A country on edge
Massacre of five officers in Dallas plunges U.S. into race-related worry The lone suspect had bomb-making equipment at home, police say Unwelcome tensions and possible roadblocks for black activists
“Local religious leaders ask for unity, prayer,” read the headline at the bottom of the television screen in front of Taira Johnson.
Johnson, a black parole officer in Dallas, desperately wanted the same. She feared something else.
Johnson, 36, believes prayer can heal. But in a restaurant on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., her mind kept drifting to a thought she never had before.
“It makes you wonder: Is there going to be a race war?” she said.
“I never thought it would be a possibility. But when you see things like this, you know that it’s very much real. You just never can say.”
A horrific three-incident string of caught-on-video killing, culminating with the massacre of five police officers in Dallas on Thursday night, has plunged much of the United States into a crisis of race-related apprehension.
The country’s eternal wound, never removed from the public consciousness, has been ripped open, right on YouTube, during an already combustible period of heightened political polarization.
“There’s just this general dissonance that’s happening,” said Kyle Hiller, 30, a black writer in Philadelphia who said he was so “numb” he had trouble getting himself out of bed on Friday. “We have these two separate parties that are screaming so loud, and it’s creating this really harsh noise, and it’s really hard to make sense of it.”
As Dallas police continued their investigation, the city was the picture of calm. Black and white residents gently placed flowers on top of a patrol car parked as a memorial outside police headquarters. The black police chief and the white mayor appealed together, again, for love and understanding.
And it was not just them: The public mood appeared far more griefstricken than militant.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a crazy individual that doesn’t speak for the black community,” said Ronald Chapman, 70, a white man. “Do I think the world is going to react to that? Not in a negative way. A positive way, hopefully.”
But in coffee shops and barbershops, the hoping was combined with bracing.
In interviews, residents spoke of preparing themselves for a period of strife some said they worried would eventually resemble the conflict of the late 1960s.
Developments around the country offered more reason for unease: At least three more police officers were shot or shot at Friday, in Missouri, Tennessee and Georgia.
White conservatives said they worried about the possibility of a prolonged series of anti-police attacks fuelled by Black Lives Matter activists’ vocal criticism of officers’ conduct.
Even blacks long ago accustomed to mourning police violence said they had never felt so afraid.
“I’m sitting here now, looking at the news, and I’m thinking, ‘What next? What city will have erupted next?’ ” said Baruti Kafele, 55, a well-known black educator and public speaker in New Jersey.
The police killings this week of Alton Sterling, a seller of CDs in Louisiana, and Philando Castile, a school cafeteria employee in Minnesota, appear to have hit home with many blacks even more deeply than previous police deaths the community widely viewed as unjust. Sterling and Castile died, it appeared, for doing nothing more than being black in America.
They could have been anyone doing anything.
“These are just regular people, living their regular lives, doing regular things, and they’re being attacked by doing so. They’re not doing anything to stand out,” Hiller said. “We can’t do anything without putting our lives at risk for no reason at all.”
Race relations are generally seen to have deteriorated during the tenure of Barack Obama, the first black president. In April, the percentage of Americans who said they were greatly concerned with race relations hit 35 per cent, the highest figure since Gallup began asking the question in 2001.
Last year, 60 per cent of Americans said race relations were generally bad, including 68 per cent of black Americans, about the same as the period after the Los Angeles riots following the Rodney King beating of 1992.
Into this environment has stepped Donald Trump, a racial demagogue widely loathed in the black community. With the party conventions and the height of election season fast approaching, local leaders’ pleas for calm may easily be superseded by the incendiary rhetoric of national leaders.
“I’m sitting here now, looking at the news, and I’m thinking, ‘What next?’ ” BARUTI KAFELE BLACK EDUCATOR
Trump, though, signalled Friday that he would not try to fan the flames. In an uncharacteristically restrained statement, Trump called the Sterling and Castile shootings “senseless” and “tragic.”
Newt Gingrich, Trump’s possible running mate and a man with his own inflammatory history on race, changed his tune dramatically.
“If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk,” Gingrich said in an interview on Facebook Live.
Hiller wanted to do something constructive this week with his roiling emotions. An idea occurred to him: a gathering outside Philadelphia’s city hall where people could come together and talk.
Then he decided against it. Too risky, he thought, even to attempt some progress.