Tim Wise's Blog, page 8

#WhiteLiesMatter, Part Three: Debunking Racist Apologetics One Fact at a Time

Some more corrections to common right-wing “wisdom…”

Lie: Blacks have job edge over whites because of “reverse discrimination.” Fact: Recent black college grads 2.5x more…

Posted by Tim Wise on Thursday, May 21, 2015

Lie: Asian success proves that racism is dead. Fact: Whites w/ a high school diploma or college degree, and of the same…

Posted by Tim Wise on Thursday, May 21, 2015

Lie: Black superstars prove there is equal opportunity in the U.S. Fact: The wealthiest 400 white people in the country…

Posted by Tim Wise on Friday, May 22, 2015

Lie: Blacks can move up the economic ladder as easily as anyone. Fact: Even for those born middle class, whites are…

Posted by Tim Wise on Friday, May 22, 2015

Lie: The War on Poverty made blacks worse off. Fact: Black poverty fell 43% from 1959-1973 as anti-poverty programs…

Posted by Tim Wise on Friday, May 22, 2015

#WhiteLiesMatter – Part Two: Debunking Racist Apologetics One Fact at a Time

Well that didn’t take long.

Shortly after I began posting #WhiteLiesMatter entries on Twitter, naturally the white nationalist trolls at American Renaissance decided to chime in, claiming that I had misrepresented one of the data points, and creating their own hashtag #WiseLiesMatter.

Very pithy. Too bad their “correction” was total bullshit.

They insisted that I was misrepresenting the data on black homicide rates. I had noted that since 1950, black male homicide was down by 37%, and had later gone in and tweeted below that (and then corrected it on Facebook), that actually for men the number was a one-third reduction, and 37% for blacks overall. Not only did AmRen miss that correction tweet, they said I was fudging by saying black homicide rates were down, because those numbers only refer to the homicide death rate for blacks, per capita (i.e., their rate of victimization), rather than their rate of offending. In other words, the white nationalists are implying that blacks are murdering more people now than ever, per capita, even if they themselves are less likely to die from murder than before. And of course, the implication they want people to draw is what? That they’re killing whitey! Run for the hills!

But actually, black homicide offending is also way down. From 1976-2005, which is the latest data I was able to find on this, the black homicide offending rate fell 43 percent. So that’s even bigger than the victimization decline. Even though that data ends ten years ago, homicide rates for all races have continued to fall since that time, so the rate today would be even lower, and thus, the decline in black homicide offending even bigger than the 43 percent figure.

Oh, and here’s another entry…

Lie: Black substance abuse higher No: Drug use rufly = but whites booze more http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2014..., http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2014... … #WhiteLiesMatter

Posted by Tim Wise on Thursday, May 21, 2015

#WhiteLiesMatter: Debunking Right-Wing Racist Apologetics One Fact at a Time

The first installments in #WhiteLiesMatter, a hashtag series I intend to post regularly. The series will debunk, with links embedded, various right-wing racist claims about people of color.

Lie: Black teen pregnancy a growing crisis. Fact: Since 1970, fertility rate for black girls 15-17 down 81% http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2014... … #WhiteLiesMatter

Posted by Tim Wise on Thursday, May 21, 2015

Lie: Nonmarital black birthrate skyrocketing. Fact: Births to single black women down 35% since ’70 http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2014... … #WhiteLiesMatter

Posted by Tim Wise on Thursday, May 21, 2015

Lie: Black Male murder rate exploding. No. Black male homicide rate now one-third below rate in 1950 and 60 percent below rate in 1970… http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2014... … #WhiteLiesMatter

Posted by Tim Wise on Thursday, May 21, 2015

Lie: Black students are especially dangerous. Fact: White students are more likely than black students to carry weapons http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2014... … #WhiteLiesMatter

Posted by Tim Wise on Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Crime of Innocence: White Denial, Black Rebellion and the Cost of American Obliviousness

Though perhaps overused, there are few statements that so thoroughly burrow to the heart of the nation’s racial condition as the following, written fifty-three years ago by James Baldwin:

…this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it…but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime

Indeed, and in the wake of the Baltimore uprising that began last week after the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, they are words worth remembering.

It is bad enough that much of white America sees fit to lecture black people about the proper response to police brutality, economic devastation and perpetual marginality, having ourselves rarely been the targets of any of these. It is bad enough that we deign to instruct black people whose lives we have not lived, whose terrors we have not faced, and whose gauntlets we have not run, about violence; this, even as we enjoy the national bounty over which we currently claim possession solely as a result of violence. I beg to remind you, George Washington was not a practitioner of passive resistance. Neither the early colonists nor the nation’s founders fit within the Gandhian tradition. There were no sit-ins at King George’s palace, no horseback freedom rides to affect change. There were just guns, lots and lots of guns.

We are here because of blood, and mostly that of others; here because of our insatiable and rapacious desire to take by force the land and labor of those others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Rather, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so.

Which is why it always strikes me as precious the way so many white Americans insist (as if preening for a morality contest of some sorts) that “we don’t burn down our own neighborhoods when we get angry.” This, in supposed contrast to black and brown folks who engage in such presumptively self-destructive irrationality as this. On the one hand, it simply isn’t true. We do burn our own communities, we do riot, and for far less valid reasons than any for which persons of color have ever hoisted a brick, a rock, or a bottle.We do so when our teams lose the big game or win the big game; or because of something called Pumpkin Festival; or because veggie burritos cost $10 at Woodstock ’99 and there weren’t enough Porta-Potties by the time of the Limp Bizkit set; or because folks couldn’t get enough beer at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake; or because surfers (natch); or St. Patty’s Day in Albany; or because Penn State fired Joe Paterno; or because it’s a Sunday afternoon in Ames, Iowa; and we do it over and over and over again. Far from mere amateur hooliganism, our riots are indeed violent affairs that have been known to endanger the safety and lives of police, as with the infamous 1998 riot at Washington State University. To wit:

The crowd then attacked the officers from all sides for two hours with rocks, beer bottles, signposts, chairs, and pieces of concrete, allegedly cheering whenever an officer was struck and injured. Twenty-three officers were injured, some suffering concussions and broken bones.

Seventeen years later, one still waits for the avalanche of conservative ruminations regarding the pathologies of whites in Pullman, whose disrespect for authority suggests a larger culture of dysfunction, no doubt taught to them by their rural, corn-fed families and symbolized by the easily recognizable gang attire of Carhartt work coats and backwards baseball caps.

On the other hand, it is undeniably true that when it comes to our political anger and frustration (as contrasted with that brought on by alcohol and athletics) we white folks are pretty good at not torching our own communities. This is mostly because we are too busy eviscerating the communities of others—those against whom our anger is aimed. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Panama, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Manila, and on down the line.

When you have the power you can take out your hatreds and frustrations directly upon the bodies of others. This is what we have done, not only in the above mentioned examples but right here at home. The so-called ghetto was created and not accidentally. It was designed as a virtual holding pen—a concentration camp were we to insist upon honest language—within which impoverished persons of color would be contained. It was created by generations of housing discrimination, which limited where its residents could live. It was created by decade after decade of white riots against black people whenever they would move into white neighborhoods. It was created by deindustrialization and the flight of good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas.

And all of that is violence too. It is the kind of violence that the powerful, and only they, can manifest. One needn’t throw a Molotov cocktail through a window when one can knock down the building using a bulldozer or crane operated with public money. One need not loot a store when one can loot the residents of the community as happened in Ferguson—giving out tickets to black folks for minor infractions so as to rack up huge fines and fees, thereby funding city government on the backs of the poor. Zoning laws, eminent domain, redlining, predatory lending, stop-and-frisk: all of these are forms of violence, however much white America fails to understand that. They do violence to the opportunities and dreams of millions, living in neighborhoods most of us have never visited. Indeed, in neighborhoods we consider so God-forsaken that we even have a phone app now to help us avoid them.

As I was saying, it is bad enough that we think it appropriate to admonish persons of color about violence or to say that it “never works”—especially when in fact it does. We are, after all, here, are we not? Living proof that violence works and quite well at that, thank you very much. What is worse, as per Baldwin, is our insistence that we bear no responsibility for the conditions that have brought about the current crisis, and that indeed we need not even know about those conditions. That innocence, as Baldwin expressed it, was the crime, because it betrays a non-chalance that ensures the perpetuation of all the injustices against which those presumed to be uncivilized are rebelling.

White America, as it turns out, has a long and storied tradition of not knowing, and I don’t mean this in the sense of truly blameless ignorance, for this ignorance is nothing if not cultivated by the larger workings of the culture. We have come by this obliviousness honestly, but yet in a way for which we cannot escape culpability. It’s not as if the truth hasn’t been out there all along. It was there in 1965, for instance, when the majority of white Californians responded to the rebellion in the Watts section of Los Angeles by insisting that it was the fault of a “lack of respect for law and order” or the work of “outside agitators,” while only one in five believed it was due to persistent unemployment and the economic conditions of the community. The truth was there, but apparently imperceptible to most whites when we said in the mid-1960s—within mere months of the time that formal apartheid had been lifted with the Civil Rights Act of 1964—that the present situation of black Americans was mostly their own fault, while only one in four thought white racism, past or present or some combination of the two, might be the culprit (1).

Even before the passage of national civil rights laws in the 1960s, whites were convinced there was nothing wrong. In 1962, eighty-five percent of whites said black children had just as good a chance as white children to get a good education in their communities—a claim so self-evidently absurd in retrospect that it calls into question the ability of whites to perceive even the most elemental realities of the country in which they lived. And by 1969, a mere year after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., forty-four percent of whites told a Newsweek/Gallup National Opinion Survey that blacks had a better chance than they did to get a good paying job—two times as many as said they would have a worse chance. In the same poll, eighty percent of whites said blacks had an equal or better chance for a good education than whites did, while only seventeen percent said they would have a worse opportunity (2).

The history of feigned white “innocence” actually goes back quite a ways before that of course. Even in the 1850s, during a period when black bodies were enslaved on forced labor camps known as plantations by the moral equivalent of kidnappers, respected white voices saw no issue worth addressing. Indeed, according to Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a well-respected physician of the 19th century, enslavement was such a benign institution that any black person who tried to escape its loving embrace must clearly be suffering from a mental illness. In this case, Cartwright called it “Drapetomania,” a malady that could be cured by keeping the enslaved in a “child-like state,” and by regularly employing “mild whipping” (3).

In short, most white Americans are like that friend you have, or perhaps relative, who never went to medical school, but went to Google this morning and now feels certain he or she is perfectly qualified to diagnose your every pain and discomfort. As with your friend and the med school to which they never gained entry, most white folks never took classes on the history of racial domination and subordination, but are sure we know more about it than those who actually did—who more than merely taking the class actually lived the subject matter—and whose very lives have depended upon something far greater than a mere pass-fail arrangement. One wonders (or perhaps most don’t and that is the problem) how a person can attain the age of adulthood and be viewed as educated, as remotely competent to engage with their society, to vote, to participate in the lifeblood of American democracy while knowing nothing of the lived experiences of their fellow countrymen and countrywomen?

When white folks ask “why are they so angry, why do they run from police, and why do some among them loot?” we betray no real interest in knowing the answers to those questions—which answers we could have found on the same internet we so often use to bash black people on Twitter—but rather, reveal our own intellectual nakedness, our hatred for truth, our utterly ahistorical understanding of our own society. We query as if history did not happen, because for us it did not.

And so we need know nothing, apparently, about the forces that really destroyed urban America, and long before anyone in Baltimore decided to attack a CVS or a liquor store. For instance, University of Alabama History Professor Raymond Mohl has noted that by the early 1960s, nearly 40,000 housing units per year were being demolished in urban communities (mostly of color) to make way for interstate highway construction, begun under the Eisenhower Administration. Another 40,000 were being knocked down annually as part of so-called urban “renewal,” which facilitated the creation of parking lots, office parks and shopping centers in working class and low-income residential spaces. By the late 1960s, the annual toll would rise to nearly 70,000 houses or apartments destroyed every year for the interstate effort alone. Three-fourths of persons displaced from their homes were black, and a disproportionate share of the rest were Latino (4). Less than ten percent of persons displaced by urban renewal and interstate construction had new single-resident or family housing to go to afterward, as cities rarely built new housing to take the place of that which had been destroyed. Instead, displaced families had to rely on crowded apartments, double up with relatives, or move into run-down public housing projects (5). In all, about one-fifth of all African American housing in the nation was destroyed by the forces of so-called economic development.

Importantly, this displacement of impoverished persons of color was no unintended consequence of the highway program. To the contrary, it was foreseen and accepted as a legitimate cost of progress. In 1965, a congressional committee acknowledged that the highway system was likely to displace a million people before it was finished. But due to racial discrimination in suburban and outlying areas, persons of color displaced had nowhere to turn for housing. Certainly the white developers weren’t thinking of challenging the blatant racism in lending or zoning that was keeping their suburban spaces all-white. In fact, at the same time black and brown housing was being destroyed, millions of white families were procuring government guaranteed loans (through the FHA and VA loan programs) that were almost entirely off-limits to people of color (6). So, ironically, the government was reducing the housing stock for people of color at the same time it was expanding it for whites. In fact, since the interstate program made “white flight” easier and cheaper than ever before, it can even be said that white middle-class housing access was made possible because of the destruction of housing for African American and Latino communities (7).

The destruction of urban residential space prompted citizen protests across the nation, including a substantial movement in Baltimore where the impacts of highway construction, urban renewal and ghettoization were among the most extreme. In fact, opposition to many of the proposed interstate routes forced the government to pass new regulation in the late ’60s, ostensibly ensuring relocation assistance or new housing construction to replace units destroyed: a promise that would go largely unfulfilled in each and every community affected. Given the government’s steadfast refusal to offer relocation assistance in the face of intentional housing stock reduction—indeed the head of Eisenhower’s Office of Economic Advisors admitted relocation help was rejected for being too costly—it can be said that the interstate program operated as a mechanism of racial apartheid and oppression for millions of people

But we can know nothing about any of that and still be called educated.

So too, we need know nothing about the blatant ways in which race-based housing discrimination created the so-called ghetto, in cities like Baltimore and elsewhere. In addition to redlining—a practice that involved banks literally drawing red lines on neighborhood maps, signaling which neighborhoods would be denied mortgage loans, no matter the creditworthiness of individual residents—and discrimination in suburbs limiting where blacks could move, other more intricate methods of economic marginalization were deployed as well. One of the most pernicious was the practice of “contract” home sales, in which black homebuyers were essentially roped into buying their property “on time,” the way you might a television or dishwasher: making payments (at inflated rates of interest), until the entire “loan” (far larger than the actual value of the house) had been paid off. Even one late or missed payment would typically cause the borrower to be considered in default, and the holder of the contract would then take the property back from the borrower, reselling it to some other unlucky customer. Last year in the pages of The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates discussed how such practices created and sustained the ghetto in mid-century Chicago, but make no mistake, the practice was a nationwide one. And whereas whites in the cities—who were rarely conned into these kinds of loans—could leave for more pastoral settings, often using government-guaranteed FHA loans for the purpose, blacks could not. Not only were FHA loans largely off-limits to persons of color during that time, but more to the point, if they left the cities before their contracts were paid off (which could take several decades), they would lose every dollar of equity they had thus far, theoretically, accumulated. In this way, white flight and black entrapment in the poorest neighborhoods were intimately linked. Which is to say that our opportunities, our advancement, our greener pastures and what accumulated property we possess is the flipside of black and brown oppression. They are two sides of one coin, not separate and unrelated historical processes.

But we can know nothing about that and still be thought educated. We can live in the very houses obtained with those government-backed loans that were denied to others based solely on race, or inherit the proceeds from their sale, and still believe ourselves unsullied and unimplicated in the pain of the nation’s black and brown communities.

And surely we need know nothing about the systematic violence experienced by thousands of Baltimore families subjected to lead poisoning in their run-down apartments, many of them with the approval of government-funded medical researchers.

In the 1990s, The Johns Hopkins-affiliated Kennedy Krieger Institute knowingly exposed children and families—most of them black—to potentially dangerous levels of lead, as part of a study to determine the most cost-effective methods for removing lead paint from older buildings in poor neighborhoods. Their research entailed recruiting poor families to move into apartments and houses where three different levels of lead abatement had been utilized (telling them little or nothing about the risks involved) and then observing the lead levels in the children’s blood over time. Although most children saw reductions in the levels of lead in their blood, some of the kids in homes where the less expensive and thorough method of lead abatement had been used were exposed to lead levels high enough to have significant effects on brain development. Rather than simply eliminate the lead entirely, regardless of the cost, or knock down lead-infested buildings and start over again with new and non-toxic housing for Baltimore’s poor, prominent and respected researchers used low-income black families as guinea pigs. That I could reference here Tuskegee and most white folks would have no idea to what I was referring speaks volumes. And no, I won’t hyperlink it. If you have to look it up you have proved my point.

Others in Baltimore, not part of the Kennedy Krieger study, were similarly subjected to lead paint, often without even the pretense of attempted abatement or removal. One such family settled a lawsuit against slumlord Stanley Rochkind in 2010, he having been previously fined $90,000 by the Maryland Department of the Environment, and forced to remove lead paint in nearly 500 rental units he owned in the city. As regards that family for whom the 2010 settlement was obtained, one of the sons in that family, when tested, had levels of lead in his blood that were 2-4 times what the Centers for Disease Control considers cause for concern, and as much as twice what the state of Maryland deems official lead poisoning.

That son’s name? Freddie Gray. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

May his story—and not just the way he died in the custody of Baltimore police, but also the way in which his life was stolen years earlier by institutional racism, neglect and a vicious class system—never be forgotten.

______

Notes:

(1) John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture and Justice in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 83.

(2) Newsweek/Gallup Organization, National Opinion Survey, August 19, 1969.

(3) Cartwright, Samuel. “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” DeBow’s Review. (Southern and Western States: New Orleans), 1851. Volume XI.

(4) Micaela di Leonardo, “‘Why Can’t They be Like Our Grandparents?’ and Other Racial Fairytales,” in Without Justice For All, Adolph Reed Jr., ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), 42.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Rudolph Alexander, Jr. Racism, African Americans and Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 85.

(7) George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. (Temple University, 1998), 6-7; Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare. (Oxford University Press, 1994); Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. (NY: Routledge, 1995); Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid. (Harvard University Press, 1993).

What Animals! Why Do We Tolerate Violent Rioters? Shoot ‘em All!

Wow, I hadn’t realized what animals these rioters were! This, from a news account…”The crowd then attacked the…

Posted by Tim Wise on Monday, May 4, 2015

Here’s the source for this, in case anyone doubts the veracity of my claim…

Brief Thoughts on Superiority and Self-Doubt (White Racial Edition)

Just received a fascinating e-mail.

Literal word-for-word, as follows:

“I’m very proud of being a white male, and I don’t care what you say! White people are the BEST!”

I have long wondered, amid such declarations of presumed superiority, exactly whom are these folks trying to convince? Surely they cannot expect that such a missive is going to awaken me to the “best-ness” of the Aryan tribe. I mean, I’m not likely to see such an e-mail and then think to myself, “Oh, holy shit, YES, I totally FORGOT that we were the best!” So if they’re not trying to convince me, why the need to repeat the mantra of superiority? For whom does it serve a necessary psychological purpose? Hmmm?

See, it strikes me that people who actually have done anything of substance with their lives, anything for which they were truly proud or felt a sense of accomplishment would likely do two things:

1) They would not need to ascribe that accomplishment to their racial identity (for which, after all they are due no credit, and which if anything diminishes their individual effort, sacrificing it on the altar of inevitability); and

2) They would just allow their “superior” actions to speak for themselves, without the need of cheerleaders at all (even if those cheerleaders be only themselves).

In other words, if you go around telling people how awesome you are, or how awesome others of your “racial group” are, it’s likely because you doubt it quite strongly. You are attempting in such a case to serve as your own pain reliever, blocking the self-doubt receptors in your brain, which continually are sending your body signals that you are quite a bit less impressive than you insist.

It is sad. Sad that our society pits us against each other in such a way as to make such self-delusion as this “necessary” in the minds of some; that it makes it “necessary” for one to feel superior to another. In a society based on equity and compassion such a need would not exist, and the person who wrote this e-mail could have done something better with the thirty seconds he spent composing it.

Challenging Racism in 21st Century America: Speech at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church 4/20/15

Tim Wise at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, April 20, 2015: Challenging Racism and White Supremacy in 21st Century America

A note: in my criticism herein of Teach For America (TFA) I misspoke and claimed they only provide five months of training…fact is, it’s worse than that — it’s five WEEKS, which is clearly insufficient to prepare teachers to truly educate kids from profoundly different backgrounds than the ones from which the teachers come…in other words, my criticism of TFA is far harsher than that indicated here…

The Eyes of Our Whites: Racial Perceptions and Racial Reality in Ferguson and Beyond

You really can’t have it both ways.

You cannot praise the Justice Department for, in effect, exonerating officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown—and argue how that report proves that the black community’s outrage over police racism was manufactured—and yet ignore the Department’s companion report (or even worse, criticize it as the work of “black radicals and Marxists”), which found a pattern of racist abuse on the part of the Ferguson P.D. over many years.

You cannot presume that the Department was thorough in its investigation of Wilson but sloppy in its larger undertaking—at least not if intellectual honesty is a commodity for which you have any regard. If they did their job well in the first instance, it is likely the case that they did their job well in both.

Yet, for much of white America (and especially its more conservative set), we are to believe the one and not the other; we should use the one as a weapon with which to beat the #BlackLivesMatter movement over the head—”see, he didn’t have his hands up, that was all a lie!”—while ignoring the daily abuses of power meted out against black Ferguson residents, who were being regularly stopped, ticketed, fined, arrested and even attacked by police dogs for minor infractions. That black folks were paying, in effect, a racial tax means nothing apparently, even to the kinds of people who normally rail against taxes. That they were subjected to blatantly unconstitutional treatment means nothing, even to those who claim to love the constitution above all (at least when their Second Amendment rights are concerned). All that matters to some is that their presumptions about Michael Brown’s actions (which, and let’s just be honest about it, were fixed well in advance of any evidence) turned out to be sufficiently confirmed by the Justice Department.

And yes, I know the retort: By the same logic, so too must we who backed the original “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” narrative accept both reports, and as such, accept that our presumptions about what happened that August day were also concretized ahead of the facts, and in the end, largely unsustainable.

Fine. I can’t speak for others, but I can certainly speak for myself. I am willing to accept both reports, having read them from beginning to end. I am willing to accept that so far as the bulk of available evidence indicates, Officer Wilson reasonably felt endangered that day (or at least could not be proved a liar when he claimed so, which is the burden the feds had to consider), and as such was justified in using force against Brown. I am willing to accept that so far as the bulk of available evidence is concerned, Brown’s hands were not up and he was not in the act of clearly surrendering when he was shot. And I am willing to accept that Brown was moving towards Wilson: that much is proved by multiple eyewitness testimony as well as the location of his blood, twenty feet behind where his body ultimately fell. Note please, that doesn’t mean he was “charging” Wilson as some claim. After all, prior to the fatal shot Brown had been hit in the middle of the forehead by a bullet that blew out his facial bones, as well as two shots that punctured his lungs, so it seems unlikely he could have been moving very fast. Yet if he was moving forward and those shots hadn’t fully stopped him, one can understand why Wilson might reasonably have felt that he was in danger.

Like I said, fine.

But what does that really mean? And more to the point what does it not mean?

One thing it clearly demonstrates is this: when it comes to white people who kill black people, the system ultimately works, and quickly. Darren Wilson was not jailed for his actions. He will not spend a day in prison.

How nice it would be if we could say the same for Glenn Ford, imprisoned for thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit, but for which he was convicted by an all-white jury.

How nice it would be if we could say the same for Darryl Hunt, convicted and imprisoned for two decades for the rape and murder of a white woman, despite his innocence—also convicted by an all-white jury.

How nice it would be if we could say the same for Ronald Cotton, convicted and imprisoned for ten years for a rape of a white woman that he did not commit, only exonerated after DNA evidence proved his innocence.

Or for Marvin Anderson.

Or for Herman Atkins.

Or for Bennett Barbour.

How nice it would be for the hundreds of black men, falsely accused, prosecuted and convicted of crimes they did not commit over the last several years, none of whom were able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from strangers for their defense, the way Darren Wilson was. Though ultimately exonerated—and so one could say, if given to a particularly generous definition of success, that the system “worked” for them too—would it be untoward to point out the obvious? That for every Darren Wilson, whose life though disrupted has not been destroyed in the fashion of these men, there are hundreds of black men not so lucky; men who are railroaded to prison on the basis of witness testimony far flimsier than that against Officer Wilson?

And no, this is not changing the subject. It is the subject. For at least two reasons.

First, because white America by and large sheds no tears, spills no ink, and exudes no anger on our Facebook walls about the injustices done to these black folks. Just as most of us say nothing about those killed by police in cases where even video evidence suggests it was the cops who lied, and where the killings were self-evidently unjustified, as with  or John Crawford or Eric Garner, just to name a few. So long as most white folks turn a blind eye towards even those cases where the injustice is apparent, even proven (as in the case of the exonerations), it will be hard for folks of color, or for some whites among us who are committed to fighting racism, to view the concerns about Darren Wilson as anything but white racial bonding and smug supremacy. Especially when at least some among us are not only insufficiently upset about such incidents, but even giddily express admiration for police who kill blacks in such cases, as happened at a rally last year in Beavercreek, Ohio (where John Crawford was killed at Walmart).

And second, because it is precisely the fact of those myriad injustices—the false convictions, the racial profiling, the stop-and-frisk policies, the police brutality, the planting of evidence after said brutality (as happened last week in Michigan), the fabrication by cops about black assaults against them, as in Portland recently, and the ticky-tack harassment of blacks by the Ferguson police—which explains the pain, hurt and even rage that seems so irrational to so many whites. To not attend to these daily indignities, generation in and generation out—to not be as outraged about them as we seem to be about those who rise up to challenge them—is to miss the story entirely. And it is to ensure that there can be no healing, no justice and no peace for any of us, ever.

The reason it was so easy for black Ferguson and black America writ large to presume the worst about Officer Wilson was because black Ferguson and black America has seen this movie before, and rarely does it offer much in the way of a surprise ending. Does it appear that the facts in this case might have been an example of that rare plot twist? Yes. But it was nothing if not rational for the African American community, given the typical script, to have felt as they did. The same was true with the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. Most black folks felt O.J.’s acquittal was just (even though many believed he was guilty), because questions about the racist history of the lead investigator in the case set off alarm bells about planted evidence and misconduct by the LAPD. While most of white America thought such concerns irrational, even paranoid, black suspicions on that matter were borne out a few years later when the Ramparts Division scandal broke, during which it was revealed that LAPD officers had indeed engaged in a pattern of evidence-planting and fraud to procure convictions. In other words, systemic abuse by law enforcement, about which black America is all too aware (and with which they have lived for generations), is the cause of black suspicion in individual cases like that of Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, or for that matter, Mark Furhman and O.J. Simpson. Solve the first, and you’ll no longer need worry much about the second of these.

But for far too many of us, our only angst is directed at people of color. It is their feelings about cops we can’t abide, their anger and hostility towards law enforcement, and their defiant demands that their lives matter and ought not be snuffed as readily as they so often are, which manage to set us on edge. Yet if white folks have a hard time dealing with how black folks feel about the system—and how willing they are to criticize it—we might do well to consider how much harder a time black folks are having actually living with that system. Black perceptions are rooted in black experience, which is to say that if we would like the perception gap to be narrowed, the experiential one must be narrowed first. Because right now, that gap is cavernous. And while we may not know just how expansive is the divide between the way we experience that system and the way they do, make no mistake—black folks know it all too well.

Black America knows that black males are twenty-one times more likely than white males to be killed by police, not because they commit crime twenty-one times more often or resist arrest at a rate that is twenty-one times greater than the rate for whites, but because they are perceived as dangerous in ways that white men are not. Even when they are unarmed and posing no threat to police at all. In places like New York, this tragic reality has been evident for a long time and in case after case for decades.

They know that white folks can parade around with guns (real ones, with actual bullets, unlike the toy possessed by Tamir Rice or the air rifle held by John Crawford) and not be shot, tased or in any way abused by officers. Even when they threaten those officers. Even when they verbally taunt and abuse those officers outside a school. Even when they bring that weapon to a park between the White House and Capitol building, and proceed to issue political threats.

They know that a white man can actually point his weapon at officers, refuse to drop that weapon when told to do so, and even demand that the officers “drop their fucking guns,” as happened last year in New Orleans and still remain a breathing, carbon-based life form.

They know that a white man can actually take an officer’s gun from him and manage to get a shot off without being killed or beaten to a bloody pulp, as recently happened in Beaverton, Oregon.

They know that a white guy can shoot at cops with a BB gun and not be violently beaten or killed for his actions, as happened in Concord, New Hampshire last year. Or that white guys can shoot up a Walmart in Idaho and be taken into custody without injury. Or point a gun at cops in Pennsylvania and not be killed or injured. Or point a gun at firefighters in Phoenix and not get shot when the cops arrive.

They know that a white man like Cliven Bundy, who is in violation of federal law can hold law enforcement officers at bay with the help of his family and random scores of supporters, who point weapons at the federal agents and threaten to kill them if need be, and not be shot or arrested.

They know a white woman can shoot up a neighborhood and lead cops on a car chase during which she also shoots at them, as happened last year outside Chattanooga, and still live to tell the story, all while black women who are posing no threat to police at all are killed with frightening regularity by the cops.

They know that white men and women who kill or threaten to kill police will never be viewed as politically-motivated or engaging in such acts due to whiteness, or because of right-wing ideology, even as the shooting of officers by black men (in Brooklyn or more recently in Ferguson) will be immediately ascribed to left-wing, even racist anti-cop hatred stoked by civil rights protesters.

They know white folks can literally assault police and not only remain alive but actually manage to run away after the fact without a shot being fired at them.

Black America knows that no matter what white folks do and no matter how we behave, those behaviors will never be discussed as evidence of some race-based group pathology. And so when white men brawl in the streets at a St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York, as was recently captured on video, not only will none of the violent men in question be arrested, but it will fail to register even a blip in the media culture that was so quick to discuss the recent fight amongst black girls at a Brooklyn McDonalds. And needless to say, when covered, it won’t lead to pronouncements about the cultural dysfunction of white men and their tendency to over-consume alcohol, even as the fight involving African American youth was met with just such a culturally-inscribed narrative. So too, when a white family in Idaho initiates a deadly brawl at the local Walmart, as happened recently, no one in FOX News-land will opine as to the white cultural or genetic rot at the heart of such behavior.

Black America knows that white males can pummel each other senseless in a hockey rink and not worry that such violence might be viewed as a reflection of white people’s lack of impulse control or thuggish natures, unlike the way brawls involving black athletes are often viewed, especially on a basketball court.

Black America knows that a white frat boy can fire a weapon at a rival fraternity and not have it seen as evidence of something inherent to preppy white kids and their penchant for gunplay.

Black America knows that when white folks riot, overturning cars, starting fires and throwing rocks and beer cans at police—either because it’s “Pumpkin Fest” time in Keene, New Hampshire, or because of the results of a sporting event, or a sporting event, or a sporting event, or a sporting event, or perhaps yet another sporting event, or maybe yet another sporting event, or because what else is there to do in Iowa? or because of a surfer festival—there will be no long exegetical ruminations about the brokenness of white families, the pathology of our communities, or the need for whites as a group to “take personal responsibility” for our savage young people.

Black America knows that media in places like New York over-represent black criminals in their news coverage of crime, relative to the actual share of crimes committed by blacks there, and what effect this has on public perceptions of danger as well as police treatment of African American communities.

Black America knows that police racism, whether or not it animated the actions of Darren Wilson that hot August day in Ferguson, is all too common across the country, no matter how white America may find that nearly impossible to believe. They know it from the recent cases in which white officers were found to have been sending around or posting blatantly racist e-mails, videos or text messages, as in Florida and San Francisco, or, for that matter, in Ferguson. Or posting racist updates on their Facebook walls in case after case after case after case after case after case after case after case after case after case.

They know it from the way police manage to justify any killing of a person of color, even blaming a twelve year old like Tamir Rice for his own death at the hands of a Cleveland officer who was previously found unfit for service.

They know it from the way police recently assaulted a black student at the University of Virginia for no reason at all, slamming him to the ground for supposedly drinking underage (something white people do all the time without being beaten by cops as a result, and which, in any event, he had not done). Or the way police in Philadelphia viciously assaulted Najee Rivera and then lied about the incident to cover up their brutality.

They know it from the way that police even treat white protesters differently (and better) than black protesters, when both are engaged in speaking out against police misconduct, as was evident late last year during protests in New York regarding the death of Eric Garner.

They know it from the outrageous conduct of the Cleveland Police Department over many years, whose officers have engaged in such over-the-top abuses as to make the Ferguson P.D. look like amateurs—and yet, there has been almost no media coverage of the Department of Justice report in that case.

They know it from the way cops also have been shown to use such disproportionate force against non-threatening Latinos and South Asians, in incidents that, were it not for the video evidence, would never have come to light at all.

In short, to be black in America is to have a highly-sensitive racism detector, not because one is irrational but because one’s life so often depends on it. It is to have little choice but to see the patterns in the incidents that white America would so prefer to see as isolated, no matter how often they occur. It is to have little choice but to consume the red pill (to borrow imagery from The Matrix), so as to see what’s going on behind the curtain of the larger society, even as their white compatriots have the luxury of walking around, firmly and indelibly attached to a blue pill IV drip, the reliance on which renders us equally unable to see what’s happening.

And just because every now and then that red pill shows its consumers an image that isn’t quite accurate, doesn’t change the fact that in general it provides insights far deeper than those afforded the rest of us. Rather than bashing black people for seeing the connections and presuming them present, perhaps we would do well to remove the blue pill IV and substitute the red for a while. Maybe then we could begin to see what folks of color see. Perhaps then we could understand their rage. Most of all, perhaps then we could be a little less smug about the exoneration of an officer who, whatever his crime or lack thereof, still took a young man’s life.

The eyes of our whites (or perhaps it’s the white in our eyes) are misleading us. Time for some new lenses.

Tim Wise – Combating Racism: From Ferguson to the Voting Booth to the Border (Speech at Eastern Washington University – 2/24/15)

Tim Wise presentation, Feb 24, 2015 at Eastern Washington University.

Tim Wise at Portland Community College – 1/29/15 – “Ferguson and Beyond: Racism, White Denial, and Criminal Justice”

Video of the first of two presentations I made at Portland Community College, 1/29/15