Trump’s Shooter’s Identity Was A Bullet Dodged For Black Folks Also
Being America’s Scapegoats Is A Stressful Role We Play
Blame it on the brothers!
Remember Susan Smith? The White woman who claimed a Black man kidnapped her sons. How about Charles Stuart? He said a Black man shot his pregnant wife. Both did it! What about Amy Cooper, the White woman who called the police claiming that Christian Cooper, an avid bird watcher who now hosts a multi-episode documentary “Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper” on National Geographic Wild, and a Black man, was threatening her and her dog in Central Park? He wasn’t. And she got fired for saying he did. How about the five youths, dubbed the Central Park Five, for the brutal terrorizing rape of a jogger. Remember Donald Trump taking out a full-page ad saying they should get the death penalty? An act, to this day, he has not apologized for even though they were exonerated.
Ours is a life full of being followed by security, profiled by police, having our property undervalued, our assets seized, our bodies experimented upon, our talents and intellect underestimated (save in-game and song), and our lives ultimately devalued. However, as if these were not enough, it’s the random race-based violence and murder, historical and present, that’s the clear and ever-present danger in African Americans’ lives in the U.S. From kidnappings and lynching to church bombings killing children, the unfettered acts of domestic terrorism, that have us unable to relax, fully, in our own homes, cars, parks, beds, and in our being in the United States.
Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Amaud Arbery, Walter Scott, Breonna Taylor, Jordan Davis, Atatiana Jefferson, Eric Garner, Botham Jean, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, George Floyd, and too many more who lost their lives for no other reason than living in the United States.
The irreconcilable compromise
Live with us as the great social experiment (integration) or put us in our place (segregation), became what sociologist, historian, publisher, and activist Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois prophetically hailed as the most pressing problem of the twentieth century. A problem I’d venture to guess he’d not be surprised remains unresolved.
In The Souls of Black Folks (1903), Dr. Du Bois, with disquieting candor, examines the stress of being Black in the U.S. and upon life in the U.S. beneath “The Veil.” A reference to our desires to develop and prosper to the heights of our nurturing and nature is no different from any other human on this planet. And to that which we are not - White.
Our existence in U.S. society demands the development of consciousness, habits, and other adaptive behaviors, attitudes, and ways of coping with what Dr. Du Bois calls the “color line,” a duality of existence no one knows or cares to know!
Hypervigilance
Our societal identity is one we’ve played no role in constructing. All that is wrong with U.S. society many trace to Black people. Labels of immoral, lazy, shiftless, can’t be trusted, immoral, dumb, loud, low-life niggahs, and more are painted upon our characters and souls in film, by lexicon and deed. And indeed such can be found within our ranks, as is true with any other people on this earth, such depictions are applied to us with the same casual callousness as the whip was laid upon our backs.
The diversity that was thrust upon U.S. society after it became illegal to use kidnapped Africans and their progeny for free labor became a pariah to many. As if to justify chattel enslavement and dehumanization, instead of freedom after legalized slavery’s end, Reconstruction’s promises resulted in scapegoating and accusations of our being the reasons for society’s ills.
President Andrew Johnson returned to power and influenced the very same promulgators of racist beliefs who had terrorized enslaved people before their Emancipation. Legalized discrimination (Jim Crow) became the law of the land. Race-based bias went unpunished, and domestic terrorism was allowed to flourish. Politicians enjoined law enforcement and a criminal justice system to enforce systems of continued servitude, subjugation, and disproportionate and unjust punishment. Even so-called scholars used their bully pulpits to deny our humanity.
In this life after bondage, the survival of African Americans too often depends upon high levels of hypervigilance. Meaning that we are almost always in a state of stressful, heightened awareness. The potential of threats, insults, injury, and death for little more than the color of our skin is a reality of our lives in the United States. Our position is U.S. society and the roles we play are often reinforced by the dominant class’s actions and consciousness regarding diversity. Similar to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD), the results of which are found in health disparities, stress-related preventable illnesses, mental health disorders, and more.
We need no more stress! That’s why we’re relieved
Black people have been conditioned to be cognizant of the possibility that for an offense, real, imagined, or constructed, retribution might come our way. It can be as intense and threatening as Emmet Till’s uncle being helpless to defend him when a truckload of White men showed up at his door in search of the boy who supposedly said something he should not have to a white woman.
Or when my White neighbor demanded to be told as I readied my keys to enter the house I’d just purchased, having arrived at almost midnight, after a 26-hour flight from the other side of the world and a three-hour drive with my exhausted son in my arms, why we were there. As my startled wife looked on carrying his cranky, too tired-for-sleep twin sister, I wondered if she was crazy enough to have a gun and drunk enough to use it. Bags in our hands, and the driveway, all of us are too tired for the drama.
We and our communities are just one false allegation away from calamity. And most of us know it. Like the false allegation made against a nineteen-year-old Black youth for assaulting a seventeen-year-old White girl, leading to the Tulsa race massacre. Where some estimates say up to 300 people were killed, over 800 were hospitalized, and more than 10,000 were left homeless. A massacre for which the only people ever arrested were Black Tulsans. Their prosperous community, land, businesses, and resources were all stolen from them in the aftermath.
The Rosewood Massacre (Florida) had similar beginnings and a similar ending. People fled to swamps to escape that carnage. It’s Red Summer (1919), described by the National World War I Museum and Memorial as “an event that affected at least 26 cities across the United States.” https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/about-wwi/red-summer. The aftermath of the violence committed by not just the Ku Klux Klan but by untold numbers of ordinary citizens against innocent Black people, many who’d just returned from fighting for their country, is unjustifiable and unimaginable.
Al Fin: “All Ya’ll” - a label of convenience
Domestic terrorism, unabated, is a constant stress for Black people in the United States. Not a Race War! People looking for any excuse to blame Black people for anything wrong is why we’re relieved when we find out, “it wasn’t one of us.” For we know, arguing our absence of responsibility tends to give our accusers little solace. Attempts to factually assuage the blame given to us tend to be a non-starter also. Unless a White person speaks up on our behalf. Quite simply, Trump’s would-be assassin being a White man, was a relief because we needed not to defend ourselves, again, against “all ya’ll” accusers (remember OJ?). A relief, even if brief, from the potential of retribution that comes all too infrequently. Especially these days, when hypervigilance is particularly needed!
German philosopher and scholar Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” He must have been talking about Black people.
