It’s not about race.
It is my considered opinion that the foregoing statement is the most frequently repeated lie in the history of the United States of America.
The roots of the lie go even deeper, back to the migration of mass numbers of white people to the shores of the New World and the subjugation — leading to the eventual genocide — of Native Americans. The lie twined its way through the founding and growth of the American nation, which in the declaration of its independence in 1776 extolled the equality of all men, but which did not free its slaves until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, and did not extend the full benefits and protections of citizenship to blacks until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (It also did not allow women to vote until 1920; but that is a subject for another day).
Even in the face of undeniable progress, the lie persisted. It persisted in the public rhetoric of political forces — and their private supporters — intent on ensuring that de jure racial equality would never become de facto (or, put another way, that America never become “post-racial”). It persisted in the degeneration of our politics into two mutually exclusive and ideologically rigid camps, locked in petty power struggles as the nation burns around them.
The lie persists still. And not only has it persisted, it has redoubled. It has redoubled in the perniciousness of its growth, the invasiveness of its tendrils, the poisonous heart of its fruit. It has redoubled and been made manifest in every aspect of our national life, up to and including the rote opposition to and relentless demonization of a twice-duly-elected President — who is the first black person to serve as our Chief Executive.
I mention this last fact because I do not believe that Barack Obama’s race is coincidental to the irrational intensity and unfathomable depth of the feeling against him among a substantial body of white voters — including many who used to be on the fringes of the culture wars, and now are on the front lines of what they cast as a battle for America’s soul, the preservation of a providentially conferred social order. I don’t believe that, and I surely don’t believe that we have reached a point at which reasonable Americans can say that the scales of economic and social justice are adequately balanced, or that we are anywhere near to equalizing opportunity.
I don’t believe the reflexive assertion that race is not the fulcrum of our seemingly terminal political division, the tectonic force that has widened the divide across which “liberals” and “conservatives” regard one another. Not believing that, I also do not believe that we are the nation the Declaration of Independence envisioned, nor that the Constitution promises.
In other words, I don’t believe the lie. Race does matter — in the United States of America, in the Great State of Alabama, and right here in Birmingham. It matters in the availability and accessibility of educational, cultural and career opportunities. It matters in the quantity and quality of resources and services provided by both public and private entities. It matters in the conduct of our elections and the ways in which government functions — or doesn’t — at all levels.
I’m not writing these things to be provocative — not, at least, just for the sake of being so. I’m writing them because I am dismayed and anguished at the endlessly growing number of instances in which young black people are dying at the hands of police officers, or after being taken into police custody.
I am further dismayed and anguished at the response of what I judge to be far too many of my fellow Americans to the successive instances of this appalling trend, in which they refuse to admit that — regardless of circumstances or particulars, regardless of the very true statement that there are plenty of “good” cops out there putting their lives on the line — shooting deaths by police of unarmed black youths and young men like Michael Brown in Missouri, Akai Gurley in New York City, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and the death by police stranglehold of Eric Garner in New York, indicate that something is deeply wrong with the ways in which many, if not most, of our communities are being policed.
But that, too, is a topic for another day. That’s because the thing about which I am most anguished and distressed is the death of a young black person in this community, an 18-year-old woman named Sheneque Proctor. The death of Proctor left an infant son without a mother and has brought national questions about police tactics and practices — particularly in poor black neighborhoods — to the very doorstep of our community.
Proctor died in the Bessemer City Jail, sometime on the morning of Nov. 2, after being taken into custody by police officers of that city the night before. As Weld reported last week, Proctor was arrested at a party, charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, booked into the jail and found dead in her cell the following morning. Proctor was asthmatic, but whether that and/or other circumstances contributed to her death remained unknown to the family, as the police and district attorney clamped down on information about the case. The Alabama State Bureau of Investigations is looking into the case.
Weld also continues its investigation. As events in Bessemer continue to unfold, the community has begun to rally behind the call for a full investigation. At this writing, an online petition urging “both state and federal investigations” has attracted more than 100 signatures.
What happened to Sheneque Proctor? We don’t know, and should reserve our judgments of blame, responsibility and redress until we do. In the meantime, however, we can only ponder the death itself, and in so doing find ourselves confronted by the question of whether our community, in its collective handling of and response to the aftermath of Proctor’s death, will prove itself closer than the rest of America to closing the racial divide rather than contributing to its inexorable widening.