Race relations have never been straightforward in this country. I was born in 1954 to Southern white parents. All mainstream America was racist.
My mother owned a small business, an answering service, about two blocks from the White House. My father was a Washington, D.C., policeman. The only black people I ever saw were the elevator ladies and the cleaning staff at my mother’s office building, a sharply impoverished neighborhood we passed through sometimes, and the underpaid black lady who had been with my family for eight years before I was born. She cleaned our house, and babysat.
One day she phoned in sick. I told my mother, and she became annoyed. “She’s probably going to that thing at the Mall.”
“What thing?”
“Just a thing.”
I was about 12 before a liberal white kid at school asked me, “Do you think black people are as smart as white people?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because the only jobs I ever see them do are elevator operator and janitorial work.”
“What about oppression?”
I told the boy the truth: “I’ve never seen any oppression.”
My father was from the sticks and was prone to violent rages. Sometimes he’d express these rages in corporal punishment. Other times, and this is literally true, he would just be sitting there on the couch, and would suddenly be spouting a tirade about “those damn n——” — not specific acts of specific people, but generalized racial epithets.
During one of these tirades, I grabbed his hands and looked into his face with a child’s anxious concern and said, “Why, Daddy? What did Negroes do to you?”
He did a double take, looked at me dispassionately, and said, “Nuthin’. They’re just n——.”
He was irrationally and unapologetically racist.
Once I was watching “A Raisin in the Sun” on television. “You know what that’s about, don’t you?” he asked.
“What?”
“A bunch of belligerent n——.”
We had three channels and no Internet. As a child, I had never heard of police brutality. I thought his racism didn’t count because he was only an ignorant man from the sticks.
As an adult, I’ve come to realize racism is comprised of ignorance and mindless rage. Unfortunately, I see the same vacuous failure to perceive oppressive racism, in the white people around me, that colored my own childhood “ignorant.”
Police brutality has been a mainstay of organized racism since slave days. Corrupt police and prosecutors have incarcerated innocent black men and turned the thugs loose on black communities for decades. Watch “The Hurricane,” starring Denzel Washington.
On year ago this week, a police union official was supporting the New York City homicide of Eric Garner on the radio, and his interviewer seemed quite surprised by that support, so I watched the famous video.
There’s not even any gray area. When he was killed by New York police on July 17 last year, Garner was a totally harmless man from beginning to end, as harmless as Ethan Saylor in Maryland in 2013. Supporters of police brutality say Garner would be alive if he hadn’t “resisted arrest.” Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t.
To say so is reminiscent of the batterer who screams at his injured victim, “See what you made me do?”
Except that Garner is dead, and not because he didn’t want to be arrested, but because a police officer was violent. Apparently, police want a wide range of killing opportunities, from “imminent threat” to “He looked at me funny.”
Theresa Stephen lives in Lakewood.
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