I live in the rural Midwest. Agriculture is the dominant activity, and most folks live in small towns. In many respects, it is a good place to live. People are mostly decent and hard working. They try to be what they consider “good folk”. The problem is, they are prisoners to what they want to believe about the world, and therefore, they fail to see the often stark reality that lies beyond their prejudices.
As I sat waiting my turn for a haircut, the five o’clock news was on TV, and they were reporting that six Baltimore police officers were being charged in the death of Freddie Gray. I thought to myself, finally, after days of dancing and denials, a step in the right direction – a step toward justice and accountability. No sooner had the thought reverberated in my head, the barber piped in “I just don’t think I would want to be a police officer nowadays”. I was shocked for a moment, but then, remembering where I sat, I was left with the realization of the wall of prejudiced belief that imprisons these folks.
These are not people that would intentionally harm a black person simply because of the color of their skin, but how easily they made the leap to believing the police officers were just doing their job, dealing with bad people, and now they were being unjustly charged in the death of what surely must have been a bad person. After all, if you aren’t a bad person, you don’t have run-ins with the police. That is, by-and-large, how things operate locally, so they project this dynamic onto the national stage. A chorus of grunts and groans of agreement echoed from the others waiting for their haircuts.
One gentlemen, a farmer in his sixties, cited some statistics to back up his point of view. He read an article stating the total number of people of black people shot by police last year was around 240 (my recollection of the numbers are approximate, not exact), but there had been 490 white people killed by police. Why aren’t the white people out protesting and rioting?
As I digested these comments, I was overwhelmed at the complete lack of any sense of proportion or perspective in this observation. I really couldn’t comprehend how you could miss the most obvious fact. It was low hanging fruit, right there for the picking. According to 2013 figures from the US Census Bureau, White Americans are approximately 73% of the population, while black Americans make up approximately 13% of the population. You don’t need an advanced knowledge of statistics to see that black people are significantly more likely to be killed by police than are white people. Yet this gentlemen chose to focus on the simple quantitative difference – there are more white people killed by police than blacks, so white people, therefore, should have more reason to be upset.
This wall of seemingly impenetrable ignorance, combined with the complete inability to engage in anything resembling critical thinking, may be, more than anything else, the reason why 50 years after Selma, we have not made more progress on racial equality for African Americans. The progress is glacially slow because white America is blinded by a mythology that there is equality in the form of a level playing field, and that blacks can avail themselves of all the same opportunities as whites, and all these issues with the police are just because of bad choices made by black folks.
Yep, and homosexuality is a lifestyle choice.
