An Antiracist Trinity

An Antiracist Trinity

Adult nonfiction
Friday I was serving up supper. The television was on local
news. Only they cut away to announce a national story--the acquittal
on all charges of Kyle Rittenhouse. Video showed a teen who had
crossed state lines to participate in a counter demonstration cradling
an assault rifle confidently and eagerly scanning the crowd, looking
quite pleased to have an opportunity to use his weapon. This was not
someone fearing for his life. Although he was a civilian, he was
given the kind of qualified immunity normally reserved for police
officers. It was said by at least one person he was acting in lieu of
police in their role. Hello. An untrained seventeen-year-old? There
was so much wrong with the verdict.
Rittenhouse is white. If a Black teen had committed the acts
Rittenhouse had you know he wouldn't have been set free. He would
have been beaten and arrested, if not shot on the spot. He would have
been dubbed a thug, not a hero by the right wing.
By some quite fortuitous coincidence I had recently browsed the
Fogler Library (UMaine) popular books section and snagged three books
all related to state sanctioned racial violence. I decided to review
them together to explicate some of the back story behind why the
verdict was not only possible, but sadly predictable.

Ida B. the Queen
For much of my life Ida B. Wells has been one of my big time
sheroes. She spoke about lynching at a time when it was accepted. I
don't understand the mentality behind it. Many people considered it
family friendly entertainment to see people hung, shot, or burned to
death and mutilated. They brought the kids and spectated the way we
might watch a football game, even bringing picnic lunches. They
collected scraps of victims' clothes and actual body parts as prized
souvenirs.
Wells saw the truth and made it her purpose to bring this sordid
truth to light in order to get the practice made illegal. (BTW we
still haven't made a law to do that). People in power didn't listen.
And by her extensive documenting of and publishing about the atrocity
she put herself in very real peril of death at the hands of a racist
mob...
...like sadly today protestors trying to attest to the simple
truth of Black lives mattering put themselves in danger of being shot
in cold blood by vigilantes and police officers armed with military
grade weapons.
A new book about her life, Ida B. the Queen by Michelle Duster,
is the most illuminating work on her life I've ever seen. Published
in 2021, it isn't just a retelling of the same information.
First of all, it goes into detail about the heartbreaks she
experienced that helped shape the radical activist she became. At
sixteen, an age when girls often ponder prom, summer vacation, and
college or other plans for the future, she lost both parents and her
youngest brother to a yellow fever epidemic and instantly became
responsible for nurturing and financially providing for her five
younger siblings. The three men whose lynchings kindled the fire in
her were personal friends, the Black owners of the People's Grocery
who were tortured, murdered, and mutilated for the "crime" of
competing with the white-owned store that had previously held a
monopoly. Can you imagine the anguish behind these words:
"The City of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor
standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the
white man or become his rival...There is therefore only one thing left
that we can do; save our money and leave a town which will neither
protest our lives or property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts,
but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white
persons."
Secondly, it shows us all the ways in which Wells' work and
legacy carry into the current century--connecting her with people like
Colin Kaepernick, Maxine Waters, Bree Newsome, and the founders of
Black Lives Matter.
(The Rittenhouse verdict illustrates the terrible necessity of
all their work.)
And then there are all the wonderful pictures.
If you want to take a fresh look at a woman whose Black life
mattered immensely, put Ida B. the Queen on your reading list.

A Peculiar Indifference
"In the United States today, a young black man has fifteen times
the chance of dying from violence as his white counterpart. Violence
takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and
diabetes combined. It strikes even black women more often than white
men and contributes significantly to persistently lower overall life
expectancy and higher infant mortality among black Americans. These
disparities contribute to sharply divergent overall patterns of life
and deaths between whites and blacks in the United States..."
Elliott Currie took the title of his book, A Peculiar
Indifference, from a statement by W.E.B. Du Bois. Speaking at the end
of the 19th century, he lamented that there were "few other cases in
the history of civilized peoples where human suffering has been viewed
with such indifference" (as that of America's Blacks). He believes
that this peculiar indifference is still in evidence among whites
today. True we join in protest waves in the wake of an especially
egregious police shooting of am unarmed Black. But when it comes to
the pervasive violence that tragically permeates Black communities we
are asleep at the wheel. Generations of us have made decisions that
have created great wealth gaps between white and black communities
that impact every aspect of life including degree of violence and
relative mortality. "...That wealth gives us both the means and the
responsibility to reverse the consequences of those decisions. Our
failure to do so--our peculiar indifference--is not only socially
destructive and economically wasteful but a profound moral default."
It's hard to get beyond the first chapter, Dimensions. A number
of statistical measures are used to show the great life/death
disparities between whites and Blacks. In addition to street violence
other more intimate, hidden sources are illuminated. A little known
measure called the years of potential life lost is especially
telling. It's calculated by subtracting age at death from a potential
sixty-five. Blacks lose exponentially more of those years than whites.
A sizeable chunk of the book is devoted to explanations of the
overabundance of violence in Black Communities by pioneering and more
recent researchers. Both groups came up with some strikingly similar
conclusions. Higher levels of violence in Black communities result
not from innate or cultural dispositions (which a lot of whites even
today sadly believe) but as response to the systemic racism and
blatant injustices and inequities perpetuated by the white
institutions and the inability to achieve meaningful change.
For me the most heartbreaking chapter is the one on the impact
of pervasive violence in Black communities on even their youngest
members. Children know of and even witness the violent deaths of
family members and friends. They are robbed not only of people close
to them, but also of the ability to believe in any kind of future for
themselves. Five years to many seems like an impossible to imagine
distant future.
The final chapter consists of remedies that are far more
comprehensive and interrelated than today's bandaid solutions usually
tried and abandoned when they don't work--their failures allowing
whites to victim blame and lapse back into a state of peculiar
indifference. They will not be easy to implement. But we have not
only the resources, but the moral imperative to do so.
A Peculiar Indifference is a good read for learning the scope of
the problem and the steps necessary for solving it.

America On Fire
"Black rebellion clearly has a future; it also has a long history.
That Black people might rise up in violence has been a widespread fear
among white Americans for centuries...Here was the foundational logic
of American policing: maintaining the social order through the
surveillance and social control of people of color."
In her comprehensive and insightful America On Fire: The Untold
History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960's law
professor Elizabeth Hinton decisively shatters some of our nation's
beloved myths.
Well, things used to be bad. But the Civil Rights Era fixed all
that. We've been making all this racial progress since then. We've
even elected a Black president. So aren't we like post racial now?
Not quite. The inequity and racism embedded systemically in our
way of life are still very much alive and destroying Black
individuals, families, and communities.
Rioters were/are thugs. They start waves of misguided,
irrational, and/or pathological mass crime.
Hinton asserts that what has been typically called riots can be
more accurately described as rebellions by people with plenty to be
angry about. Also individual riots were triggered by acts of violence
on the part of the police and followed by state violence against
protesters and a clamping down on the Black community by a police
force with new military grade weapons and almost unlimited powers.
But you had to do that to restore law and order and keep
everyone safe. Right?
Wrong! Those involved in the rebellions often had very
legitimate demands (decent housing, jobs with degnity, education
comparable with that available to whites, an end to mass
incarceration...) and the willingness to collaborate to achieve them.
Hinton has massive amounts of evidence to back her assertions,
over three hundred pages of it. She analyzes rebellions and their
causes and aftermaths from the 1960s when President Johnson's War on
Crime encouraged police to become increasingly intrusive and heavy
handed in Black communities to the mess we're in today. If you're
anything like me it will make you mighty angry.
But at the very end there is a flicker of hope.
"...Some lawmakers are listening again, and the challenge of the
twenty-first century is to actually bring about change. As Michael's
comments imply, America will continue to see the fires of rebellion--
perhaps by a new, more diverse generation of protesters--until the
forces of inequality are finally abolished and the nation no longer
empowers police officers to manage the material consequences of
conditions that are beyond their control."
I fervently hope that I live to see that.

On a personal note, Thanks to Kyle Rittenhouse two men are dead and a
third paralyzed from the waist down for the "crime" of protesting
racism and police brutality. He was acquitted of all charges. Even
though he was not in any kind of danger he convinced a jury that
(while wielding an assault rifle) he had reason to fear for his life.
That's become a magic get out of jail free card for police and white
supremacists.
In the meantime unarmed Black men, women, and even children in
police encounters are shot if they even move and their killers
exonerated by the magic card.
And we still aren't doing nearly enough to change the
impoverished conditions under which so many Blacks are condemned to
live and die.
I was so angry after seeing the verdict I had to do something.
Reading and reviewing these three books was what I could think of.
They and other fine volumes in our libraries can help us understand
why in America the Rittenhouse verdict was possible and what's needed
to transform our nation into a place where liberty and justice for all
is more than an empty phrase.
A great big shout out goes out to all who rebel against racism and
police brutality.
Jules Hathaway


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