What the Hell is Going On

By Wayne Hare

In February, in the middle of Black History month and as I was writing the March story about the struggle to change the name of the Dixie school district in Marin County CA, Paul Larmer, publisher of High Country News and I were talking. Our conversation was flavored by the race and privilege components of the Dixie story and came on the heels of a weird month - several high-profile blackface incidents in VA, more  racist comments by Congressman Steven King, actor Liam Neeson claiming that in the wake of a friend’s rape that he had prowled the streets armed with a club looking to “kill some black bastard”, fashion designer icon Gucci sending a model down the runway with a blackface turtleneck. And in the same month, Florida, Governor Michael Ertel resigned after photos emerged of him in blackface mocking black victims of hurricane Katrina. Iowa Representative Steven King continued with his outright racist comments. And in Sacramento yet another cop who mistook yet another cell phone for a non-existent gun and shot and killed yet another unarmed black man was determined to be acting within his authority. Again. All during Black History Month. 

Paul, a decent white man of admitted privilege who looks for the best in people, was raised in ______ and lives in the small, seemingly all white, mountain town of Paonia CO where High Country News is published, was taken aback by the many, high profile displays of racism when he asked me, “What the hell is going on here?” and suggested that I write about it. White folks think racism is white hoods and burning crosses. Police shootings. Blatant housing discrimination. And it is. But it’s mainly the smaller things that happen every day that go unnoticed. But that unnoticingness is a sign of how imbedded racism is in this country. It’s so embedded that when black athletes and others with a platform protest racism, many Americans think that they are protesting against the country, so intertwined are the two.

So imbedded that in 1980 the country barely took notice when Ronald Reagan made a campaign stop at the Neshoba MS county fair. The same location where three civil rights workers had been murdered 26 years before. But the southern racists that he was pandering to…they noticed. 

And in 1981 when Reagan’s senior advisor Lee Atwater said. “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff...” the nation took no notice and Reagan continued the GOP’s infamous and successful southern strategy of playing to white fear and resentment.

So imbedded that when National Guard troops killed 4 white students and wounded nine more at Kent State on 1970, there was a prolonged national uproar and the event was instrumental in turning public opinion against the war in Vietnam. But two years earlier and four years after passage of the Civil Rights act outlawed segregation, when South Carolina State Police opened fire on about 200 African American students on the campus of South Carolina State University who were protesting the continued segregation of the local bowling alley, killing three and wounding another 28, white America didn’t notice. Freshman Sammy Hammond was shot in the back; 17-year-old high school student Delano Middleton was shot seven times; and 18-year-old Henry Smith was shot three times. 

So imbedded is racism that the only person to be imprisoned for the 2014 chocking death of Eric Garner by NYC police has been African American Ramsey Orta who filmed his friend being killed. Orta is currently serving four years on a drug possession charge. 

America was founded and built on the belief in the supremacy of humans that are white and the white man’s burden…a concept that I was taught in middle school. So entrenched was this concept that when 13 southern states declared their secession from the United States, 241 years after the first Africans were brought to the shores of Virginia to be enslaved for life, Texas echoed the sentiments of all thirteen southern states when the state wrote, “the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law…We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”

The confederacy lost their bid for secession, but the concept of white supremacy lived on. Fifty-two years after the end of the war fought to end slavery and uplift African Americans, Woodrow Wilson, America’s president, showcased the silent film, “Birth of a Nation”. Originally named, “The Clansmen” the film glorified the KKK and the work it accomplished terrifying America’s black population, to visiting dignitaries. 

Ten years after Wilson’s presidency ended America adopted a song written by a slave holder - a man so committed to slavery that he once tried to have a man hung in the nation’s capital merely for being in possession of abolitionist literature – as the country’s national anthem. Our ‘All men are created equal’ country adopted a song that in the third verse pays tribute to slavery. 

In 1994 Democratic President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act which dramatically increased the already disproportionate effect of incarceration on the African American community. The prison population rose from____ in 19XX to _____ by 19XX. And his wife, Hillary, stoked America’s fear of young, black men when she referred to, “Gangs of super predators”.

The Great Recession of 2007 caused by predatory mortgaging practices - which disproportionately affected African Americans because of the well documented history of home ownership discrimination - saw black wealth decrease from a meager 14% of white wealth to an even more meager 10% by the time the recession ended.

And although outlawed in 1958 with the Fair Housing Act, predatory lending continues today.  In 2012 Wells Fargo was fined 175 million dollars for racist discriminatory lending practices. And in 2011 Bank of America was fined $335 million. 

In 2014 12 year old Tamir Rice was shot to death while doing what little boys do - playing with toy guns - by City of Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehman who “feared for my life.” Loehman was never indicted or tried.  

Also in 2014, Beavercreek OH police officer Sean Williams shot and killed 22 year old John Crawford in Walmart who was examining a BB gun he was considering purchasing for his son. Officer Williams “feared for my life” and was never indicted or tried. 

The next year unarmed Sam DuBos was shot to death by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing who, while wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt under his uniform, had pulled over DuBos for a missing front plate. DuBos was shot and killed after the officer inexplicitly reached inside the vehicle. Tensing “feared for my life”. He was indicted, but acquitted at trial.

2015 also saw Hurricane Katrina and the disproportionate affect it had on poor, black communities. And because federal aid isn’t necessarily allocated to those who need it the most but rather by an algorithmic calculation meant to minimize taxpayer risk, wealthier and whiter communities receive the bulk of federal aid. Rich people get richer and poor people? Well…they just survive. 

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election we saw a real estate mogul who had refused to rent to African Americans and who sought to delegitimatize the nation’s first black president by claiming that he had been born outside of the United States, stoke racial fears – again – by inflating white murders attributed to African Americans by a factor of over 5 times greater than the numbers presented by the FBI. America didn’t notice the error. Just the danger. 

Later that year, Freddie Gray was tossed alive and well into a police van in Baltimore MD after committing nothing more than the crime of being black.  A couple of hours later he was tossed out - paralyzed and dying. In that instance, nobody feared for their life. Except Freddie Gray. Several officers were indicted. None were found guilty at trial.

In 2017 we witnessed Katrina all over again with Hurricane Harvey in Houston with exactly the same effects on African American Communities. The federal aid system wasn’t designed to be discriminatory. It was just designed without any understanding of how different classes of people actually live their lives. 

In 2017, Alabama senate candidate and former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore would claim, “I think (America) was great at the time when families were united — even though we had slavery — they cared for one another…. Our families were strong, our country had a direction.”

Also in 2017 violent white supremacists clashed with counter-protestors over a statue honoring a general who led troops against the United States for the sole purpose of keeping humans in bondage - and our president mused that there were “good people” on both sides.

And last month, in Boulder CO, police drew a weapon and confronted an African American man who was picking up trash, in broad daylight, at his own residence. 

Amidst all of that, in 2017 we saw Jeff Sessions, a man so racist that he was denied an appointment to the Southern District of the Alabama District County, become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. We watched in dismay as he dismantled one consent decree after another that his predecessor had managed to hammer out with police departments found to be especially abusive and violent. We watched again as he took the teeth out of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

Meanwhile we witnessed voter suppression tactics, designed specifically to keep African Americans away from the polls, steal elections away from African American candidates in Florida, Georgia, and across the country. 

And smack dab in the middle of Black History month the Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s pre-eminent hate-fighting organization, released their annual report on hate groups that shows a fourth straight year of growth to an all-time record high of 1,020 that coincides with our current president’s campaign and presidency. 176 of those groups are in the ten traditional western states. 

So no, Paul, I‘m not going to wrote about what a surprising month February was. Because it wasn’t. It was just another month in America.