Rebel Without A Pause

Another essay about Race.

America has a history of taboo words. It’s a little different in the current wave of anti-decorum spurred on by our last (and potentially next) president, but there’s things you don’t say and labels you don’t want. If you’re a member of polite society, at least.

Who decides what polite society is? Who decides what is right and wrong? Talking about politics or money? That’s gauche. We don’t talk about religion! When you think about taboo in America, do you think about WHY they are taboo? Why we don’t talk about it?

I think about that a lot. I know the devil doesn’t need another advocate, but all things in moderation right Ben? Contrarian thinking has certainly made me a villain in a lot of stories, many times deservedly so. A child asking why is an irritant, right? Their intellectual curiosity frustrates parents who are tapped out and tired. Overworked. Who don’t want to find or face the answers to the questions their kids have.

When facing the forces that shape our world, however, asking why has helped me find reason for things that don’t make sense. We exist in a world where it is increasingly difficult to deny reality. We can’t just turn off the news. We can’t insulate from truths. Our only path to rationality is to deny reality or embrace it. For some people, embracing reality means relishing their role as a villain. I proudly claimed misogyny in my youth. You see it with the flag wielding patriots today.

Most people choose to deny reality.

I did, in the many years before I accepted my role in a racist society. I had no problem being a villain, but I did have a problem accepting that part of my villainy. You see people who deny realities for a host of reasons. Typically the reason is an idea of self-preservation. People who have it worse than you could easily be you. We can’t change systems, we can only survive them.

I can write novels on the why here. Who knows, maybe I will. But let’s drill down on one facet of American denial, one of the biggest tentpoles of classism in America and really one of the biggest foundations of our national. It’s a cornerstone of our economy, our politics, our culture. It’s a word people feel tacky using in “polite company.” However, racism is as American as Apple Pie (more so, probably).

Like most things that manifest in humanity, racism is a spectrum. How much you benefit. How much you suffer. How much you are even aware of its impact on your life. Racism is pervasive in our world, and while I deal mostly with American themed racism, I do not pretend it is a wholly American invention. How do you move from being complicit to being an anti-racist?

With anything that has roots as deep as this cultural malady, it takes a lot of effort and intention.

Three Years, Five Months and Two Days…

My first step to confronting my own racism was acknowledging it. Denying my own complicit nature did not change it. Explaining it didn’t either. Accepting it changed a lot.

Once I was able to acknowledge that I do benefit from racism, I couldn’t stop seeing the ways I had. Generational wealth, of which I have benefitted, is racist in nature. Because white America had been built with slave labor, I had access to resources via ancestors I never met. Because the schools they went to were better. Because they jobs they had access to were better. Because they could own homes easier, could get bank loans, could break laws with less repercussions. Some of that was certainly a function of wealth as well, but it gave all white Americans opportunities that non-white Americans didn’t have access to. And those white Americans had children.

Once I was able to accept that my actions were harmful to SOME oppressed people, I was able to navigate “touchy subjects” with empathy and accountability. One common refrain from any group is individuality. Even straight, white men aren’t divorced from unfair stereotypes which has lead to the ridiculous cries of “Not all men!” I certainly have bristled at statements lobbied against people who look like me, but I also had to learn that not every conversation is for me. And if the conversation isn’t about me, maybe I need to listen to WHY so many people feel that way about white men.

And if white men aren’t a monolith, as any white man would be happy to tell you, why is any other group?

Jimmy Yang has a bit about being the mouth piece for Asians and how no white comic has to be the voice of white America. They are allowed to being individuals and speak for themselves. But countless entertainers of color have long been held to a different standard. Bill Cosby to Chris Rock and Will Smith to LeBron James or Michael Jordan to infinity and beyond.

When you allow yourself to see a person as an individual instead of a trait, you find a footing to combating your own racism.

When you start to see people as individuals and not representatives, things like the Model Minority start to fray. Why is it okay for country/rock criminals to be lionized and rap criminals to be demonized? Why is Jordan Belfort cool? Why does Woody Allen get to keep making movies? Roman Polanski get to win an Oscar? Why is Louis Farrakhan a problem but Christian Fundamentalists get TV Shows? Their own networks?

If those questions get under your skin, why? What about it bothers you? The next step for me to combat my own racism was to accept the racism of our world. Not to endorse it, but to accept that it does exist and it is unfair.

All Cats Are Beautiful

I have accepted that I am racist. I have accepted that my culture is racist. But I have really only flirted with the biggest hurdle I had to face before I was ready to start being an actual anti-racist. Systemic racism.

Why is our foundation racist? Who does it benefit and why is it so pervasive?

I’m really flying fast and loose here. I’ll admit it. I’m not getting sources and citing research. I get it. But this is about my personal journey and while I read a lot and I had a lot of data to bring me to where I am today, I think it is important for me to keep this part personal.

Racism is a key component in classism. Classism is a problem as old as recorded history. Racism has existed as long as humans have needed a reason for people to hate other people. Who does classism benefit? The people at the top. The people near the top. The people in the middle. The people on the bottom rung of the top ladder. There’s always someone worse off because they are worse than you in a classist society.

Racism makes it easy for you to hate another group of people and make them less than you. It’s easy to see racism broadly, when you see people blatantly dehumanizing another person you can call them a racist safe in the ocean of micro aggressions we might not even be aware we’re using to ALSO dehumanize others.

I was walking with my friend Marc yesterday and we talked about reparations. He was asking me how I felt about it. How do you feel about it? When we deny our own privilege from our ancestor’s racist history, we are insulating ourselves from the benefits we’ve gained. Reparations are, at their core, paying people back for unpaid labor. Labor that created wealth gaps that grew with interest.

That feels like an attack when you’re a poor person. Why would I give money I’ve never had? It’s created a boogeyman. A rich person who exploited slave labor, undocumented labor, indentured servitude and more will turn a class issue into a race issue to escape accountability for their exploitation. There are even loopholes for slavery through imprisonment. In case you might tell yourself that no one would actually do that:

Louisiana's prisoners do all sorts of work, often for only a few cents an hour, ranging from agricultural labor at Angola — itself a former slave plantation — to janitorial work at the State Capitol and Governor's Mansion. 

Sure, that article was from 2 years ago, clearly things have changed greatly in that time right?

Labor is the biggest cost of doing business so unethical people will do whatever they can to save money. If that means creating a system of policing to keep a certain “race” of person imprisoned so that they can continue to exploit that labor, sure we can do that. How are you going to deal with the backlash when that information gets out?

The ridiculous police of 1910s pop culture didn’t come out of nowhere. The police of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were widely understood to be a corrupt gang, and not without reason. The infamous Lexow Commission of the 1890s, which ran more than 10,000 pages long, found that the police extorted $10 million from the public each year in New York State alone, and that they regularly harassed the citizenry rather than trying to protect them. That report drove 30 years of police reform efforts and gave a young Theodore Roosevelt the chance to build his reputation on cleaning up the New York City Police Department — but for much of the public, the police’s reputation as a pack of hired goons at worst and incompetent bumblers at best had already been set.

Art has a history of condemning agents of the state that operate as traitors. New mediums are always radical until the “powers that be” have the ability to sanitize it and control it. We’re really in the middle of the culture war of the internet and it is has become another losing front. We’ll cycle back to that on another day.

Decades of reform helped change the public’s perception of the police. But it also helped that the movie industry, eager to escape police censorship, began to police itself. Studios needed police cooperation to cover up their stars’ misdeeds. They also needed to get shooting permits. They had plenty of motivation to play nicely with the police. So the policeman as incompetent bumbler began to fade away from the movies.

Pressure was applied to the people who financed the art to stop calling them out for their corruption and maleficence.

But what cemented the idea of the hero cop in the American imagination was the modern cop show, starting with 1951’s Dragnet. And as many critics have already shown — including, notably, Alyssa Rosenberg in her in-depth study at the Washington Post — the modern cop show was the result of a close relationship between Hollywood and the police.

Copaganda built a world where cops were heroes and (mostly) black people were dangerous villains. Regulatory bodies are bad. Vigilante cops are good. Gun control, a bastion of liberal policies in America, has a racist history:

For a significant portion of American history, gun laws bore the ugly taint of racism.¹ The founding generation that wrote the Second Amendment had racist gun laws, including prohibitions on the possession or carrying of firearms by Black people, whether free or enslaved.² A Florida law in 1825 authorized white people to “enter into all Negro houses” and “lawfully seize and take away all such arms, weapons, and ammunition.”³ In Dred Scott v. Sandford,⁴ Chief Justice Roger Taney argued that one reason Black people could not be citizens under the Constitution was that it “would give to persons of the negro race” the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

The cops are an easy punching bag, because they are so openly racist. They are insulated from accountability, internally and externally. It can be hard to reconcile the reality of policing in America with the IDEA of policing in America. We are people who are conditioned to believe that police are brave heroes, even if being a pizza delivery driver is a a far more dangerous job. And far less pay ($37k vs 50k before factoring in overtime).

Why does the systemic racism conversation seem to die at police brutality?

The Tip of the Iceberg

Culture wars aren’t some new tactic and they are regularly refined. An iceberg is an apt comparison because it gets much bigger the deeper under the surface you get but you are also subjected to a lot more pressure than you can handle. Going under the ocean’s surface is always dangerous and digging into racism gets you questions you might not be prepared to answer.

You need the right tools and the right education. You’ll face things that seem almost alien because they are so at odds with the world you know. The life under the ocean is not the life you know. I understand this comparison has flaws, oppressed people aren’t sea creatures after all. Just that your understanding of what life is like as a non-white person in a white dominant can feel unreal when you’re subjected to a life that is so unlike the one you know.

The reality of police brutality is inescapable in the current age. And people still deny that reality. Bad apples. Personal anecdotes. Cultural beliefs. Politics and religion are two things you don’t talk about because bad actors don’t hold up to scrutiny. People don’t like facing truths that conflict with their world view. It’s a bit of a chicken and the egg scenario, in that organizations that are divorced from scrutiny are loaded with predators.

Did people start those organizations because they knew it would give them a path to exploit with minimal repercussions or did they manipulate a situation instilled with unwarranted faith? I’d love to say that coming to terms with the real functions of police (protecting wealth) was all it took for me to be an anti-racist but there are systems we haven’t started on.

Work, education, healthcare, housing, family life, cuisine, technology and so many other layers contribute to our role in racism in America. Some of those I can write about with a level of authority, many I’m still learning about myself. But I’ll dig into that next week. And I’m going to get into my work toward being an anti-racist as well.

For now, the next time you start to get defensive on behalf of police, ask yourself how YOU would feel enforcing an unethical law? How would you feel kicking a struggling family out of their home? How would you feel having to defend a coworker that murdered someone for the crime of being black? How would you feel about your co-workers posting white supremacist information openly? Being a member of the neo-Nazis or Klu Klux Klan?