Blacks Believing That Racism Was Lessening Was Just Our Imagination

by Kenny Anderson

Over the past year, since the racist police murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the acquittal of white 'killer-kop’ Daren Wilson, Blacks across this country have consistently protested against the on-going racist murders of Blacks by police.

These racist police murders have become routine, like the recent murders of a Black male and female in Texas. Christian Taylor, a 19-year-old male, was murdered by a white cop in Arlington, Texas; Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old female was found dead while in police custody in Walker County, Texas.

From my perspective, the majority of Blacks protesting against racist police murders, and the Blacks who are not protesting, believe that most whites are empathetic to our struggle against injustices, along with a belief that the American government is against racial injustices. The reality is, both of these notions are ‘untrue’ – they are false!

According to the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute survey released June 23^rd of this year, the survey found that 63% of white Americans believe that protests against unequal treatment are good for the country.

However, when Blacks are protesting against injustices, less than half of whites, 48%, believe that Black protests are good for the country; white protesters are viewed as an ‘activists’ - while Black protesters are often viewed as 'thugs’.

What was ‘note-worthy’ in the Public Religion Research Institute survey, and needs to be highlighted, is that, young whites in their 20s, the millennials, have basically the same racist views as older whites.

This survey showed that the so-called ‘post-racial generation’ of whites aged 17 to 34, were only slightly less likely than whites 65 and older, to say Blacks were ‘unintelligent’ – a 1.5 point difference, or ‘lazy’ – a 3.6 point difference.

Indeed, the election of a Black male president Barak Obama and a post-racial America is a farce! With regard to the Obama Administration supporting the Black protest struggles against racist police murders and injustices of the system is also a farce.

Emails recently obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed that Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter group, one of the leading groups protesting against racist police murders. No surprise, nothing has changed! During the 1960’s President Johnson’s FBI under J. Edgar Hoover constantly monitored Martin Luther King, Jr. and the SCLC when they protested against Southern white supremacy racist police brutality and murders.

What were Blacks thinking when they believed racism was decreasing in America just because Obama was elected as president? Blacks have been politically neglected by Obama and our worst off socio-economically under his administration. In the words of Eddie Kendrics: “It was just my imagination running away with me.”

This post-civil rights political imagination is rooted in the idealistic – romantic excerpt from ‘The I Hade Dream Speech’ by an over-optimistic and naïve Martin Luther King:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of  freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”

As Blacks we forgot these latter words of a more mature and seasoned Martin Luther King:

“I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Why is the issue of racial equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich productive and awesomely powerful? The problem is so tenacious because, despite its virtues and attributes, America is deeply racist and its democracy is flawed both economically and socially, justice for Black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society, exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

This radical reconstruction of American society King refers to must be expressed in Black organizational resistance by simultaneously exposing, confronting – protesting against racial injustices and building as a first priority institutional 'Black Power’ in our communities.

Though protesting is necessary it’s not sufficient’; protesting alone makes us dependent on whites granting us justice, as Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) stated: “Then, in order to understand white supremacy we must dismiss the fallacious notion that white people can give anybody their freedom.