It's Always Been 1984 for Black Americans

Why does this keep happening?

Faced with the regular barrage of news about people treating the lives of African Americans and other non-White people as disposable, many of us are asking this question.

Many of us are tired of asking.

Just within the past few weeks, we have been inundated with news of the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a man just trying to go for a run, and the latency with which police and prosecutors finally arrested and pressed charges against his murderers; the police killing of the unarmed, subdued George Floyd, and the enduring image of an impassive officer with his knee literally on Floyd’s neck; the police killing of Breonna Taylor, a woman who was simply in her own home when the police broke into it because they had the wrong address; and an impromptu drama performance by Amy Cooper, who was apparently so bothered by someone asking her to observe local leash laws that she called the police to claim that she was being threatened when she clearly wasn’t. And those are just the most recent examples.

Coupled with the disparaging comments that barrage non-White people on a regular basis, whether made in person or by people in the highest positions of power, propagated by news outlets and social media, it’s discouraging. On top of that, those of us affected the most by this problem can’t simply ignore it. For us, it’s impossible to completely distance ourselves from the hatred (I’ll touch on this later, but this point is worth addressing in its own post).

Accordingly, it’s worth examining why bigoted perspectives and discriminatory behavior persist. What is the appeal to millions of people who, in an age of unprecedented access to information and other people from around the world, have every opportunity to know better and to do better?

I am far from the first or only person to examine this question, but I hope that I can provide some helpful insight to the people who wonder, as I have, why some people choose hatred. Because for many, it is absolutely a choice. More on that in a bit.

For the purpose of this post, I’m not focusing so much on the propagation of bigotry across generational lines. Instead, I want to identify the central appeal of bigotry to those who hold onto it so dearly – the underlying motivation behind the decision that someone makes in 2020 to be hateful and to act on that hate.

Of course, prejudiced viewpoints and behavior are not universal by any means among people of European descent (or any other demographic group). I have had the joy of living, studying, and working with people of many ethnicities and nationalities, and my perspective (or at least my hope) is that most people by now are sick of the perpetuation of these forms of bigotry – at the very least, when they result in violence against the innocent. However, mostly on the same page is not enough when it comes to overcoming backwards ideologies.

I was raised by a literature professor, so I have a particular appreciation for the role that the stories we tell play in society – both how they reflect the worldviews and norms of the people who tell them, and how those stories in turn shape people’s worldviews and norms. Therefore, in this post and others, I plan to reference and analyze some of the stories that we tell and consume in order to try to shed some light on the idiosyncrasies of human behavior.

No Angels

Back to the topic. We see repeated acts of brutal violence targeting innocent people, and additional attempts to subject innocent people to potentially brutal violence. The people engaging in the violence instantly begin to revise history in front of us. People who find the discrimination and violence acceptable are quick to try to paint the latest African American murder victim as “no angel.” They can’t erase all records of the victim’s existence, as in 1984, so the next best thing is to slander them.

Why?

Many people seem to believe that only the innocent deserve to be treated fairly, so all that is necessary in order to take away someone’s basic freedoms is to portray that person as not being innocent. It’s an unconstitutional belief, as our justice system is based on the precept that a person should be considered innocent until proven guilty of a specific crime in a court of law, but the court of public opinion follows its own rules.

When it comes to African Americans, millions of people are still primed and ready to deny our innocence for any reason or seemingly none at all. Whether walking down the sidewalk, trying to enter one’s own house, or literally any other activity (for instance, the time when, as I put my groceries in the trunk of my car, an older woman stopped me to inform me that she believed that I must have stolen my car, and she was going to call the police based on that suspicion alone), we are always presumptively guilty of something in certain people’s eyes. The “no angel” box is always just a hop, a skip, and a jump away for anyone who looks like us.

Why do these people continue to view the world this way in 2020, and to push so insistently for the subjugation of any African American (or other non-White person) who dares to cross their paths? I used to believe that everyone who harbored some form of bigotry – racism, sexism, homophobia, you name it – must have been raised with it, and given a lack of exposure to different types of people, they simply never had the opportunity to challenge the hateful worldviews with which they were indoctrinated as youth.

However, personal experiences over the past several years, coupled with the events we see playing out repeatedly in the news, have convinced me otherwise.

I was struck by the work of Deeyah Khan, who spent months interviewing neo-Nazis and jihadists in person in an attempt to improve mutual understanding and foster a dialogue about hatred and bias. Her experience confirmed my own. Some people match my description above. They were taught to hate and fear people from other demographic groups, but when they actually meet people from those groups, they begin to question, and in some cases reject, the hatred that they have been taught.

When I was in college, for example, I attended a slam poetry session featuring three men: one African American, one Jewish, and one European American. By his own description, the man of European descent was a former white supremacist “skinhead.” Listening to his poetry was eye-opening – he had undergone the excruciating work of unlearning the hate with which he had been brainwashed and realizing something painful and ugly about himself in the process. Given the prospect of looking in the mirror with unclouded eyes and seeing the picture of Dorian Gray, I can see why many choose to double down on their ignorance.

Many extremists, on the other hand, are not raised by extremists. We see this in the case of white supremacists such as the one who shocked his mother by driving his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, or jihadists who joined their cause because someone gave them a cell phone and promised sex and glory.

So what prompts someone to choose to adopt an extremist view of other ethnic groups, or perhaps worse yet, to cynically attempt to trigger other people’s extremist views when one doesn’t even share them, just for the sake of effecting a desired result?

1984’s Lesson

This is where I find George Orwell’s 1984 instructive (spoilers ahead). For those who haven’t read it: in Orwell’s vision of the year 1984 (or whatever year it really is), we see a totalitarian state that exerts control over everything from the economy to every citizen’s exercise regimen to people’s very thoughts. State-monitored video cameras and microphones make most places unsafe to talk or write, and the state rewards those who out others as deviants – even a lack of visible enthusiasm for the daily, public sessions in which people collectively demonstrate anger toward a common enemy can be a crime.

Initially, the point of all of this control ostensibly seems to be to support the perpetual wars that the state wages against the other, presumably equally oppressive states. However, we never learn whether the wars are actually happening at all, or even whether there are any other governments in existence at this point. The state’s obfuscation of the exchange of information and punishment of any record-keeping other than the official state records, which are subject to change every time Big Brother makes a new proclamation, are absolute.

You haven’t actually seen what you’ve seen. Your memory is wrong. It never happened. Sound familiar?

The major revelation we see late in the book is that there is no underlying goal to this hoarding and abuse of power. The state exercises oppressive power for its own sake. The reason for exerting power over the less powerful is simply to have and feel that power.

This point brings us back to our 2020. What I and many others have found is that when someone makes a racist comment, there are generally two predictable, immediate reactions by people who sympathize with the viewpoint. This phenomenon can happen in person, but is even more likely on social media, where people often feel (inexplicably, on certain platforms) that their interactions are private, or they can hide behind a fake name, and therefore they can get away with saying things that they might not say in person.

The first thing that happens is that several people show up to defend the racist comment, insisting that it was a misunderstanding, or worse yet, that it was actually somehow the fault of the person targeted by the epithet. The second is that several other people will show up to announce that the incident in question never even happened at all – even when it is in writing, is on video, or just happened in front of a group of people. This entire conversation can happen even without anyone labeling the racist comment as such. Apologists are so accustomed to defending racism that they will launch into and sustain the entire dialogue without a participant on the other side.

The result is that even if one tries to avoid the inevitable “do you really think that White people are racist?” argument altogether by remaining silent, the apologists will act as though it has happened anyway (the result is the same even if one explicitly states that (s)he believes that most White people are not racist). Why? Because they know that you were probably thinking that the comment was racist, and that is enough to offend them.

Again, sound familiar?

(It’s the thought police.)

So why does Karen in the park feel the need to tap into this power? Why does a police officer who has already subdued a suspect use an arm or knee to suffocate the prone, handcuffed person who is already complying with orders? Or, for that matter, slam a teenage girl in a bikini onto the ground and then sit on her back in response to a noise complaint in the suburbs?

The answer, I think, is their own sense of vulnerability, rather than any material gain.

Not legitimate fear, and I am not advocating sympathy. But consider this.

We just spent a decade with the stock market rising and high-ranking corporate executives and already deep-pocketed investors pocketing the lion’s share while the rest of the country was left behind. Just this spring, over 40 million people in the US alone have lost their jobs as a worldwide pandemic has quickly shuttered just about every industry while killing over 100,000 people here and hundreds of thousands more worldwide.

Times are tough. This has been a scary year.

Some people respond by finding ways to build up the people around them so that we can all rise together. Others choose to find ways to channel their displaced anger where they think they can do so with impunity.

Our friend in the Ramble resented being asked to take a small step to comply with a law that promotes everyone’s physical safety and sense of security. Speaking of which, you may have noticed how much it bothers certain people to be told to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Furthermore, we can surmise that someone attempting to weaponize the ethnicity of the African American man in front of her by specifically calling it out when she calls the police, is probably resentful largely (or entirely) because he is African American.

So a person balls up all of this anxiety and resentment and looks around to see who’s nearby. (S)he sees someone lower on the ladder. Someone from a group that (s)he considers inferior, anyway. And (s)he punches down.

There’s no material gain in it, outside the workplace. Historical codification of the second-class status of African-descent and other non-White people in the US Constitution and well over a century of ensuing case law was explicitly designed to support and maintain the concentration of wealth and political power among self-proclaimed “White,” property-owning men. Today, when decision makers largely shut entire ethnicities out of consideration for skilled positions and especially for leadership roles in industry after industry, it further concentrates wealth in Euro-American communities.

But shooting a man while he’s going for a jog? Calling the police on someone for asking you to leash your dog?

It’s exerting power for the sake of exerting power.

This is what I’ve come to realize about people who insist on banning the terms “racism” and “racist,” even as they insist on their right to say racist things. Even more so for those who try to browbeat people into agreeing that the racist thing never happened at all. Some people may genuinely believe that if it didn’t happen in front of them, then it didn’t happen. Not a reasonable belief, but it’s possible.

But when someone insists that something that did happen in front of them didn’t happen, and then that person tries to get you to agree that you didn’t see or hear what both of you plainly saw and heard? It’s all about tapping into the power that White people have historically had over non-White people in this country, codified in law and protected by police and vigilantes who have openly attacked African Americans who have dared to stand up to it.

And when they try to tap into that power and find that it doesn’t always work anymore? Boy, do they get pissed.

And again, I don’t propose feeling sorry for the people doing it. We’re all in the same boat in the eyes of a virus (although many non-White American communities have been hit harder than most Euro-American communities), and some groups are much more vulnerable to a loss of livelihood during an economic downturn, even in the absence of a pandemic. Experiencing hardships that are common to us all – especially when those hardships tend to hit the rest of us harder – is not an excuse to lash out at other people. But I do believe in understanding the cause of a problem.

Proposing a solution to the multifaceted dilemma of people’s feelings of powerlessness, and the tendency of many to try to take what power they can get at the expense of people who have less, is beyond the scope of this blog post, but I believe that’s the explanation for much of the behavior that has been made increasingly public (again) over the last several years.

It’s why they keep punching down when there’s nothing left to gain from it.

Just like in 1984.

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Ceschino studied politics and literature at Notre Dame, law at Harvard, and business at UT-Austin. He is raising two adorable children with his wife, and he hopes to make the world a better place for them while passing on his love of good stories, fun games, and art. Feel free to connect on Facebook or Twitter if you would like to continue the conversation.