“We Need Our Police To Be Better Than This”: It’s Part Of Having The Badge And The Right To Use Force
In 1951, Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. The two never got along, but that wasn’t why Truman canned him. “I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was,” explained Truman after the fact. “I fired him because he wouldn’t respect the authority of the president.” You expect soldiers of all ranks to understand the need to respect the chain of command, regardless of personal feelings.
Soldiers—and cops, too.
Which is one big reason the display by members of the New York Police Department at the funeral of slain patrolman Rafael Ramos is particularly disturbing. At Ramos’s funeral service Saturday, NYPD rank-and-file—along with members of police forces attending from around the country—turned their backs when Mayor Bill de Blasio delivered his eulogy. This was a very public fuck you to a politician widely perceived by conservatives and law-and-order types as weak on crime and in the pocket of social-justice warriors. Yet the cops’ protest illustrates exactly what drives so much fear of the police: the worry that cops react emotionally and impulsively in situations that call for cool rationality and a reliance on training and strategic restraint. “It wasn’t planned,” said one of the protesters. “Everyone just started doing it.”
“I certainly don’t support that action,” said NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton. “I think it was very inappropriate at that event.” Bratton—whom de Blasio appointed and who first served as commissioner under tough-guy Rudy Giuliani—is very much in the tradition of “Give ’em Hell” Harry Truman. Which is to say that he at times lets his emotions get the best of him, as when he spuriously implicated President Obama for strained relations between police and citizens, saying that cops feel as if they “are under attack from the federal government at the highest levels.”
But if de Blasio is in fact soft on crime, he made an exceedingly strange choice in tapping Bratton, credited with helping drive crime down in ’90s New York under Giuliani and in 21st-century Los Angeles, to lead the NYPD. As a cop’s cop, Bratton is in the best possible situation to restore respect for authority among New York’s finest.
The NYPD—and cops more generally—have a public relations problem in the wake of the Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and a long string of other cases. Acting like a bunch of high-school jocks protesting a ban on keg parties isn’t exactly going to win over many hearts and minds. It’s exactly the inability of the cops who killed Garner to restrain themselves that bothered so may of us who watched the video of the encounter. The same goes for the hysterical overreaction and escalation of force used against protesters in Ferguson over the summer.
Yes, cops are under stress and tension (though their jobs are far less dangerous than normally supposed). But they are trained to rise above mere emotional responses; that’s one of the reasons they are given a state-sanctioned monopoly on force. Yet even after the funeral protest, de Blasio was booed and heckled while addressing a new class of recruits as well.
That’s not the worst of it. In the wake of the murders of Ramos and Liu, the head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, immediately issued a statement claiming that “there’s blood on many hands tonight” and “that blood on the hands starts at City Hall in the office of the mayor.” In fact, Ramos and Liu were killed by deranged gunman Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a career criminal who shot his girlfriend in Baltimore, drove to New York, and bragged about “putting wings on pigs.”
I’m no de Blasio partisan, but the mayor’s willingness to entertain the notion that Eric Garner needn’t have died in police custody has about as much to do with the murders of Ramos and Liu as Sarah Palin’s defense of the Second Amendment had to do with madman Jared Loughner’s shooting of Gabby Giffords. Which is to say: nothing.
The New York Post reports that an email circulating among the NYPD declares, “We have… become a ‘wartime’ Police Department… We will act accordingly.” The email further advised that “two units are to respond to EVERY call,” regardless of the severity of the situation or “the opinion of the patrol supervisor,” a tactic that, the Post notes, not only bucks the chain of command but would “effectively cut in half the NYPD’s patrol strength.”
Prior to the killing of Ramos and Liu, the last time an NYPD cop was ambushed in such a way was in 1988; their deaths were the first in the line of fire since 2011. Yet the email references the 1970s, “when police officers were ambushed and executed on a regular basis.” We normally associate such massive displays of overreaction with pearl-clutching undergraduates calling for “trigger warnings” when faced with reading The Great Gatsby.
Echoing Truman talking about MacArthur, Bratton has said that it was wrong for cops to disrespect de Blasio at the Ramos service because “he is the mayor of New York [and] he was there representing the citizens of New York to express their remorse and their regret at that death.” The police commissioner is sitting down with the unions representing the NYPD rank and file to work through issues that range “far beyond race relations in this city” and include contract disputes about pay, benefits, and more (these latter issues suggest that police outrage at city leaders may be as much a negotiating tactic as in-the-moment reactions).
Based on the responses so far by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and the cops themselves, those won’t be pleasant conversations. But Bratton himself has granted that black people “of all classes” have told him they fear the police. Such attitudes join the growing discomfort with militarized police who always seem ready to escalate force and refuse to acknowledge any culpability when things go wrong.
As Bratton and the NYPD start talking among themselves, the commissioner will do well to paraphrase another Trumanism: “The buck stops here.” The police cannot ultimately control public opinion unilaterally. What they can do, though, is acknowledge that a change in their attitudes, behavior, policies, and willingness to engage in discussions about how people see them can help them win back the public trust.
By: Nick Gilllespie, The Daily Beast, December 31, 2014
“Racism; It’s The Law”: What Institutional Racism Looks Like When We Finally Notice It
Smoke and fire, sirens blaring, horns honking, a sudden hail of bullets. This is what passes for the American dialogue on race and justice.
It’s hidden until it explodes.
“By 10 p.m.,” the Wall Street Journal informed us, “a St. Louis County Police squad car burned just down the street from the Ferguson Police Department, with spare ammunition ‘cooking off’ or exploding in the car.”
Those who want to shake their heads in disgust can do so. American institutional racism conceals itself so neatly from those who prefer not to see it and, of course, aren’t victimized by it. And then every so often something sets off the public trigger — an 18-year-old young man is shot and killed by a police officer, for instance — and the reality TV that is our mainstream news brings us the angry, “violent” response, live. And it’s always one side against another; us vs. them. It’s always war.
“But what is justice in a nation built on white supremacy and the destruction of black bodies?” Mychal Denzel Smith wrote in The Nation the day after the grand jury announced that police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted. “That’s the question we have yet to answer. It’s the question that shakes us up and makes our insides uncomfortable. It’s the question that causes great unrest.”
What is justice, indeed? And beyond that question are the real questions, perhaps unanswerable. What is healing? What is peace?
If an officer had been indicted in Michael Brown’s killing, and then convicted on one charge or another, maybe that would have been justice, in a “case closed” sort of way. In our limited legal bureaucracy, justice means nothing more than punishment. Even when such justice is done, it changes nothing. The state’s “interest” has been satisfied and that’s all that matters. The terrible loss suffered by parents, friends and community would remain a gaping wound. And beyond that, the social brokenness and racism that caused the tragedy in the first place would remain unaddressed, unhealed.
But not even that minimal justice was in the cards for the loved ones of Michael Brown, or the occupied community in which he lived — because that’s not how it works. Officer Wilson, whatever he did inside or outside the state’s rules on the use of lethal force when he confronted Brown on the afternoon of Aug. 9, was just doing his job, which was controlling and intimidating the black population of Ferguson. He was on the front line of a racist and exploitative system — an occupying bureaucracy.
The New York Times, in its story about the grand jury verdict, began thus: “Michael Brown became so angry when he was stopped by Officer Darren Wilson on Canfield Drive here on Aug. 9, his face looked ‘like a demon,’ the officer would later tell a grand jury.”
This sort of detail is, of course, of immense value to those who sympathize with the police shooting and accuse the black community of endemic lawlessness. See! Michael Brown wasn’t just a nice, innocent boy minding his own business. He and his companion were trouble incarnate, walking down the middle of the street spoiling for a fight. He was Hulk Hogan. The cop had no choice but to shoot, and shoot again. This was a demonic confrontation. Politeness wouldn’t have worked.
If nothing else, such testimony shows the stark limits of our “who’s at fault?” legal system, which addresses every incident in pristine, absurd isolation and has no interest beyond establishing blame — that is to say, officially stamping the participants as either villains, heroes or victims. Certainly it has no interest in holistic understanding of social problems.
Taking Wilson’s testimony at face value, one could choose to ask: Why was Michael Brown so angry?
Many commentators have talked about the “anger” of Ferguson’s black community in the wake of the shooting, but there hasn’t been much examination of the anger that was simmering beforehand, which may have seized hold of Brown the instant the police officer stopped him.
However, an excellent piece of investigative journalism by Radley Balko of the Washington Post, which ran in September — “How municipalities in St. Louis County, MO, profit from poverty” — addresses the issue head on. He makes the point that local municipal governments, through an endless array of penny-ante citations and fines — “poverty violations” — torment the locals for the primary, or perhaps sole, purpose of keeping their bureaucracies funded.
“Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts,” Balko writes. The fines are mostly for traffic offenses, but they also include fines for loud music, unmown lawns, “wearing saggy pants” and “vague infractions such as ‘disturbing the peace,’” among many others, and if the person fined, because he or she is poor, can’t pay up, a further fine is added to the original, and on and on it goes.
“There’s also a widely held sentiment that the police spend far more time looking for petty offenses that produce fines than they do keeping these communities safe,” Balko writes. “If you were tasked with designing a regional system of government guaranteed to produce racial conflict, anger, and resentment, you’d be hard pressed to do better than St. Louis County.”
Regarding the anger and resentment in communities like Ferguson, he quotes a longtime racial justice activist, Jack Kirkland, who says: “I liken it to a flow of hot magma just below the surface. It’s always there, building, pushing up against the earth. It’s just a matter of time. When it finds a weak point, it’s going to blow.”
And when it blows, we get to watch it on TV: the flames, the smoke, the rage, the ammo “cooking off.” This is what institutional racism looks like when we finally notice it.
By: Robert Koehler, Award-Winning, Chicago-Based Journalist and Nationally Syndicated Writer; The National Memo, December 29, 2014
“Rudy Lied. Let’s Start With That”: Giuliani’s Hate-Mongering Shows The Right Wing Will Never Stop Trying To Scare Whites About Obama
Rudy Giuliani lied. Let’s start with that. After the heinous murder of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos a week ago, Giuliani spewed the following bit of hate about President Obama: “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police.”
For the record, the president did absolutely no such thing. If you want the details of what he has actually said about law enforcement officers over the past four months — i.e., since Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — Politifact and the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker have compiled them as part of their respective evaluations of Giuliani’s claim (the WaPo‘s article also includes more, similar statements by Giuliani about Obama and the police, made after the initial one cited above). Politifact found the claim to be a “pants on fire” lie, while the WaPo gave it four (out of a possible four) Pinocchios. As I said, Rudy Giuliani lied.
But of course it’s about much more than just the lie, it’s about the kind of race-baiting lie he told, and how it fits into an eight-year-long campaign by the right to draw on the worst fears of white Americans about a black president, in particular a liberal black president. You see, Giuliani’s comments about the police killings weren’t even the worst ones uttered. Among others, Ex. Rep. Joe Walsh accused Obama of having “blood on his hands.” Erick Erickson said the president has “created a situation where Americans cheer police officers being gunned down.”
As egregiously wrong as these are, I want to focus now on some remarks made by Rush Limbaugh that didn’t get, as far as I can tell, any broader media coverage, but which were heard by his 12.5 million listeners (he’s still got the biggest talk radio audience out there). What Giuliani only implied, Rush came right out and said — after first echoing the point that the president has “blood on his hands” and placing his picture next to that of Al Sharpton just below that statement on his website’s show transcript:
We are all headed in an accelerated pace for anarchy. That is where all of this is headed. The primary agents of this anarchy are militant Islamists, militant civil rights coalition types, the New Black Panther Party and ancillaries. And who are their enablers? The Democrat Party and the American left, from college professors to pop culture false idols to elected Democrats, and of course the media, the left has and is, I believe — and I really believe this, and I’m not using a single word for exaggeration purposes — I really believe that college professors, these pop culture false idols, elected Democrats, the media, are literally making their followers, i.e., base voters, insane with rage and anger. I don’t think there is any other conclusion.
No, Rush is not exaggerating. This is exactly what is behind the statements — as hateful as they were on their face — made by Giuliani. And notice what Limbaugh has done here, building on Giuliani’s demonstrably false accusation that the president has been telling people to hate the police. He hits on racial boogeymen like the New Black Panther Party, a teeny-tiny organization (which the Southern Poverty Law Center has defined as a hate group) about which the right has long stoked anxiety among whites. But Rush also connects the New Black Panthers to civil rights activists (not to mention militant Islamists, triggering a whole other set of fears), and says that elected Democrats — led by the chief elected Democrat — have been “enabling” them and pushing our country into “anarchy.” Oh, and as a college professor myself I’m proud to note that he mentioned us twice. Finally, since this is a race-based, “civil rights”-based anarchy, Rush’s listeners know that he’s talking about the thing he’s talked about so many times before: a race war.
This is by no means the first time Limbaugh has invoked the specter of race war. Just after the president was inaugurated a second time, in January 2013, he declared: “We’re in the midst here of designed class and race wars,” and this was only a week after he claimed that Louis Farrakhan was “in preparation for a race war.” Rush also talked on July 30, 2009, about how the media were promoting a “race war.”
But Limbaugh doesn’t have to use the words race war to make his listeners afraid of big, bad, black Barack Obama and his radical, militant allies. In my book about President Obama and American national identity, I examine numerous examples where Rush (and other right wingers) practiced race-baiting. I’ve shared what I then called his most egregious example here on Daily Kos before (although what he said last week certainly gives this one a run for it’s money), but I want to cite it again here because it ties together all the hateful things — starting with the remarks by Rudy Giuliani — said about the president (not to mention Eric Holder and Bill de Blasio) since the murder of NYPD Officers Liu and Ramos. This is from my book:
Limbaugh summarized this perspective on June 4, 2009, in one of the most pernicious formulations heard from a major media voice since Obama became a national figure–one that could have no purpose but to sow the toxic combination of hatred and fear among white members of his audience and pit Americans against one another along ethnic lines: “The days of them not having any power are over, and they are angry. And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about, gang. He’s angry, he’s gonna cut this country down to size, he’s gonna make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made, its mistreatment of minorities.”
In this brief, vitriol-laden rant, Limbaugh defined Obama and his nonwhite supporters (“they”) as anti-American and angry, and set their interests in opposition to those of whites, whose interests he defined as in line with those of America. It’s Obama and his people vs. America. Moreover, Limbaugh insinuated or perhaps tried to subconsciously evoke the idea that this was a street fight by using the term “gang.” In his view, the battle between Obama’s and Limbaugh’s gangs would determine whether whites or nonwhites will ultimately wield “power.”
Limbaugh did not choose these words lightly. His statement resembles rhetoric that goes back to the eighteenth century, according to which poor whites should rally together with slave owners around their shared whiteness, because if black slaves ever got free they would enact vengeance on all whites. It draws on the image of blacks as bloodthirsty savages bent on destroying the white civilization that has oppressed them for so long, without of course mentioning what that oppression says about how “civilized” are those who have carried it out. The greatest fear of the slave-owning elite was always an alliance of the common folk of all races. Limbaugh’s use of the trope of white racial unity as the only defense against retribution for past mistreatments is not original, but that makes it no less disgraceful.
And this is exactly what the right has sought to do to Barack Obama since before they had even heard of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Rudy Giuliani does it his way, and Rush Limbaugh does it his. But make no mistake, both of them — along with every other right winger who engages in this kind of race-baiting — have but one goal in mind, and that is to draw on and even heighten already existing fears held by too many white Americans that the day is coming for, in Limbaugh’s own words, “retribution.”
And they have the nerve to say Obama’s the one spreading hate.
By: Ian Reifowitz, The Blog, The Huffington, December 29, 2014
“Resetting The Default Button”: The NYPD Is Using Fear As A Weapon In The “War On Cops” Crackdown
The New York Post‘s Christmas edition carried a red, but hardly festive banner on its front page: “War on Cops.” The hyperbole aptly captures the perspective of the New York Police Department, which indeed has behaved like it’s at war since officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were murdered in their patrol car last week. Patrick Lynch, the head of the city’s largest police union, declared that there’s “blood on many hands,” specifically “those who incited violence under the guise of protests” and Mayor Bill de Blasio. Another police union has advised its members to remain armed even when they’re off duty and to keep a low profile on the street and online.
Never mind that the dead killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, had a long history of mental illness and had shot his ex-girlfriend in Maryland before traveling up to NYC. The only relevant fact, it seems, is that Brinsley had forecast his actions by posting a photo of a pistol on Instagram with the phrase “They Take 1 Of Ours… Let’s Take 2 of Theirs” and hashtag references to Eric Garner and Michael Brown. That’s all the evidence that Lynch, the Post, and their ilk need that there’s a war on cops—and that police must respond in kind.
The week after Ramos and Liu’s deaths has seen more than 40 threats against the NYPD, with seven arrests in connections with those threats, the department’s media office said Friday. One of those arrested, Devon Coley, an 18-year-old facing separate assault and weapons charges, posted on Facebook a photo—possibly from a movie—of a man firing a pistol into the driver’s side of a police car. He wrote “Nextt73,” an apparent reference to his local police precinct in Brooklyn, and punctuated it with emojis of a cop with a pistol by his head.
Under normal circumstances, that vague, semipublic comment might be reason for police to contact Coley for a conversation. But in these “blood on the hands” times, the NYPD is making it known that it will treat all threats as deadly serious. For his Facebook post, Coley faces up to seven years in prison. Brooklyn’s district attorney, Ken Thompson, told the Post that his request for $250,000 bail in the case fit the charge of making terroristic threats. (New York statute defines it as an actual threat that inspires “a reasonable expectation or fear” that a specified crime will happen.) While acknowledging that what Coley did was “stupid” and an “incredible inflammatory thing to do right now,” Circuit Judge Laura Johnson concluded, “I think that for me to set bail because of the current climate—it would be a misuse of bail.”
NYPD’s strong reaction does seem justified in at least one case: An informant with ties to Black Guerilla Family gang overheard talk of shooting up the stations, sources told DNAinfo, prompting two precincts to post heavily armed officers outside. But actual arrests have made for a less-than-ominous roundup. A Queens man was overheard talking on his phone about killing police; after receiving a tip, police searched his place and found guns, brass knuckles, and pot paraphernalia. A Manhattan man called Ramos and Liu’s old precinct in the middle of the night and claimed to be Brinsley, saying he’d like to kill more cops. Two men were arrested for making false reports of other people making threats. One Staten Island teenager wrote “kill the cops” on Facebook. And Jose Maldonado, 26, posted the same shooting photo Coley did, musing he “might just go out and kill two cops myself!!!” He surrendered to police and apologized, saying he was drunk. That didn’t save him from a trip to Riker’s after being arraigned on charges of terroristic threatening.
The NYPD understandably takes even drunken rants seriously, given Brinsley’s Instagram message. But throwing terroristic-threat charges at Facebook users who walk themselves into police stations when police contact them, as both Coley and Maldonado did, cheapens the very notion of terror. It might also make their jobs a whole lot harder in the coming weeks and months.
A basic principle of good policing holds that officers in the field should seek to de-escalate, rather than intensify, tension and use of force. (Police escalation of force was instrumental in many if not all the recent deaths that have sparked nationwide protests.) Yet thousands of New York’s finest created a political spectacle at Ramos’ funeral Saturday by turning their backs on the mayor during his eulogy. And while it’s Lynch’s job to antagonize the sitting mayor when his union is in protracted contract negotiations with the city, it’s also his job to represent police to the city. Cranking up the heat, especially at funerals, does police no favors. Even NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton has started pointing fingers, saying on the “Today” show that the “targeting of these two police officers was a direct spinoff of this issue of these demonstrations.”
Connecting peaceful demonstrators to a cop-killer has had its presumably intended effect. The New York Times on Friday reported that the killing of Ramos and Liu has opened rifts in the protest movement in New York. “It is wrong to connect the isolated act of one man who killed NYPD officers to a nonviolent mass movement,” Joo-Hyun Kang, the executive director of Communities United for Police Reform, told the paper. But conflating a call to end police violence with violence against police, contradictorily or not, has worked in City Hall. The Times quoted Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who earlier in December exhorted her colleagues to repeat “I can’t breathe” in memory of Garner’s last words, now calling “to end hateful and divisive rhetoric which seeks to demonize officers and their work.”
At the protests I saw two weeks ago, no one was demonizing officers’ work: The overwhelming mass of people were calling for police simply to do their jobs better, to avoid unnecessary deaths. The very inspiration for these protests was police overreaction, and yet here we are, charging nitwits with terroristic threats. Maybe this is how the NYPD de-escalates situations after all: By corralling elected officials and prosecutors, and letting the city know fear will now be the default. New York needs its cops to keep cooler heads. “Stop resisting” may be practical advice during an arrest, but it makes for contemptible politics.
By: Sam Eifling, The New Republic, December 28, 2014
“An Internalized Fear Of Black Males”: ‘Confirmation Bias’ Has Long History Of Helping Whites Demonize Blacks
Does “confirmation bias” influence the way whites think about police shootings of young men of color?
This bias is the tendency to interpret or remember information in a way that confirms what we already believe, and helps us to ignore new data. And it may explain the tension between white cops and black kids — and the public reaction to them — more than outright racism does.
Many of us think police must be in the right because we have internalized a fear of black males and assume that they are up to no good.
As Harvard sociologist Charles Ogletree has pointed out, “Ninety-nine percent of black people don’t commit crimes, yet we see the images of back people day in, day out, and the impression is that they’re all committing crimes.”
Young black males in recent years were at 21 times greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts, reports ProPublica, which analyzed federal data this year. It found that in “1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012, blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million,” compared with 1.47 per million white males in that age range.
Roger J.R. Levesque of Indiana State University says that eyewitnesses to crimes generally report scenarios that are consistent with confirmation bias. Among the studies he cites is one in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that found merely seeing a black face led subjects to be more likely to mistake objects for weapons.
In Ferguson, Mo., the white officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, described Brown as demon-like. Would he have used such a word if the teenager had been white?
Confirmation bias undoubtedly helped the defense in the 2013 trial in the death of Trayvon Martin. Lawyers successfully “thuggized” the black teenager, who was walking home carrying candy and a bottle of tea when he was shot by a white neighborhood watch member. Martin had no criminal record, but the defense dug up some minor problems he had in school and made an animated video showing him attacking the white man who shot him. There was no actual evidence that the unarmed teenager started the fight. But jurors clearly bought that narrative.
Throughout U.S. history, confirmation bias has helped some white people use the image of the evil black man for their own ends. The “Willie Horton” TV ad caused a huge controversy when it ran during the 1988 presidential race between George H.W. Bush and Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. The ad featured a fearsome-looking mug shot of a black convict who raped a woman while free under a Massachusetts prison furlough program backed by Dukakis. The ad was intended to picture Dukakis as soft on crime, and it worked.
Whites trying to escape punishment for their crimes sometimes find black men convenient scapegoats, because they are so readily seen as prone to crime. In 1989, a Boston white man, Charles Stuart, was shot in a black neighborhood in the city, along with his pregnant wife. He blamed a “black male.” His wife and son, who was delivered prematurely, later died.
News coverage was extremely sympathetic until evidence surfaced indicating that Stuart shot his wife and himself.
In 1994, Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman, claimed that a black man had hijacked her car and kidnapped her two young sons. For days, the news media gave around-the-clock coverage to a nationwide search for the black carjacker. But no such man exist. Smith had drowned her two sons by pushing her car into a lake with the boys inside. She had a wealthy boyfriend who allegedly was not interested in having a “ready-made” family.
It’s no wonder whites so easily accept the image of the evil black male. But this was not always so.
Early in the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, notes Audrey Smedley, now professor emeritus of anthropology at Virginia Commonwealth University, blacks were not set apart from other laborers. The first slaves the English used in the Caribbean were Irish. And there were more Irish slaves in the middle of the 17th century than any others.
At that time, Smedley writes, African slaves and European slaves “worked together, they played together … they lived together” and color didn’t “make much difference … because they were all in the same boat.”
One 17th century planter who wrote to the trustees of his company said, “Please don’t send us any more Irishmen. Send us some Africans, because the Africans are civilized and the Irish are not.”
But plantations grew ever larger and the African slave trade exploded. To justify the cruelty of lifetime slavery, the myth had to be manufactured that blacks — especially men — were subhuman and violent. That image stuck.
In the years since, those ideas too often have intensified. As Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson points out, “More than 45 years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded that we lived in two societies, one white, one black, separate and still unequal.” And we still do. If we don’t resolve this gap, Dyson writes, “We are doomed to watch the same sparks reignite, whenever and wherever injustice meets desperation.”
Only when we realize the power of confirmation bias, and start looking at reality instead of stereotypes and misinformation, will things change.
By: Caryl Rivers, Journalism Professor at Boston University; Op-Ed Opinion, The Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2014
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