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June
30, 2003
Preferring Our Violence
Wholesale
Race
and Destruction in Black and White
By TIM WISE
I don't know why these things amaze me, but for
some reason they always do.
Before the ashes were even cool from
the recent riots in Benton Harbor, Michigan, much of white America
had decided that it knew what was behind all the mayhem; at least
if the white folks who call into talk radio are at all representative.
It wasn't the reason stated by the residents
who had engaged in the destruction, of course: namely, a history
of police racism, brutality and misconduct, which they saw symbolized
most recently by a high-speed police chase from a neighboring
township ending in the death of a black motorcyclist.
Of course not. That explanation, though
not necessarily justifying mass violence, would still constitute
a reason; and having a reason would mean that the rioters were
something other than merely insane; and insane is how much of
white America prefers to see our black and brown brothers and
sisters.
To whites who were calling talk radio
in the days following the riots, the violent actions by certain
members of the Benton Harbor black community were indicative
of cultural depravity, even a biological predisposition to violence:
arguments that are never made when whites on college campuses
riot, as they have done some three dozen times in the past several
years.
In truth, the idea that blacks are more
prone to violence and destruction than those of us who are white
is so utterly incomprehensible as to boggle the imagination.
After all, the people who incessantly wonder why blacks occasionally
riot and wreak havoc in their own communities never ask why whites
are so quick to wreak havoc in the communities of others.
Indeed, the history of white violence
done to non-whites, to say nothing of white violence done to
each other--think 1066, think the Holocaust, think Stalin's purges--makes
one wonder how anyone could believe persons of European descent
were especially peaceful.
It wasn't black people who destroyed
one Indian village after another throughout this continent and
wiped nearly 100 million people off the face of the planet in
the process.
Black folks didn't lynch themselves,
or cut off their own ears for souvenirs after burning their own
bodies, or hanging themselves from tree limbs.
It wasn't black people who launched a
war with Mexico in the name of Manifest Destiny, or conquered
Hawaii, or laid siege to the Philippines at the turn of the last
century, or planned, authorized, and carried out the terror bombings
of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, knowing full well
that the victims in each case would invariably be innocent civilians.
It wasn't black people who created napalm, and then decided to
drop it on Southeast Asians.
It wasn't black people who drew up the
war plans to bomb Baghdad's electrical grid in the first Gulf
War, thereby rendering water treatment facilities inoperable,
even though it was acknowledged that doing so would result in
widespread disease and death.
And with the exceptions of Colin Powell
and Condi Rice--two black people who have long felt more at home
in the presence of white elites than anyone who might actually
look like them--it wasn't black folks who lied about Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction so as to launch another war on that nation,
killing several thousand civilians and destroying what economic
infrastructure remained after a decade of sanctions.
For that matter, even violence in American
cities has been the work of whites far more than blacks. Oh sure,
we may not think of it as violence, but the effects of white
elite actions vis-A -vis our cities has been every bit as destructive
as anything thought up by the residents of Watts, Miami, Cincinnati
or Detroit, to say nothing of smaller towns like Benton Harbor.
When white political and corporate elites
launched "urban renewa" in the 1960's, the destruction
wrought upon black peoples was immense. Hundreds of thousands
of homes, representing one-fifth of all black housing in the
U.S., were destroyed to make way for office buildings, shopping
centers and parking lots. Afterward, only one-tenth of the property
destroyed was replaced, so displaced families had to rely on
crowded apartments, living with relatives, or run-down public
housing projects. Interstates were built through the heart of
black communities in city after city, impacting not only housing
but economic vitality as well, and leaving a congested, loud,
disorganized space in their wake.
It is doubtful that the combined amount
of property destroyed by blacks in urban riots comes anywhere
near the amount of property destroyed by urban renewal, for the
benefit of whites.
When white-run banks redlined black communities,
refusing to loan money to any businesses or individuals within
the borders of those communities, no matter their individual
credit worthiness, the effect was as destructive to neighborhood
well-being as any riot.
When banks continue to refuse loans in
such places, only to turn around and grant the very same loans
through their subsidiaries known as sub-prime lenders, and in
the process charge 3-5 times higher interest than would be allowed
through the bank itself, the effect on black people is economic
violence.
When two-thirds of black children in
extreme poverty test positive for elevated levels of lead in
their blood, thanks to exposure from lead paint in old, dilapidated
buildings built by white folks, this is an act of violence.
In fact, white institutions have intentionally
exposed black children to lead paint, as with recent revelations
that Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute, with the approval
of officials from Johns Hopkins University, essentially used
black families as guinea pigs for a study on lead abatement in
the 1990's. The study, condemned by a Maryland Appeals Court
judge, placed poor families of color in housing with varying
levels of lead, without telling them the dangers of such exposure.
Researchers used incentives like T-shirts, food stamps and payments
of $5 each to encourage families to move into contaminated housing,
and then after periodic testing of lead levels in the children's
blood, withheld information on the extent of their poisoning
until it was too late to prevent serious health effects.
Indeed, if riots result in the burning
of lead-infested buildings, or the places where such truly evil
studies are concocted, we might more properly view such actions
as the ultimate act of intra-racial charity, truth be told.
And it's not only in the inner-city where
white violence destroys the lives of people of color. When the
government in concert with white-owned businesses strip mines
uranium on Native American soil, thereby helping to inflate the
cancer rate among Navajo exposed to radiation by 1600 percent
above the national average, the result is death and destruction
as severe as any low-level retail violence by the oppressed themselves.
When white doctors routinely underdiagnose
patients of color with serious illnesses; or fail to recommend
the same medical interventions as they do for white patients,
even when they present the same symptoms, have the same kind
of insurance, and come from the same economic background, black
lives are lost in numbers that dwarf those lost in riots.
When companies that pollute in white
communities receive fines from the EPA that are 500 percent higher
than the fines received for polluting in black communities, the
result is violence of an especially pernicious form.
In fact, studies have estimated that
because African Americans--particularly those of low-income--have
less access to wealth and high quality health care, and are more
likely to be exposed to environmental pollutants, as many as
75,000 blacks die each year above the amount that would be expected
to die if wealth, health care and pollutant exposure were equal
to that of their white counterparts.
That most whites can't conceive of these
things as violence is testimony not to the veracity of the charge,
but rather our unwillingness to understand systemic racism and
the harm it does to people every day.
So in the white imagination, burning
down a building out of anger at police brutality is violence,
while destroying a building to make way for a mall is progress,
as is chopping down old-growth forest, dumping toxic waste in
streams and rivers, or burying it in communities of color.
That's the difference between the violence
of the powerful and that of the powerless. Those with power have
the capacity to work out our existential crises on the bodies
and property of others; those without have to make do torching
their own stuff, because they know that the moment they turn
their frustrations on those who have remained privileged and
sheltered, the power of the state will be turned against them
full-force.
And if that day ever came, most white
folks wouldn't bat an eye, because we have nothing against violence.
We love it, in fact; we glorify it; so long as it's being done
by John Wayne, Rambo, Clint Eastwood, Tony Soprano, Andrew Jackson,
Teddy Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan,
George Bush or his kid.
Body counts never bother us, and neither
does destroying property, so long as the bodies and the properties
are not ours.
Tim Wise
is an antiracist essayist, activist and father. He can be reached
at timjwise@msn.com
Weekend Edition
Features
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
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Alan Maass
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C.Y.
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Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
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Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
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Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
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Kam
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Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
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