After Ferguson - When Whites Just Don’t Get It

I don't like to beat a dead horse, but in the wake of the Ferguson grand jury outcome - an outcome manipulated by the prosecutor - 3it remains time to face the reality that America has a huge race problem.  And even whites who are not racists become complicity given the manner in which the system is rigged based on race.  Not talking about it is not a solution just as not talking about the ugliness of homophobes and "family values" hate groups doesn't solve the problem of LGBT discrimination in this country.  An other column in the New York Times looks at America's race problem and the challenges faced by many totally innocent and law abiding blacks.  Here are some excerpts:

WE Americans are a nation divided.  We feud about the fires in Ferguson, Mo., and we can agree only that racial divisions remain raw. So let’s borrow a page from South Africa and impanel a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine race in America.

The model should be the 9/11 commission or the Warren Commission on President Kennedy’s assassination, and it should hold televised hearings and issue a report to help us understand ourselves.

We as a nation need to grapple with race because the evidence is overwhelming that racial bias remains deeply embedded in American life.

If such racial bias exists among professional referees monitored by huge television audiences, imagine what unfolds when an employer privately weighs whom to hire, or a principal decides whether to expel a disruptive student, or a policeman considers whether to pull over a driver.

This “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” series is a call for soul-searching. It’s very easy for whites to miss problems that aren’t our own; that’s a function not of being white but of being human. Three-quarters of whites have only white friends, according to one study, so we are often clueless.

What we whites notice is blacks who have “made it” — including President Obama — so we focus on progress and are oblivious to the daily humiliations that African-Americans endure when treated as second-class citizens.

“In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” a 23-year-old black man wrote in May 1992. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall, they follow me.”

He described an incident when he was stopped by six police officers who detained him, with guns at the ready, and treated him for 30 minutes as a dangerous suspect.

That young man was future Senator Cory Booker, who had been a senior class president at Stanford University and was a newly selected Rhodes Scholar. Yet our law enforcement system reduced him to a stereotype — so young Booker sat trembling and praying that he wouldn’t be shot by the police.

My sense is that part of the problem is well-meaning Americans who disapprove of racism yet inadvertently help perpetuate it. We aren’t racists, yet we buttress a system that acts in racist ways. It’s “racism without racists,” in the words of Eduardo Bonillo-Silva, a Duke University sociologist.

I don’t know what unfolded in Ferguson between Michael Brown, a black teenager, and Darren Wilson, a white police officer. But there is a pattern: a ProPublica investigation found that young black men are shot dead by police at 21 times the rate of young white men.

That’s the gulf that an American Truth and Reconciliation Commission might help bridge just a little.

This occurs partly because of deeply embedded stereotypes that trick us, even when we want to be fair. . . . . White Americans may protest that our racial problems are not like South Africa’s. No, but the United States incarcerates a higher proportion of blacks than apartheid South Africa did. In America, the black-white wealth gap today is greater than it was in South Africa in 1970 at the peak of apartheid.

Most troubling, America’s racial wealth gap, pay gap and college education gap have all widened in the last few decades.

There is a huge problem even if many don't want to talk about it.  And just as with homophobia, what's really behind it all is the inability of far too many Americans to see those who are different - "other" if you will - as equally human.