Moved by an op-ed piece in today’s Baltimore Sun, I write to urge white leaders to speak about racism. The Latin phrase in the title means, “He consents who remains silent.” Young people dying is not something to which I feel I can consent.
The events over the last two weeks in Ferguson, Mo., have created uprisings about police killing young people. The deaths of children in both Chicago and Baltimore have also been reported widely in news sources from both cities.
For their part, police are applying what may be a necessary level of response, though not necessarily force, to rioting and looting. Without a strong response, including sniper-scoped rifles being pointed from atop tank-like armored vehicles directly at protesters, most of whom were African-American, I don’t know if the looting would get out of control, but we see a tightening of police ranks in more recent action: As of early afternoon Friday, nearly $230,000 had been raised online from 5,756 donors—including $1,070 from the Anne Arundel County police union—for Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed unarmed, African-American teen Michael Brown.
But what has gotten out of control is the killing, the shooting, the crimes against innocent black children. A cycle is created here that will not stop unless leaders address both the causes and symptoms of the problem, including:
- racism that is still predominant in the US
- military-like guns police and others use to dominate and force compliance through fear
- fear on the part of black citizens to take the chances needed to succeed today
- poverty, unemployment, and broken homes in our predominantly African-American communities
- situations, e.g. poverty, that lead to crimes to which police must respond
- development of and recruitment by gangs in response to perceived heavy-handed police
Taken as a whole, these elements create an unstoppable cycle of racism, violence, police use of lethal force, and death at the hands of both police and other citizens. It also causes fear on the part of black citizens. Many of their hopes and dreams are cut short, no matter what our schools can do to provide an education, by untimely and unnecessary crimes against them and their friends, sad memories they often carry throughout their lives.
Racism is something that’s in the heart. Evidence that racism exists comes in the form of feelings. It happens when a black man walks down a street in Chicago, hears footsteps catching up to him, looks back to see a white man walking behind him, and feels relieved. It happens when a white police officer fires six shots into a large black teenager who may have been fleeing the scene of a crime. It happens when leaders don’t speak out on the subject of so many unnatural deaths in our predominantly African-American communities.
As ugly as racism is, this is who we are. Schools have, in the past, painted a picture of different cultures—blacks, Hispanics, and so on—mainly by teaching white students about the many accomplishments African-American citizens have made to society. I think it’s time to pull the plug on that, because it’s not working. It may impart a kind of pride among blacks, but what it doesn’t do is paint an accurate picture of who we really are. Other communities in the US suffer from poverty, and there needs to be education about them as well.
However, by failing to teach our children about racism, white racism in particular, we force them to grow up believing what their parents believed about race, feeling what their parents felt, and acting out how their parents acted out. The world has changed, and racism in 2014 has both bad causes and bad effects. It’s time for schools to develop an age-appropriate but reality-based curriculum about racism in America.
If we understand the problems of unequal treatment by police faced by people whose skin isn’t white, we’re more likely to deal with racism effectively, because empathy is more likely to follow from understanding than from fear. And right now, everybody’s acting afraid. There can be no empathy and probably no solution in such a world.
