What People Miss About American Race Relations

There's basically two attitudes about race in America:

• The (mostly white) attitude is that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s mostly solved the problems we can solve on race, and now you can't wipe out individual attitudes, but at least we're all formally equal.
• The (mostly progressive) attitude is that we're still living in the Civil Rights movement, and that today's work is an extension of the work of the likes of Martin Luther King Jr.

Both are wrong.

Schools, lunch counters, military units, and all public services are no longer segregated. In short, Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement worked. We can say today that under the "black and white" of the law, equality across races has been achieved. For all intents and purposes, much of King's work was finished. There are areas of workers rights and the dignity of the poor which were not, but some would consider that to be separate from knocking down segregation laws and their like.

The problem we face today on race is less about formal law and more about areas that are tougher to govern. When Darren Wilson calls Michael Brown a "demon," or any of the similar cases where white (or just non-black) people assign super-human powers to African-Americans who they shoot (remember, George Zimmerman's story on why he had to shoot Trayvon Martin?), is that this not an attitude that can be struck down by law. Our stereotypes of African-Americans cause us to de-humanize them:

So, it's no wonder non-Americans tend to think that real life in the US is just like it is in violent Hollywood movies - because it often is. But this doesn't mean that other countries have picked up our bad habit of frantically demonising blacks in the news. Watching foreign news treatment of Michael Brown is particularly illuminating. In Japan, newscasters call him "Brown-san", using the honorific suffix "-san" out of respect. In Mexican coverage, he's referred to as a "joven", in Brazil, a "jovem", in Taiwan, a "xiaonian" - all words for a "young man". In other words, he is treated as a person.

But in the US, we are warned that Michael Brown "was no angel". We are told that he made rap songs. We are reminded that he was quite tall (just as tall as his killer), and a bit overweight (this part makes him scary). Fox News has worked to cast doubt on whether he was headed to college or not. Any facade of humanity that Brown might have had has been stripped away, all the better to show us the terrifying monster within.

Think about that all for a moment. Michael Brown "was no angel?" Ok, neither am I, but I bet I'm not getting shot over a cheap pack of cigars. Michael Brown had no criminal record, and yet an altercation was needed to get him for taking a pack of cigars. That's over-policing. That would not be done to me.

Which leads to my point- the problem we have with race relations in America today are the applications of our law towards African-Americans, as driven by white attitudes about African-Americans. If a white kid in a suburb stills a pack of cheap cigars and the cops catch him, chances are  they get a slap on the wrist, or just taken home to dad. If a black kid in suburban St. Louis gets caught doing the same thing, there's an altercation and a shooting. Our law is not applied equally. We find that justice is not blind at all. Justice has eyes that are wide opened.

It's why the sentence for cooked cocaine, or crack, a "black" drug, are worse than the sentence for regular cocaine, a drug white people use more. It's why we use "standardized tests" to help determine school funding, which tend to favor wealthier (whiter) school districts. It's why transportation funding bills tend to favor new roads from the suburbs to the jobs in the cities, rather than mass transit. I could go on and on. All of this is driven by attitudes. Those attitudes effect the application of law.

We're past the days of poll taxes and open uses of the N-word. We're past the days where people can openly support racism. We're past the time of open legal use of racism. While that's all great, if you stack the deck against African-American people, if they think that their lives don't really matter in this country, isn't that just as bad, if not worse?