Racism Is Baked Into America: Thinking It Will End With Police "Reform" Is Like Cutting Off a Toe to Cure Cancer.
April 26, 2021
Just over a hundred years ago, on June 15, 1920, three Black workers in a seasonal circus were lynched in front of an estimated 10,000 citizens of Duluth, Minnesota. As was the custom in the South, postcards of the grotesque murders were sold for a while. (Minnesota Historical Photo)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
When it comes to racism, geography is everything. Blacks who survived the often deadly “middle passage” were brought to the slave holding states with the Northern States agreeing and condoning to the horrifying practice by enshrining it in the US Constitution. That determined the geography of the largest asset in the United States, billions of dollars spent on the purchase of humans treated as “chattel” and their production of approximately 65% of the world’s cotton by 1860.
In an April 18, 2021, Washington Monthly article, “Geography Helped Kill George Floyd: Social science suggests that racism and geography form a toxic mix that triggers police violence,” Reginald C. Oh, a constitutional law professor, writes,
George Floyd’s murder took place at the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in Minneapolis. That intersection operates as a border or buffer separating “the whiter neighborhoods east of Chicago Avenue from the ‘heart of Black Minneapolis’” west of Chicago Avenue. Racial segregation in Minneapolis is a major reason that the city was ranked in 2018 as the fourth-worst city in the nation for African Americans to live in….
Residential racial segregation can help explain the spate of police killings of unarmed African Americans. The greater the level of racial segregation in a state or city, several studies have found, the higher the levels of racial disparity in rates of police shootings of unarmed persons. Thus, racial disparities in police shootings in Chicago, the most heavily racially segregated city in the United States, are four times higher than in Aurora, Colo, the least racially segregated city. At the state level, racial disparities in police shootings are eight times higher in New York, the most racially segregated state, than in Hawaii, the least segregated.
Racial segregation, in other words, kills Black people.
A 2017 NPR interview with Richard Rothstein discusses his book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” details how the US government reinforced segregation in the ‘40s and ‘50s, limiting the ability of black families to advance their economic well-being through desirable home ownership and build wealth.
NPR host Ari Shapiro asks,
SHAPIRO: So the basic argument of your book is that while racist individuals might have contributed to housing segregation in specific cases, there was an overwhelming amount of government policy at the state, local and federal level that explicitly forced black people to live in different places from white people. And I have to admit that reading this book, the geographic scope, the longevity, the sheer creativity of these policies really took me by surprise.
ROTHSTEIN: It takes many people by surprise. This whole history has been forgotten. It used to be well-known. There was nothing hidden about it. The federal government pursued two important policies in the mid-20th century that segregated metropolitan areas. One was the first civilian public housing program which frequently demolished integrated neighborhoods in order to create segregated public housing.
The second program that the federal government pursued was to subsidize the development of suburbs on a condition that they be only sold to white families and that the homes in those suburbs had deeds that prohibited resale to African-Americans. These two policies worked together to segregate metropolitan areas in ways that they otherwise would never have been segregated.
Such segregation led to further white flight from the city, subsidizing of white suburban expansion, real estate developer exploitation of “block busting” and other incentives to creating “ghettoized” Black communities. Government policy throughout the US supported a less evil racism than slavery, but racism nonetheless.
The devastation that resulted from Blacks in urban areas being relegated to red-lined neighborhoods and vast swaths of high unemployment areas, blighted by lack of economic opportunity, became the foundation for reinforcing modern day racism.
The occupation and patrolling of destitute Black areas, where drug dealing may be the most profitable profession, provides an unending cycle of police and neighborhood violence, in which suburbanites and better-off white city dwellers have Black stereotypes reinforced by “crime” coverage on local television news. This is what one TV news producer told me was known as the “knife and gun club” coverage.
Police departments don’t exist as independent governmental agencies, but are extensions of the will of the communities and cities that they serve. Mayors and city councils condone the development of an incarceration system that imprisons more inmates than anywhere in the world, approximately 2.3 million. The police are not rogues, but rather what Thom Hartmann calls modern day “slave patrols,” keeping millions of urban Blacks from becoming politically rebellious (think the Black Panthers) and from competing for jobs with working class whites due to the socially-accepted permanent “zones of criminality.” Cities and towns reinforce this deeply embedded racism through generally inadequate school funding and disinterest in creating local economic opportunity.
In short, the racism of police officers who treat Blacks as dehumanized bodies is built into the United States, a pernicious river running through the nation. Their killing and brutal treatment of Blacks won’t end until systemic and daily acceptance of a racist social and economic structure is obliterated. As long as white communities passively accept that nothing can be done to help economically impoverished Black neighborhoods become a part of an employment loop, instead of arrests, shootings and incarceration, then the police will continue carrying out their “mandate” to keep “a lid” on Black communities.
The Duluth lynching, about 155 miles from Minneapolis, of the three Black males — based on a trumped up rape accusation — (which is gruesomely recorded in the photo at the top of this commentary) is inextricably tied to the asphyxiation of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, just one month shy of 100 years later.
Ibram X. Kendi, in an article in The Atlantic argues,
Then again, the racist fear of the dangerous dark body governs—as it has since the days of slavery. As divided as many conservatives, moderates, and liberals are on other matters, they remain largely united by their fear of roaming dark bodies, and vulnerable to fearmongering by police officials, or by former President Donald Trump when he says, “Without police, there is chaos….”
The violent institution of American slavery—the concentrated patrolling of enslaved bodies on and off plantations—is an ancestor of the violent institution of American policing. And like its forebear, American policing is defended as good despite its unmatched amounts of lethal violence.
The police are just the spearhead of this toxic racist geography of fearing “roaming dark bodies.”
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