“I know you watch as you grow older, the corpses of your brothers and sister pile up around you. (…) when you try to stand up and look the world in the face like you had a right to be here, without knowing that is the result of it, you have attacked the entire power structure of the Western world.”
-James Baldwin
It was not even two weeks ago that a Yale and Hamden police officer shot at Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon while sitting in a parked car. As you can guess, they were Black and doing nothing to alarm the police, except for the fact that the car they were in matched the description of a car connected to an armed robbery. But we all know that that is merely rhetoric, an excuse to justify the unjustifiable. Looking at this case, it is sad to note that it is only 45 years after Baldwin’s quote. The use of violence as a means of erasure can be traced before Baldwin’s time, during it and now, hereafter. Point blank, this is racism. The pursuit of Black lives, solely, to damage, dismantle and erase them isn’t anything new. However, I would like to take it a step further to illuminate what is at the core of this generational, malignant disease, of racism and underneath it all is fear.
Fear is defined as an unpleasant, often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger. I will allude to the kind of fear that has the power to perpetuate racism and I will get there, but this definition perfectly situates the fear of Black people in America. There’s fear on the other side too. It is a fear reliant on White Supremacist violence and the lengths that will be gone to in order to eradicate any trace of the Black population. This fear is embedded in the historical context of slavery, the oppression of Jim Crow, the endurance of segregation and now, the persistence of police brutality. Despite this aggressive agenda, the primary response Blacks have is distance – a desire to live away from such persistent danger, in order to ensure our safety and preserve our lives.
Juxtaposed to the fear of Blacks in America is the fear of White Supremacists in America. Their fear is losing their power and that the Black man and woman will take their place and will do what they have done, should they get said power, and that is oppress. But that is the issue with being depraved, you assume that everyone else is too. It is this dangerous assumption, that leads them to resort to violence, to shooting us in the streets.
A teacher once told me that fear is false evidence appearing real and that is the sum of racism in America. It is a false perception of a people perpetuated for centuries. The moment that we, as these United States, can begin to see people for who they are and not who we have credited them to be in our heads, we can begin to move forward and truly grapple with our compromising history that lays the foundation for our present, tumultuous times.
