THAWING OUT FROZEN RACE POLITICS
The U. S. civil- rights movement of the 1960s presented clear targets. Today’s challenges are less obvious and less certain
CHICAGO — Shootings of blacks by white police officers are exposing the intractability of racial distrust in the United States and the inability of institutions to dispel it.
“There has to be a turning point,” said Otis Moss Jr., pastor emeritus at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, where a 12- year- old boy playing with a toy gun was killed Nov. 22 by a department found to use unreasonable force regularly. “All Americans are being scarred.”
That point hasn’t been reached. In the span of 12 days, the loose lid on simmering race relations has blown off, with debate about police tactics raging across Twitter and television, at the White House and in street protests across the country. Thousands marched to show their wrath over the deaths, which include the shooting of an unarmed 18- year- old in Ferguson, Mo., and a fatal chokehold applied to a 43- year- old man on New York’s Staten Island.
U. S. President Barack Obama’s administration promised investigations and Attorney General Eric Holder appeared in Cleveland on Thursday to deliver the damning report on the city’s police force. Hours later, protesters outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N. Y., carried 11 black cardboard coffins with the names of people they said died at the hands of police and lay in the street for a seven- minute silent “die- in.”
The building action on the streets and in the halls of power contrasts with years of sclerosis in U. S. politics caused by racial and ethnic animus.
The most fervent opponents of the first black American president spent years trying to disprove that he was born in the U. S. The battle over immigration prompted states such as Alabama and Arizona to pass laws meant to intimidate undocumented immigrants into leaving, but that violated the Constitution. In the South, where 154 years ago states began seceding to fight for slavery, politics remain deeply segregated, with minority blacks dominating the Democratic Party and whites forming a solid Republican bloc. The last white Democratic senator from the South, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, will probably lose her seat Saturday, polls suggest.
The civil- rights movement of the 1960s presented clear targets such as Jim Crow laws and officials openly devoted to racism. Today’s challenges are less obvious even as certainties become less certain.
In Orangeburg, S. C., on Thursday, a white man who had been a police chief was indicted on murder charges in the 2011 shooting death of an unarmed black man. He faces 30 years to life in prison if convicted.
In Obama and Holder, the country has a black president and attorney general. Blacks and Hispanic faces are fixtures in popular culture. Yet in income, economic mobility, housing, education, employment and life expectancy blacks lag whites, according to the U. S. Census Bureau and data compiled by Bloomberg.
The median income of blacks last year was $ 34,598, which was 40 per cent less than for whites. While the poverty rate for blacks has declined during the past five decades, it’s still about 25 per cent, roughly three times more than whites. Only 20 per cent receive college degrees or beyond, compared with 30 per cent of whites. Blacks also represented about half of all homicide victims and 38 per cent of the prison population in 2011, according to data from the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
In Ferguson, where rioting erupted last month after a grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the Aug. 9 shooting death of Michael Brown, 18, the population is 70 per cent black. Turnout in the past three city elections didn’t exceed 12.3 per cent, according to the St. Louis County Elections Board. Only one of six councilmen and three of the city’s 53 police officers are black.
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who’s married to a black woman, campaigned on a promise to ease tension between police and minority residents. Many have been objects of a socalled stop- and- frisk program that focused disproportionately on young men and vigorous enforcement of low- level infractions on the theory that stopping small crimes prevents larger ones from occurring.
Yet two days ago, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict a white officer for killing Eric Garner, a black man suspected of selling single untaxed cigarettes. After the panel’s decision, New York erupted with massive, roving protests that spread to cities including Chicago, Boston and Washington.
“It’s not that white America doesn’t get it — it’s not about all black people and all white people,” said Krishan Natesan, a pastor of a Methodist church Upper Marlboro, Maryland, who marched with about 100 people around the Justice Department in Washington Thursday. “It’s people in positions of power who don’t get it.”
Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican of Libertarian bent and a likely presidential candidate, sought to turn Garner’s death into a criticism of taxation, and Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York, blamed Garner’s physical condition for his death.
Race has been a particularly fraught topic for Obama. From his 2004 Democratic convention speech about bridging the country’s divisions, which catapulted him into national politics, through his time in office, he has emerged as a polarizing figure.
His first five years as president ranked among the 10 most politically divided in the U. S. since the Eisenhower administration, according to Gallup, which tracks presidential approval ratings.
In July 2013, Obama made violence personal when he said Trayvon Martin, a 17- year- old killed the previous year by a Florida neighbourhood watch volunteer, “could have been me.”
In a speech Thursday, Obama said: “Too many Americans feel deep unfairness when it comes to the gap between our professed ideals and how laws are applied on a day- to- day basis.”
On Thursday in Cleveland, where 12- year- old Tamir Rice was shot last month, Holder announced that a U. S. Justice Department investigation determined police engaged in a pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force” between 2010 and 2013 that had “inflamed community perceptions, particularly in the AfricanAmerican community.”
On Friday, the boy’s family filed a wrongful- death lawsuit against the city and the two police officers, saying they acted recklessly in the confrontation.