This country is famous for one of the most organized and inspiring nonviolent movements in modern history. It unfolded sixty years ago in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe and focused on the racism that was an unresolved legacy of the Civil War. It was brilliant, but sadly, not enough.
Last week in Mississippi, Deryl Dedmon, Jr. and John Aaron Rice, along with a group of ‘psyched up’ white teens, left a party with the intention of finding an African American to ‘mess with.’ Driving sixteen miles to the other side of town they set upon the first man they saw—James Craig Anderson—and beat him viciously. Eighteen-year-old Dedmon, now charged with murder, stayed behind long enough to run Anderson over with his truck and leave him for dead. To top it off, his lawyer went beyond human decency to protect his client, insisting that it was not a racially motivated crime.
Maybe, on some level, it’s a positive sign that we do not want to admit that there is still racism in this country, despite the experience of people living in James Craig Anderson’s community, immigrant families in Arizona, farmworkers in California, or sleeping children in Afghanistan. But denial isn’t going to make the problem go away. What will make it finally go away is a recognition that racially motivated crimes have a cause and that we can get to it by shifting our awareness from hate crimes to just simply hate.
Unfortunately, our country takes the opposite route: from hate crime to crime, leaving us with a cycle of retribution and injustice that will never solve the problem. Racism is a form of violence and it isn’t going away until we repudiate violence itself. We demand that our political leaders be “tough on crime,” but forget to ask ourselves, where are the candidates who are “tough on hatred, tough on violence”?
One needn’t look far, then, to see one critical reason why racism doesn’t die—a reason that we ignore only because so many of us are numbed into insensitivity by its sheer familiarity. We ourselves saw a shocking example the other day on the main street of liberal Berkeley: a graphic poster for a popular television program with the bold message, “LET’S GO KILL SOMETHING.”
Coming as it did right after the very real murder in Mississippi, the echo was sickening. It isn’t just the message that violence is fun, but the enabling denial that makes violence possible, which is dehumanization: you cannot kill something, of course, but someone, some form of life.
There is something we can do, however, if politicians will not: we can start turning our backs on violence as a form of “entertainment.” In one recent study carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig it was shown that children were three times more likely to behave with empathy if they were shown a picture of two dolls in a friendly pose than if the doll images were negative or neutral. There are so many studies now showing our sensitivity to this “priming,” as scientists call it, that the effect is something we can no longer deny but on the contrary can take responsibility for and use it as a lever for pushing back against, and eventually perhaps banishing the violence that’s become endemic in the industrial world.
“Mind precedes action” as the Buddha said, and getting extremely dehumanizing images—the constant fare of our films, books, and video games—out of our minds is the point of leverage from which to start getting real or physical violence out of our lives. Right now we are relying on violence for “security” in everything from individual bullying to criminal “justice” and finally war. It will be a long struggle to rebuild every one of those behaviors and institutions, but that struggle can’t even begin until we detoxify our mental environment and let our native capacity for empathy —which science has recently shown to be well ‘wired’ in our very nervous systems—regain the upper hand.
One advantage of starting this by boycott of violent media is that it doesn’t need to be organized; we can just do it, and we should not overlook the power of even one mind that is concentrated and backed by positive energy. From there, of course, by educating and organizing we can start growing the change into a real movement. Many individuals and many families have borne witness to the healthier, sometimes deeply happier lives they enjoyed soon after they stopped watching television. Once the initial feeling of deprivation subsided, their taste for reality (which violence is not) came back into their lives. Pointing this out and experiencing it will add drive to this key campaign that is surely a sine qua non for racial justice. For this reform cannot take place in a vacuum because as Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Nor can it take place on the political or even the social level alone because it’s by now too deeply rooted in how some people think and see the world.
Not all media need be renounced, however. One recent attempt to portray at least part of the other side is the film Help, which illustrates what the famous Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung has called the “Great Chain of Nonviolence,” where oppressed, voiceless people—in this case black domestic workers in the south—link up by a chain of relationships to people in power, in this case through friendships that naturally form with the white women they work for. Help is an indifferent success, however; some reviewers have felt it was sappy at best and racist at worst due to the depiction of black men as abusive, alcoholic and illiterate. It may only help to confirm the belief that violence is real (the graphic effect of the “Let’s go kill something” vampire genre), whereas love and nonviolence are only weak and uninteresting imitations.
Much better is a 1989 film, The Long Walk Home, with Whoopi Goldberg, Cissy Spacek, and Dwight Macdonald. It not only stares racism in the face, but it is also one of the few films in history to show an actual representation of nonviolence working against a fierce opponent—something even Attenborough’s Gandhi, for all its sophistication, did not quite do. In the climactic final scene a group of terrified black women penned in by a chanting racist mob conquer their fear by singing a pertinent spiritual and walk unhindered through the confused men trying to stop them. This is realism: many scenes like it actually took place in the Civil Rights movement and elsewhere..
With the likes of Gandhi, The Long Walk Home, or the 1995 political drama Beyond Rangoon we could “reprime” our lives. When we run out of such films—and Lord knows they are rare—we can spend time with friends and family that we would otherwise have spent watching someone else’s idea of entertainment. As Gandhi once said, evil does not exist: it can only make its appearance as long as we cling to it. Why not put that to the test by not clinging to images of violence?
“All around the country, people in politics and the media have been tip-toeing around the fact that violent attacks by blacks on whites in public places are racially motivated, even when the attackers themselves use anti-white invective and mock the victims they leave lying on the streets bleeding.
This is not something to ignore or excuse. It is something to be stopped. Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia seems to be the first to openly recognize this.
This needs to be done for the sake of both black and white Americans — and even for the sake of the hoodlums. They have set out on a path that leads only downward for themselves.”
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2011/08/16/social_degeneration
While I trust and hope that Sowell’s objective is to build more of a culture of responsibility and nonviolence in the black community (every community could use this), it’s worth remembering that stirring up public anxiety about black-on-white violence is, historically, a very, very sensitive matter—for good reason. This kind of rhetoric has accompanied a lot of white supremacist violence in American history. We don’t really need more of it.
Further, the kind of measures being taken by Michael Nutter that Sowell is praising basically amount to lashing out against particular forms of dress:
Parallels come to mind with laws in France banning Muslim women from wearing headscarves. We need none of that here.
Anyway, I don’t think this kind of criticism really amounts to empowerment. In fact, as a white American, I notice that the standards of dress for white people are often effectively lower than for others. I, for instance, can wear a torn shirt and be perceived as a hipster of some sort, and nobody will consider it inappropriate. The same can’t be said, I suspect, of my black neighbors.
Dr. King didn’t dream of a world in which people would be judged by their clothing, rather than their skin, but by the content of their character. Could we please focus on that?
I see. Racism can only occur if it’s a majority against minority? We can only decry racial violence when it’s majority on minority, lest it somehow stir up all those white supremacists out there? Reporting what actually happens is not “stirring up anxiety” and it is every bit as important as that sad instance in Mississippi.
Mr. Nutter’s description and your torn shirt are not even remotely similar. If a white/brown/black/red/yellow person walk into an office looking like Mr. Nutter describes, they won’t get a job. That’s the facts and that’s not racial. What you wear and how you present yourself to DOES say something about the content of your character. The headscarf issue does not parallel this issue…at all.
This article is about two different impulses: Racism and violence. Racist crimes against African-Americans have dramatically declined in relation to population since the civil rights revolution, which anathematized severe racism to the point that even its advocacy has been reduced to the equivalent of a small, undereducated minority. But the common problem that remains is spontaneous aggression by individuals with racist feelings, when violence is spurred by predisposition, alcohol and/or the availability of weapons.
The correct and effective public responses are to (a) educate against both the acceptability of racism and the idea that violence is legitimate under any circumstances except self-defense, (b) enforce laws against underage or place-illegal drinking, and (c) control the possession and use of weapons. Many states in the U.S. still do all of these things poorly.
The main question that the authors raise has to do with an underutilized approach to control predisposition, i.e. the control of violent imagery in the mass media. The default featuring of gratuitous violence as a form of dramatic content — in television, film and video games — is intended to capture and hold the attention of young male viewers, and so sell products or advertising through those media. This problem has been with us since the development of a nationwide television audience in the 1950s and became worse with the greater introduction of explicit violence in both television and films after the Vietnam War. To believe that this has no effect on potential violent actors would require us also to believe that positive content in mass media has no effect, which is to say, that the content of mass media has no effect on what people do. Obviously that’s absurd.
Because the use of violent imagery in entertainment has been explicitly accepted by the Supreme Court as a form of free speech, control of that imagery will have to be voluntary, although laws by states affecting the age of who is able to purchase or download violent programming would not violate free-speech rights. Public resistance to violent content in media would certainly have an economic effect on its purveyors. There are nonprofit organizations involved in this effort, such as Media Watch. Teaching such groups about how to organize nonviolent resistance would be an excellent idea.
As a footnote, I have only one caveat to this otherwise excellent article: The examples of racism “in this country” include “sleeping children in Afghanistan.” Presumably that’s a reference to Afghan children being injured or killed by American military forces in that country. While the fact of those injuries and deaths is deplorable and a reflection on the morality of tactics in that war, there is no evidence of which I’m aware that they have been motivated by racism.
Some evidence that US attacks on the Middle East are influenced by racism: http://turnstylenews.com/2011/05/02/heems-curating-post-bin-laden-bigotry/
Maybe such a boycott doesn’t HAVE to be organized, but I believe it would help.
My only other experience with a lifetime boycott is among vegetarians and vegans, and let me tell you, there’s a lot of organization there. (Note: organization is not, of course, synonymous with central planning.)
Vegans have potlucks, they seek each other out, they plan events, they do outreach. Very rare, in my experience, is the vegan who read something about veganism and took the plunge. Much more common are folks who went vegan from long-term experience with a vegan they knew, someone who could encourage and support them.
Why no mention of the main hate crimes taking place recently? Its only a hate crime when its white on black? What about all the black flash mobs like the one at the Wisconsin fair a few days ago? not to mention the many rapes and murder done by blacks against whites. Instead you cherrypick the one rare white on black hate crime.
Racism doesn’t die because you people never look at this issue honestly without political correctness. Many whites give up hope of society being fair on this issue, and while most don’t do hate crimes, many end up in racist groups. White Racism won’t stop until the reverse racism stops, and until there is an open dialogue about the racism among minority communities society is all to afraid to discuss.
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