Ferguson and Inheritance

Things are not well in Ferguson, Missouri at the moment. I do not live there. I have never been there. It is my country, however, and I have friends that I care about that live near to it. Because of this it has been on my mind and I’ve come to two themes. The police and their relationship to violence and force is one. The other is the simple fact that the US has been a country brimming over with racial tensions since before it was even a country.

Regarding the first, take a random Ferguson cop and put him or her next to a random Liverpool cop. I don’t have the details in front of me, but I am fairly sure that the odds of one looking like a soldier and the other looking like a beat cop are pretty decent. You will easily be able to figure out which one is which. We in the US are violenceaphiles, forceaphiles. We insist on guns and force and violence. I wish we didn’t. We do.

It goes back to the beginning of euros leaving Europe and heading out into other parts of the world. These guys, my ancestors, brought with them violence. With it they conquered and pillaged and enslaved on all continents where there were people. It has been a total nightmare since then. I wish this were not the case. But it is. We are a violent people and I wish we’d change our ways. I don’t know what to do to help except to help anyone and everyone realize that violence is a choice no matter what the level in which it happens, individual, interpersonal, intergroup or international. I may not be picking up a gun, but I am standing by while others in power in my country do so. I should not stand by and I should not stand by silently. I don’t know what else to do but that seems a place to start.

Racial tensions have also been in and around us for forever. A few hundred years ago some euros got in a ship, landed on the African coast and met Africans. Racism wasn’t born then in a face to face encounter (one that I am aware I oversimplify). God knows it’d been around for ages before that fateful year. But the racism that is possibly most salient to me as a euro descendant born and raised in the US was born then on that African coast. Black and white Americans living and breathing today may not have been slaves nor slaveholders but they did inherit quite a few missed opportunities. And missed opportunities is putting the crimes against humanity committed by white euros against black Africans as about as lightly as it can be put.

I ask, What can we do with this inheritance? At the very least, we can acknowledge it. Even if you self-identify as a person, black or white, that is not racist or hateful, you still, whether you like it or not, inherit, like a family fortune (debt might be a better example), a whole lot of fear and hate and violence and separation and ignorance and a lot a lot of sadness. Maybe it sits in you or in the back of your mind. Maybe you could call it subconscious. Maybe you could call it enculturated. It is indeed in the culture. Maybe it is learned even. It is most definitely mysterious. In the end, there is no doubt that we live and breathe a basic inability to live together. I am not sure what to do about this. I want to not inherit this tension, this situation, this embarrassing history. But for some reason, I think that the first step to improve this racist society is to shed the collective denial that because there are no more white people that own black poeple in the US that there is no more racism, interpersonal or structural. Step one is shedding denial and becoming aware. Shining that ol’ light of awareness on who and what we are and who and where we came from. We came from violent euroconquers and conquered black africans or both.

Now we are here.

With this awareness, what next?