A few hours from now, at 10AM this St. Patrick’s Day, a judge in Steubenville Ohio is
expected to announce his verdict in the horrendous case of a 16-year old girl
who was allegedly raped last August by the town’s football stars while dozens
of her peers condemned not the perpetrators but the victim. They tweeted and
texted and Instagrammed and generally celebrated the incident in a viral
version of a celebratory community lynching, where crowds vied for parts of the
strange fruit that was a burned and hung black corpse.
Nowadays the ethnicity of the victim and the
accused is not a part of the news report unless it is somehow germane — the
victim’s words, active pursuit of a suspect, a race crime. It is somewhat
atypical in this case that the names of the defendants — Trent Mays and Ma’lik
Richmond — are mentioned regularly in the news given that they are 17 and 16
respectively — the victim is also 16 — and the case is Juvenile Court.
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| Trent Mays, in foreground and Ma’lik Richmond, rear |
While I always assumed that Ma’lik was African
American, I did not know Trent was Caucasian until I saw his picture for the
first time yesterday. The discovery was relief in the sense that it removes
race from the equation and puts the focus on the boys’ behavior, where it
belongs.
I suspect the boys will be found guilty and
placed in juvenile detention, where they could be held until they turn 21.
A fair and balanced summary of the case can be
found here.
Old
Habits
Old habits die hard. A lot of older black folks
are wont to check the race of the alleged perpetrators whenever news breaks of
an especially heinous crime. This habit isn’t just idle or morbid curiosity; it
has a distinct relationship to self-preservation, for in olden days whenever a
Negro went off the reservation and did something crazy or especially depraved,
the whole black community might be made to pay. This was particularly true in
the South, where often just a rumor or allegation of a Negro’s impropriety
could lead to severe reprisals, including lynching or other brutal acts of
“justice” or “revenge”.
These seemingly random acts of retribution were
actually not random at all. They were part of an elaborate plan of social
control designed to keep Negroes in their place, which was under the heel of
the white man. The reign of terror was so effective that even where blacks
overwhelmingly outnumbered whites, the former were afraid even to register to vote, leaving the political
establishment and law enforcement apparatus to the whims of the local minority.
Though I spent only a few of my formative years
living below the Mason-Dixon Line, so strong was the color barrier in this
country that its residue remains alive with an undeniable potency, all the
stronger because the emotions it arouses — pain, anger, resentment, shame,
fear, guilt — are so powerful and dangerous.
I was born in Washington DC when that city was
culturally a part of the South. Negroes were barred from all manner of public
accommodations, including hotels and restaurants. Black parents back then — and
I’m talking late 1940s, early 1950s — employed a bevy of strategies for raising
their children in ways that protected them from a hostile world.
The strategies of course depended in part on
how and where the parents themselves were raised. Some parents spelled things
out in black and white: in other words, they told it like it was.
My parents took a different tack, probably in
hopes of shielding me from the psychological damage of knowing that most people
in the country considered me to be an inferior human because my parents were
inferior because their parents were inferior because, … Educated black people —
my Houston, Texas-born father and my Richmond, Virginia-born mother each had
three degrees before my eighth birthday — often were consumed by trying to
prove they were as good as white people. Oftentimes this led to feats of
stupendous overachievement. Probably it resulted more often in all sorts of
warped notions that privileged white connections or likeness at the expense of
substantive achievement. Appearances and imitations, as detailed so well in E.
Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie,
became more important in the futile attempt to persuade white folks to like and
accept us.
Back in the day, it seemed that whenever a
black person got really out of hand, it was a setback for the whole race and
this collective struggle for acceptance.
What prompts this extended reminiscence? To
tell the truth, I venture to say most black folks carry this stuff around with
us all the time. It’s not that we want this extra tonnage on our backs but even
today society won’t really let us set it down. If we don’t carry it as a
personal handicap, we nonetheless must observe millions of our less fortunate
brethren who remain trapped not only psychically, but economically and socially
as well. Place matters. Race matters.
It’s Hard Being White in Philadelphia
I have been wrestling for some time with what
to say about “Being White in Philly”, this month’s cover story
in Philadelphia magazine. The piece
is a pathetic example of how not to talk about race, and offers up an
especially noxious kind of paternalism to boot.
There have been several effective rejoinders to
the cover story. One of the best is Daniel Denvir’s article in the Philadelphia
CityPaper. One reason I like
Denvir’s retort is his description of Philadelphia
magazine as their city’s “most white-bread journalistic institution”.
Substitute Cleveland for Philadelphia and you win the prize for
naming our city’s whitest publication in complexion, cultural orientation, and
voice.
One of my favorite bloggers is Wayne Bennett, a
Jamaican American Philadelphia lawyer who writes decidedly un-Philadelphia
lawyer-like commentary under the moniker “Field Negro”. In the first
of his two pieces on this magazine article he quotes a white woman thusly:
What the writer of “White in Philly”
doesn't really have the stones to write about is the poverty that pervades so
many neighborhoods in Philadelphia and crushes people's lives, because his
subscribers on the Main Line or in Cherry Hill don't want their peaceful dream
of entitlement disturbed. So instead, he blends anecdotes into a soothing
milkshake of "See, even nice people with the best possible motives can't
get along with black people because they're SO DARNED TOUCHY. It's not you,
it's them!"
There's a reason why only people in the
suburbs subscribe to this local version of SkyMall. They wouldn't want to read
anything that actually looks at economic inequality, heavens no.
As noted earlier, almost any interracial
discussion is fraught with emotional intensity, whether voiced or suppressed.
When my family moved to Cleveland in the mid fifties, the city had an
undeserved reputation for racial goodwill. The reality was we moved to a town
that was a raging exemplar of de jure segregation and discrimination in
housing, education, and employment. In a benign, Northern sort of way.
We shall continue to misapprehend the nature of
our racial relations when we focus on the many persons of genuine good will in
our communities but overlook the systemic and structural forces that reinforce
inequities deeply rooted in our national and local history.
