Can A Nation Divided Against Itself Stand?

I was recently criticized for “rushing to judgment” against cops in general by calling Alton Sterling’s death “untimely and wrongful” and then accused of doing this to benefit myself. The person who brought the criticism missed the whole point of a letter to the editor I had written, which was not anti-cop at all, but only meant to invite White people to join me in trying to address a system based on an ideology that is clearly threatening our common good as a nation.

I’ve worked with, talked with, interviewed, and counted as friends too many police officers to lump them all into one basket. They’re humans just like the rest of us. They bleed when they’re shot. They get scared when they go on a call. Some bring more skills to the table than others. Some make mistakes. And some break the law.

My critic said I should have mentioned that they also die in the line of duty. And certainly what happened in Dallas last week demonstrated that in horrifying fashion. In truth, 26 officers have been killed so far this year. But research tells us that even though 8 out of 10 of those cops were killed by White men, police officers are far, far more likely to kill Black people – men, women, and children, often unarmed and unarrested – than they are White ones. In fact, police officers in America have killed upwards of 150 Black people in 2016 alone (roughly one every 31 hours), which is 24% of those killed, though African-Americans make up only 13% of our country’s population.

Police officers are professionals. It’s not difficult to find film clips or photographs showing them doing a remarkable job of not killing people who are threatening or even shooting at them – as long as they are White. And anyway, according to The Badge of Life, a highly respected police organization, more than twice as many police officers died by suicide in 2015 than were killed by felons.

Regardless, my letter wasn’t about any of that. It was about White Supremacy.

I’m White myself. And for more than five decades now, I’ve been studying, learning, writing, and speaking about White Supremacy – which is, in its most basic sense, the misguided idea that people with “White” skin are superior to the rest of the human race just because of their skin tone and deserve, therefore, to live their lives as privileged people.

It makes about as much sense as saying that humans with a second toe longer than their first toe should be treated better than everybody else. Yet it’s how Europeans rationalized killing off an estimated 50 million Native Americans to take their land, stealing a third of Mexico by force, and building an entire and very rich nation on the backs of African slaves for 250 years.

Then, having established their position of dominance using such unmitigated violence, they stacked on top of all that history laws, public policies, and social practices that made sure they would hold onto the most of the best and suffer the least of the worst as permanently as possible – still based on their skin tone (something over which none of us has control).

Since we are all socialized under this ideology from birth, no matter what we look like, we have come to believe that this is normal – even natural – but it is not. And the most powerful manifestation of this ideology currently, of course, occurs when a police officer, a person we all trust with our lives every day, but who has been socialized under the same ideology the rest of us are raised under, crosses a line that is painfully visible to any who want to admit it.

Because our nation’s social institutions have all been established and maintained under the ideology of White Supremacy, it is unrealistic, at best, to hope that they will somehow not reflect norms that have been in place since the 1600s. Until the White Supremacy is addressed, this nation is in jeopardy of its destruction because White Supremacy – by nature – demands that the nation be divided against itself and, therefore, according to Abraham Lincoln, cannot stand.

This is my country. I’ve lived in it for seventy years. I want it to be the best country it can be for all its citizens. So I am against the ideology of White Supremacy.

Being against White Supremacy in a nation that continues to embrace that ideology is hardly going to make me a lot of money. It has cost me friends. It has cost me jobs. It cost me a PhD. And still I work to make my country better. I attack White Supremacy on this blog. I attack White Supremacy in my book. And my critic attacked me. An interesting choice.

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NOTE: The photograph at the top of this post was carefully chosen. Pay attention to the face of the older White male cop in the center of the police line. He's watching the young Black woman cop to his left to see what's she's going to do. And she knows it. This is why I write. Because, as a White person, I can. So far. So I must.