The Tribune

“Everyone else would rank in descending order on the basis of their proximity to those deemed most superior. The ranking would continue downward until one arrived at the very bottom – African captives transported to build the New World and to serve the victors for all their days, one generation after the next, for twelve generations.” - Isabel Wilkerson

A concatenation of recent brutal events in America are knottily stitched together in a star-spangled and blood-soaked banner of racial and gun violence that stretches from the inception of America to the present day.

As the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer accused of “second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd” continued in Minnesota, 20-year-old Daunte Wright, a black man, was killed this past Sunday approximately 10 miles away by a white police officer during a traffic stop.

The female officer who killed him said it was a mistake, that she intended to Taser and not shoot him with her nine millimetre gun. It seems inexplicable given the weighty and significant differences between a Taser and a gun. Yet again, the level of force used seemed excessive and unwarranted for a “minor traffic infraction and a misdemeanour warrant”.

The unrelenting assault, the unfettered violence against black men by police in America includes the report of an incident last December during a traffic stop in which a second lieutenant in the US Army Medical Corps, Caron Nazario, who is black and Latino, was pepper-sprayed, kicked, handcuffed and humiliated by a police officer.

One of the officers commanded Nazario, dressed in army fatigues, to obey him, stating: “You’re fixin’ to ride the lighting, son,” an expression that means to be put to death by the electric chair. “Son” is a dehumanizing synonym for “boy”, a common term used to emasculate black men.

The hysterical policeman was basically saying, “Watch yourself (N-word) or you could end up dead.”

As reported on CBS news online: “Attorney Jonathan Arthur, who is representing Nazario in a lawsuit filed earlier this month against the two officers [in the incident], said that he was afraid if he took his hands out of view, something even worse would happen.

‘‘To unbuckle his seatbelt, to do anything, any misstep – he was afraid that they were going to kill him,” Arthur [observed]…

“The incident report said that Nazario was initially pulled over for not having tags displayed on his SUV, but the temporary dealer plate is visible in the officer’s body camera video. The lieutenant had recently bought the car.”

Humiliated

The strikes against Lieutenant Nazario were numerous: he is a black, articulate man in uniform driving a brand new SUV, who was not subservient or obsequious, all offensive to many whites, who would view his manner and status as an affront to white superiority. He had to be humiliated, to “learn his place”.

No matter the background or biography of a black man or woman in America, they are often automatically characterized as feral animals demanding the application of brutal force such as would be employed in animal control.

White privilege is not solely about proactively using such privilege to gain the upper hand or some benefit. It is also about the pass one automatically gets for being white, such as a police officer treating a white driver at a traffic stop with respect and care.

Had the lieutenant in the car been white he would likely have been treated with deference and even camaraderie by the police. Just having been born white is a passport cum privilege for accruing benefits in a country or system in which white people are deemed superior.

In such a system there is the concomitant reflexive denial of black equality and more so, frenzied antipathy to: black talent, black beauty, black imagination, black intelligence, black artistry, black elegance, black pride, history and culture.

Barack Obama, an ethically and intellectually superior man to the intellectually and morally deficient Donald Trump, had to endure enervating attacks on his citizenship and good character. If Obama possessed the seedy profile of Trump he would have never been elected as President.

But a failed businessman and congenital liar like Trump, with his encyclopedia of deficiencies, was elected President of the United States.

This is what white privilege looks like. One often gets a pass for having been born “white”.

A classic American Express advertising slogan of the 1980s touted: “Membership has its privileges.” The same may be said of being white in America.

Tiger Woods initially determined that he was not black in America. He styled himself as Cablinasian until his marriage to a white woman ended after liaisons with other white women became public, rocking his golfing career and celebrity status.

After an accident in 2017, one reporter noted: “Tiger Woods, once the fresh-faced future of golf, stared into the police camera with a forlorn look and hooded eyes. A 41-year-old man who has famously insisted on his mixed racial heritage was identified in the arrest report with one word: black.”

Cataclysm

Alongside the ongoing killing of black men and women in America is the cataclysm of mass shootings, including the recent killing of eight people, most of them women of Asian descent, in a suburb north of Atlanta in Georgia and deaths in Boulder, Colorado.

The origins of America’s violence, including racial violence, is brilliantly chronicled in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson, an exploration of America’s “hidden caste system”.

“More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the contested soil of what would become the United States, a concept of birthright, the temptation of entitled expansion that would set in motion the world’s first democracy and, with it, a ranking of human value and usage.

“It would twist the minds of men as greed and self-reverence eclipsed human conscience to take land and human bodies that the conquering men convinced themselves they had a right to.

“If they were to convert this wilderness and civilize it to their likening, they decided they would need to conquer, enslave, or remove the people already on it and transport those they deemed lesser beings to tame and work the land to extract wealth that lay in the rich soil and shorelines.

“To justify their plans, they took pre-existing notions of their own centrality, reinforced by their self-interested interpretation of the Bible, and created a hierarchy of who could do what, who could own what, who was on top and who was on the bottom and who was in between.

“There emerged a ladder of humanity, global in nature, as the upper-rung people, who descend from Europe with rungs inside the designation, the English Protestants at the very top as their guns and resources would ultimately prevail in their bloody fight over North America.”

In a post entitled, Genocide of Indigenous People, the American Holocaust Museum notes the violence upon which America was founded:

“When European settlers arrived in the Americas, historians estimate there were over 10 million Native Americans living there. By 1900, their estimated population was under 300,000.

“Native Americans were subjected to many different forms of violence, all with the intention of destroying the community.

“In the late 1800s, blankets from smallpox patients were distributed to Native Americans in order to spread disease.

“There were several wars, and violence was encouraged; for example, European settlers were paid for each Penobscot person they killed. In the 19th century, 4,000 Cherokee people died on the Trail of Tears, a forced march from the southern US to Oklahoma.”

As the History Channel observed: “The US government [authorized] over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people.” There was a deliberate war of extermination.

Holocaust

The holocaust of indigenous peoples and slavery in America were enforced through an arsenal of violence: guns, sadistic beatings, amputations of slaves, Jim Crow laws, rapes, lynchings, arm and leg chains, the stitching up of black men and women for crimes they did not commit, capital punishment, unjust sentences, the cruel beating of blacks in the back of police cars and in jail cells, mass incarceration, voter suppression laws, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and various biological experiments and other weapons of mass intimidation and destruction.

Despite this cruel and unusual treatment, some have the blithe audacity to query why many black people in America and the world seethe about such depravity.

The unrelenting killing in America of black men and women by the police, which has come into greater light in the past few decades, is but the tip of a titantic iceberg of violence and brutality in America since its founding.

Many Bahamians are fairly recently coming to appreciate this history.

But this violence remains a clear and present danger.

If a black Bahamian man, no matter if he served at the commanding heights of politics, the judiciary, religious life or business in The Bahamas is caught at a traffic stop in the wrong place in America, he too may end up pepper-sprayed, on the ground, handcuffed and humiliated, or even worse.

To fully appreciate the degree and extent of racial hatred and white supremacy is to understand the compelling history Wilkerson describes in Caste, which is a must-read for those who seek to understand America the Violent.

Wilkerson declares:

“The Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate... But what they did was they sent researchers to the United States to study Jim Crow laws here in the United States, to study and to research how the United States had managed to subordinate and subjugate its African American population.”

The Democratic Party in America once served as the locus for the Confederacy. The locus of the Confederacy is now resident in the Republican Party. Those white and black Bahamians who continue to revere the latter and who all too easily discount its supremacist agenda, are either purposefully or ignorantly in denial.

The brilliant James Baldwin summed up the white supremacist reality in America, which still reigns supreme: “The reason people think it’s important to be white is that they think it’s important not to be black.”