The Racism Among Us
By Wayne Hare
I was recently discussing race with a fifty-something friend of mine in Steamboat Springs. A physician no less. He remarked, “But isn’t racism all behind us now? Hasn’t all that stuff been taken care of?” And a few years ago while kayaking the Grand Canyon, during a lull between rapids, I found myself in another conversation about race with a brilliant and highly successful business man. He was adamant that the playing field was now level. In his mind, proof was all the African Americans playing pro sports. Never mind the dearth of black team owners, managers, coaches and sports reporters.
A few years ago I retired from rangering. Most of my career had been spent with the National Park Service in the backcountry in western parks. I was in the Resource and Visitor Protection Division – law enforcement. I wasn’t a cop, but I was included in all of the squad meetings. I was aware of all the ATL’s - Attempt To Locate - and the more ominous BOLO’s – Be On the Lookout. I gave stern warnings related to resource violations like dogs in the park, illegal campfires or illegal camping. My workmates, when I had them, were cops. My supervisors were cops. So to this day, many of my friends are still cops. Rangers, sheriff’s deputies, city police, State Patrol.
I don’t think that I know one black male who hasn’t been stopped for Driving While Black. Even Robert Smith, the billionaire wealthiest African American in the country talks about the multiple times that he has been stopped for DWB in TX where he lives.
When it happened to me in downtown Portland OR, it was beyond infuriating. My particular cop was pretty amped up and aggressive. So was I …but only inside. On the outside I did my best to be calm and respectful. I’d rather be humiliated than in jail. Or dead. But if my wishing would have made it so, that cop would have died right there beside my open window. It’s more than disconcerting to be that angry …that humiliated …but to have your well-being depend on being polite and respectful with somebody who is anything but.
But among of all my cop friends, few can even entertain the idea that there are racist in their midst. They’re the good guys! Every last one of them. More than once I’ve read that no cop starts their shift hoping to jack up some African American. I used to think that was true. But then I read the racist emails out of the Ferguson Police Department.
“An African-American woman in New Orleans was admitted into the hospital for a pregnancy termination. Two weeks later she received a check for $5,000. She phoned the hospital to ask who it was from. The hospital said, ‘Crimestoppers.’”
Another email described a man trying to get welfare for his dogs because they are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddies are.”
I read the equally racially offensive remarks from the sheriff of Tammany Parish LA: “If you’re gonna walk the streets of St. Tammany Parish with dreadlocks and chee wee hairstyles, then you can expect to be getting a visit from a sheriff’s deputy.”
Miami-Dade. Chicago. LA. The Border Patrol. And North Miami which used to use mug shots of African American men for target practice.
And then there’s Ray Tensing, a University of Cincinnati cop who pulled over Sam DuBos for a missing front plate three years ago and then shot him in the face when he reached for his ignition. Yeah, it used to be hard for me to believe that an officer started his shift thinking that he’d jack up some jigaboo. But when Tensing killed Sam DuBos, he was wearing a t-shirt under his uniform adorned with the all-American African American hate symbol, a confederate flag.
A good friend of mine used to patrol the urban neighborhood around Independence Hall in Philly. He once told me that he’d never met a racist Philadelphia cop. But last June Philadelphia benched 72 of their finest for racist and homophobic posts on Facebook, and then fired 13 of them. And the city’s Black Police Union has sued the city over what the union says are discriminatory practices. It’s hard to fight racism and even harder if good people deny that it exist.
And if you don’t believe racism exist, then the only other thing you can be left with believing is that African Americans are responsible for their own lot in life: Violence, crime, poor schools, lousy jobs, crappy neighborhoods. But that’s not who we are. That’s what we so reluctantly endure.
We Americans live in a strange dichotomy, or maybe a fantasy, even here in the west where we like to think of ourselves as open and equalitarian as the landscape that surrounds us. But we’re surrounded by racism at every level of society, business, and government. And yet we evidently find racism so abhorrent that we deny that it exist and thus do little to make that so. Even bona fide racist that belong to white supremacist organizations commonly deny that they are racist. More common is “I’m not against black people. I’m just for our European heritage.”
Surely law enforcement officers would be better off if instead of continuing to insist that there are no racist officers that they rooted out the racists among them. Their jobs would become easier and less dangerous. And they’d be serving their community like they joined the force to do exactly that.
And we citizens could do the same thing. When we get those racist email jokes? Return them, and include all those folks who were cc’d, with a statement that those jokes and remarks are neither appreciated nor acceptable. Silence is no longer acceptable. Instead of quietly denying that racism exist, or quietly acknowledging that racism exist, let’s loudly make it cease to exist. We’re supposed to be a beacon for the rest of the world.