I am about
to start something I feel inadequate for. I need to write about race.
When I am
not writing about political and social issues, I am still thinking about them,
but I always feel like there is more to know, and other people are saying the
relevant things. I didn't think I had anything to say about Rachel Dolezal. I
felt like I did need to say something about McKinney. Then I waited, and something much
worse happened.
So I'm just
going to try and say what I feel I need to say, and hope that it can be helpful
to someone. Before Charleston I thought there would be six posts;
now I don't know. I was going to start with layers of ugliness though, and that
still feels right.
The picture
was ugly. Seeing a cop straddling a black teenage girl in a swimsuit was ugly.
Seeing the video, where he manhandled her, where he ordered her to get down
when she was already down - no, she needed to be face-down - and seeing her
friends try to help and be chased off with a gun, and knowing how easily it
could have ended up with them dead, all of that was sickening.
It's been a
while since I've mentioned this, but one of my big wake up calls to racism was
reading stories about street harassment, and seeing that when you are white, it
starts later and is less likely to involve touching. There aren't the same
boundaries in place for women of color, especially if they're black. There is a
long racist history going back to slavery for why that is. A lot of these
problems have a long racist history.
(That's one
of the things that made me mad with Dolezal's deception - she did not have to
put up with that when she was a blonde freckled child.)
I was
disturbed by picture and video. It was clear that the officer was out of
control. Even his fellow officers made him put his weapon down and were able to
speak to the other kids peacefully. That's nice, but they still didn't make
Casebolt get off of the girl. They were too accepting of his violation as well.
That was
ugly enough, but then I was reading more about how it started, and it got
worse. Some kids of multiple races are having a party, and some white people
say "Go back to Section 8 housing." That is an insult, and unfair,
and offense was taken, including by one of the white kids who started getting
lectured about the company she keeps. When a black friend defends her, the
black friend gets slapped.
That's
uglier. There is open racism, the assumption of poverty based on skin color,
and physical violence, again with no boundaries respected on behalf of a black
girl. It got worse.
Section 8
housing has a history in McKinney. There is a highway running through
the town. To the East, McKinney is 49 percent white; to the West,
86 percent white. There have been lawsuits and blocks to prevent any affordable
housing from going up on the West side, you know, because that brings in black
people. (Even though there were residents at the party who lived there and were
black, and there are plenty of white people in Section 8 housing.)
There are
no public pools on the East side.
It gets
uglier going past there too. America has a long history of not allowing
black people to swim, from pouring bleach in pools to filling them with cement
to selling them to private clubs - anything to prevent having to share that
space.
Many black
people don't learn how to swim. That probably raised the death toll from
Hurricane Katrina.
There were
people reminiscing on Twitter about not being able to swim, or how their
parents made them learn to swim. One person wrote "Swimming feels like
freedom," but it's a freedom that often isn't available enough.
The deeper
you look, the worse it gets. Get used to that.
We still
need to look.
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