Statistics show that violent crime overall has dropped precipitously in the past two decades. Statistics and observation show that the public’s perceptions of violent crime, including terrorism, is that Americans are at great risk.
In Redding, my home town, the homeless population is perceived as an occupying army, full of violent thugs, who steal and menace. No data supports that assumption.
It’s fear folks and its being manipulated and propagandized to make you vote and act a certain way.
We have an African American President for the first time in American history, and the calls for action because of run away crime and violence have never been so shrill. Just yesterday the slogan of Donald Trump changed in one day from Make America Great Again to Make America SAFE Again. Note the words. A small change you say, right. WRONG!
In 1968 I was a college senior and watched in horror as the country blew up. The Democrats had destroyed a divided Republican Party in 1964 in the greatest landslide in American political history. In four short years, thanks to the Vietnam War, and the race riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon was elected President running on a platform of white backlash to the wave of perceived violence within and outside of the United States.
The facts that America was winning the Vietnam War and the violence over M.L. King was constrained was completely lost in the propaganda war Nixon slyly used to convince the nation that there was a clear and present danger to the “law n order” of the United States.
And last night, predictably, here came the “Make America Safe Again” a cynical propaganda response to the Police shootings of late. Again, they are doing it again! Why, because it works!
And what was the result of the “law and order” campaign of 1968 and 1972? Well there was Watergate for one. And a retrenching of white supremacy that resulted in “A New Jim Crowe” that culminated in rather than a "war on poverty" but a “war on crime” and a “war on drugs”. And millions of people of color went to prison.
Bill Clinton was able to stem the tide of conservative racial manipulation by becoming a war on crime warrior, passing a host of laws that were intended to stop the “crack epidemic”, but actually incarcerated a generation of young men of color. In a very real sense the Jim Crowe laws that the Civil Rights Act and the Voter Rights Acts had intended to end was reborn in even more severity. In short, white supremacy won.
Today we see the end of this logic in the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Racial justice has been reduced from stopping discrimination in hiring and housing to stopping the killing of people. The difference in context is glaring; in effect civil rights and justice has moved dramatically backward in the face of “law and order”.
Law and order worked to stop the small tide, weak but growing, that was painfully ending Jim Crowe and white supremacy. It worked then, it will work now.
Why? Because all white people know in their souls, in the very pit of their stomachs that people of color KNOW. They know how they have been brutalized over the centuries. They KNOW what happened to Native Americans. They know that America was not built on Manifest Destiny of spreading democracy but on stealing land and enslaving people. They know in their bones that a mammoth injustice has been done and there may be a reckoning.
And it is the reckoning that scares the death out of white people.
The irony of course is that pure white people are ceasing to exist in America. In a few short years people of color will outnumber Caucasians. In fact, this is already the case if you count mixed race people (like myself).
In short, Americans wind of being hateful and afraid of THEMSELVES.
It is not an understatement to say that the split personality of America lies behind our internal struggles to define ourselves. Our President has written a book and often refers to his mixed race background. He also has talked about the internal struggles this dichotomy has brought.
The diversity of America that grows by the day clashes with its white supremacy and law n order legacy. It is behind the Trump candidacy, thrusting a political novice into running for the Presidency.
I have remarked on the whiteness of his Vice Presidential running mate. This may sound inappropriate but I am not so sure that Trump did not do it on purpose.
This election is all about white supremacy and race. It is being manipulated into a reaction against the “black guy” in the White House (note why do we call it the white house?) and now guess what, law n order will be the marching orders. It is not an accident that Trump headed up the birther movement.
Is this racial politics? Am I talking racial politics?
You bet I am, because I am old enough to have seen it done in 1968 and 1972. I have seen the most massive incarceration of Americans since slavery. I have seen efforts for social and economic justice destroyed by the fear of Americans to face THEMSELVES!
That’s right, face ourselves. We refuse to acknowledge what is right in front of us when we look into the mirror. The problem is rather than reach out and love ourselves we once again give into the merchants of fear and hate.
And so the reckoning, ironically, will actually happen. The destruction of America will not be from outside or from colored thugs; it will be a suicide!
