White People, Meet Me at Camera Three

Welcome to the first of what will inevitably be a very long series of my white self yelling at other white people about racism!

 

     This meme is a problem:

 

     Worse, the problem is the point.

     The way I read it, there are two possible/simultaneous messages here. First, that George Floyd’s death was a tragedy completely independent of race. Okay, interesting. Wrong, but interesting, and I’ll get into those details later. The other message is that if “people” (generally understood to be people of color, specifically Black people, and their allies) would stop bring race into everything, racism would disappear.

     The first problem with that, and it’s so glaring that it can be seen from space, is that it blames African Americans for their own poor treatment.

     Oh, not explicitly. Never explicitly. The people who create these memes would never be so gauche[1]. But do the math: if the problem, as the meme creator sees it, is that race is being injected into situations where it doesn’t belong, the question follows—who’s doing it? It’s not white people, that’s for sure. Most of us have been conditioned to stick our heads in the sand the second we are presented with anything but the sunniest of race relations. The police departments would never have said anything if the incidents hadn’t been caught on video, and politicians won’t voluntarily touch the subject of race with even a ten-foot pole.

     So, who does that leave? Where are the outbursts coming from when Black bodies are casually slaughtered?

     You think. I’ll wait.

     That’s right! They come from the Black community. Therefore, one of the messages revealed when you scratch the surface of this meme and others like it is “Well, if you people didn’t keep complaining about your poor treatment, it wouldn’t keep happening.” That’s right up there with, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” It’s a catch-22 that either consigns African Americans to silent suffering or complicity in their own abuse.

     And now that we’ve revealed that particularly horrible underlying theme, let’s look at an only slightly-less horrible message: that George Floyd’s death was completely divorced from his race.

     The plainest way I know how to illustrate this is with numbers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 13.4% of people in this country identify as Black or African American. 60.4% of American citizens identify as non-Hispanic or -Latino whites (US Census Bureau). AKA, generic white people. So, a little less than a sixth of the population is Black, and between half and two-thirds is white. Hang on to those numbers, they’re going to be important.

     Now, if American policing were truly colorblind, you’d see roughly the same numbers when looking at nationwide statistics for deaths occurring at the hands of the police. Black people would make up 12-15% of police fatalities, white people about 60%, and so on. Within these proportions, though, according to an article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Black people are nearly three times more likely to die at the hands of the police than their white counterparts. Blacks are also more likely to be unarmed during these fatal encounters by a difference of about 5 percentage points (DeGue, et al). So, unless the memeists out there want to confess the belief that African Americans are just inherently more criminal and dangerous, I think we can lay the old “American policing is colorblind, and those who say otherwise are just stirring up trouble” canard to bed[2].

     Last, but not least, I’d like to address the use of Denzel Washington’s image for this meme. On a couple of the pages I saw it, either the people posting it or some of the people who commented on it thought that this was something that Washington had actually said. It is not. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago towards the end of May, Washington got between police and an apparently distressed homeless black man in Los Angeles, and kept the situation from escalating (Trepany). This kind of subtle plagiarism—attributing the meme creator’s words to a famous Black actor so as to imply that actor’s agreement with the sentiment, is underhanded manipulation, and probably could at the very least invite a “cease and desist” letter, if the original creator could ever be tracked down.

     So, there we are white people. Racism exists, and it definitely has an effect on how the police operate in this country. Stop freaking saying otherwise, and for the love of Dog stop using respected Black actors’ images to lend weight to your own (hopefully) underinformed ideas. Tune in next time when I’ll be yelling at y’all about something. Because there’s always something.

Works Cited

DeGue, Sarah, Katherind A. Fowler and Cynthia Calkins. "National Center for Biotechnology Information." 7 Aug 2018. Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcment: Findings from the National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 U.S. States, 2009-2012. online. 12 June 2020. <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/>.

Trepany, Charles. "Video involving Denzel Washington and police goes viral after George Floyd's death." 28 May 2020. USA Today. online. 12 June 2020. <https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/05/28/denzel-washington-assists-incident-involving-police-goes-viral/5279699002/>.

US Census Bureau. Quick Facts. n.d. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI825218#RHI825218. 12 June 2020.

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[1] If they’re conscious of it at all, which I’m willing to concede that some are not. However, I will continue to assert that in those cases the creators’ subconsciouses are busy little bastards.

[2] There’s actually a whole lot to say about the concept of racial colorblindness and the real harm it does to Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC), but this is meant to be an essay, not a book chapter.