s face into a wall and he fell to the floor.</p>
<p>“Don’t pass out, motherfucker, because I’m not carrying you to
my car,” the officer is claimed to have said.</p>
<p>This was the same month Brown was killed. Were it not for the
disturbances following Brown’s death, there would have been no
investigation – not only would we have heard nothing of these
things but, because no light had been shone on them, the
Ferguson police would be carrying on with the same level of
impunity. This was a small midwestern suburb few had heard of –
unremarkable in every way, which is precisely what makes the
goings on there noteworthy. If it was happening there, then it
could be happening anywhere.</p>
<p>It is exhausting. When the videos of brutality go viral I can’t
watch them unless I have to write about them. I don’t need to be
shocked – which is just as well because these videos emerge with
such regularity that they cease to be shocking. Were it not for
the thrill of seeing an unjaded younger generation reviving the
best of the nation’s traditions of anti-racist resistance, I
would be in despair.</p>
<p>The altercations in the park, the rerouted walks to school, the
aggravations of daily life are the lower end of a continuum – a
dull drumbeat that occasionally crescendos into violent
confrontation and even social conflagration. As spring turns to
summer the volume keeps ratcheting up.</p>
<p>“Terror,” the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes in his book
Fear of Small Numbers, “is first of all the terror of the next
attack.” The terrorism resides not just in the fact that it
happens, but that one is braced for the possibility that it
could happen to you at any moment. Seven children and teenagers
are shot on an average day in the US. I have just finished
writing a book in which I take a random day and interview the
families and friends of those who perished. Ten young people
died the day I chose. Eight were black. All of the black parents
said they had assumed this could happen to their son.</p>
<p>As one bereaved dad told me: “You wouldn’t be doing your job as
a father if you didn’t.”</p>
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