Full disclosure: I am a Caucasian male.
A friend of mine who actually attends Missouri University as a graduate student has asked me to write about the events that have unfolded on campus in recent weeks.
The Guardian has an excellent timeline of the events, and I find it disturbing that white power structures consistently and continually dismiss African-Americans' complaints that they are being treated unfairly. Coincidentally, Occupy Wall Street was also continually derided by mainstream media as a bunch of kids who should just "suck it up and get a job" (let's see what you think when the economy crashes for a second time....), but I shall leave this aside for a moment because African-Americans are in a unique position to contest wholly legitimate disenfranchisement in a way few other groups can claim (others being, of course, LGBTQ individuals, as well as Muslims, who also continue to face historical discrimination by similar forces).
The historical oppression of African-Americans is, contrary to what Texan history textbooks will tell you, well-documented and catastrophic. The only other group that can even match that magnitude of oppression is the Palestinians at the hands of Israel; while the Israeli occupation has only lasted a few decades, Palestinians' very identity as a people has been all but annihilated, with the exception that Israel's invasion provides them with a sense of shared trauma (O'Malley). However, the New World has been importing slaves since the 1500s, and it has been only 150 years since slavery was abolished; African-Americans continually face state oppression at the hands of police and the justice system generally, while the rest of us continue to exclaim that we are a free society.
Why does it not bother us that a whole swath of people are required as sacrifices for the glorious Capitalist machine? How is it that we can stand to be so dismissive of the plight of people who live here, who--legally (in words, if not in action)--are supposed to enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other demographic? It should rouse us that our fellow citizens face oppression to such a degree that a previous President would have invaded a country to stop. Why do we see and say nothing?
When a Muslim American student asked Bernie Sanders what he would do to combat racism, he proceeded to give a two-minute crash course on racism. Sanders explains that capitalist bosses excuse pitiful wages by playing races against each other. "You think you've got trouble? You're better off than blacks who can't drink at a water fountain!" From this perspective, racism is a divide-and-conquer tactic that continues to be used by many Republican candidates in the current election cycle. This kind of racism is easy to spot, and is a baseline for casual racists to say that they aren't that bad.
On the other hand, this is also the kind of racism that is being experienced by many African-American staff, faculty, and students at Mizzou. But it isn't the only kind.
Since Martin Luther King first marched, legitimate grievance has been by turns ridiculed and dismissed by white power structures. "Things aren't that bad!" "You aren't slaves anymore, right? What's to complain about?"To this day this goes on, in a society that survives only by calling attention to the excesses and injustices against our own people so that we can do better and be better. OWS, Ferguson protests, and Black Lives Matter were all heavily derided by the ruling class as the tantrums of spoiled hipsters, and rioting African-Americans (not true; they have continued to model MLK's nonviolence even when they have every excuse and every right to descend into violence for what our society continues to do to them). The treatment African-American protests and movements have historically received in the press is the driving factor in their resistance to the media. African-Americans' discipline and resolve in the face of intractable and universal hostility deserves to be commended, not ridiculed. The act of delegitimizing the grievances of a historically oppressed demographic is inherently racist and serves to entrench white interests against a just and fair society.
The most difficult kind of racism for most people to understand is how opportunity is systematically removed from people who are different (sex/gender/race). Let's start simple. Consider your last job interview. Did it go well? Yes? Good for you. Now, imagine your last five job interviews. How many
said no? Are you white? What if you were African-American? According to the Department of Labor, "Historically, Blacks have had persistently higher unemployment rates than the other major racial and ethnic groups. In addition, the increase in the black unemployment rate during the recession was larger than that for other races partly because workers with less education are particularly hard hit during recessions. Moreover, the unemployment rate for Blacks was slower to fall after the official end of the recession." If you can remember what it was like to be unemployed, you likely knew that someone would eventually say yes. But imagine that the systems built into society were designed to bar you from opportunity. Think about all of the African-Americans who are disproportionately targeted by police, who are denied adequate protection from the law, and then consider how, after a sentence is served, background checks by potential employers further disenfranchises them, cutting them off from society completely. In Being & Time, Martin Heidegger at one point calls his reader to consider all of the opportunities that society has denied to the individual without the individual ever realizing it. He writes,
"In the lostness in the They, the nearest, factical potentiality-of-being of Da-sein has already been decided upon--tasks, rules, standards, the urgency and scope of being-in-the-world, concerned and taking care of things. The They has always already taken the apprehension of these possibilities-of-being away from Da-sein. The They even conceals the way it has silently disburdened Da-sein of the explicit choice of these possibilities. It remains indefinite who is 'really' choosing." (Heidegger 268-269) (Note: "Dasein" is Heidegger's term for the Individual, and the "They" is Heidegger's term for society at large; all of the people that the individual does not know; the crowd)
In Discipline & Punish, Michel Foucault explains how the individual's choices and potential are robbed from him without his knowledge:
"...Although it is true that the its pyramid organization gives it a 'head', it is the apparatus as a whole that produces 'power' and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field. This enables the disciplinary power to be both absolutely indiscreet, since it is everywhere and always alert, since by its very principle it leaves no zone of shade and constantly supervises the very individuals who are tasked with supervising; and absolutely 'discreet', for it functions permanently and largely in silence. Discipline makes possible operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism...Thanks to the techniques of surveillance, the 'physics' of power, the hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics, according to a whole play of spaces, lines, screens, beams, degrees, and without recourse, in principle, at least, to excess, force or violence" (177).
The chain of power is vast and continuous, and its methodologies and modes of operation are widely consistent. Foucault's explanation of power can be verified, truly, without even trying. However, in the interest of time, I will stick to how this affects African-Americans specifically. Despite Affirmative Action and programs designed to help them succeed in society, many other forces competing with this aim succeed in stifling it. Private employers and government officials are more likely to believe implicitly that black bodies constitute a threat simply because that is what is presented to them by a constant and ever-present network of media entities who, taken together, resemble a conspiracy, but individually are not aware that they are perpetuating bias, and these falsehoods are further reinforced by overwhelmingly disproportionate arrest rates that reinforce this bias in a positive feedback loop. African-Americans are overpoliced (invisible to greater society) > African-Americans get arrested more often (visible to greater society) > African-Americans must be criminals (greater society's assumption). Racial bias, therefore, is a ubiquitous and discreet factor that cannot be overtly accounted for in the experience of African-Americans, and this is precisely where white people fail to recognize what is happening to their fellow citizens.
Except, of course, that they are affected by it too, only in radically different ways, and by only slightly lesser degree. Foucault wasn't talking specifically about 'white people' or 'black people'; he was talking about how power operates across all societies. White people may not disenfranchise each other by skin color, but they still employ these same mechanisms to discriminate against LGBTQ people and by religious identification. Furthermore, there is no greater example of Foucault's panopticon than that of the NSA, or, to a slightly lesser extent, the social media newsfeed. As an example, white parenting--specifically, white motherhood--is heavily policed: Is she eating right? Is she getting enough exercise? Can she drink while pregnant? Should she eat allergy-prone foods? Oh my god she just yelled at her child in the parking lot! Better get the hell out of there before someone calls DYFS! If her kid has special needs, both child and parent (specifically the mother) will be policed to a degree beyond even that by the school district and the local community, with a regimen involving endless paperwork, medication, therapy, and god knows what else in order to force both the child and the parent to conform to 'normal' standards (special education children are held to the same standard as general education students while taking the PARCC). The endless discipline of the perfect mother, the perfect child, the perfect body, the perfect sex life--truly,the list is infinite--is a woefully inadequate comparison to the degree to which African-Americans are so ruthlessly surveilled in the United States, but the only one that white people can immediately understand.
When Missouri University President Tim Wolfe declined to engage protesters, and issue placebo PR statements from his office, it sent a message to an assailed community of African-American students that the people to whom they give large amounts of their money, or go into debt for, couldn't care less about their experiences of both covert and overt discrimination. Nay, the fact that even faculty were not immune from racism drives home the scale of the problem at Mizzou. Do you know who was immune from racism? Football players. The revenue from sports is enormous. Mizzou coach Gary Pinkel alone makes $4 million a year, and because of this money, football players--a large percentage of them are African-American--are shielded from the experiences endured by their non-sports-affiliated peers. As recent player Kim English tweeted about how African-Americans were treated at local bars, as cited in an editorial in The Guardian, "If U were black at my alma mater, and ur name was not Maclin, Denmon, Pressey, English, Weatherspoon, Carroll, etc. You didn't feel welcome"
Unless an African-American is an ATM for the university, he or she will face discrimination.
Things are going to improve, however, at least for Mizzou students. Just yesterday, an African-American president was appointed in Wolfe's stead, to the delight of protesters, and a diversity chancellor position was created. How effective it will be in changing the culture there remains to be seen because, as I have previously demonstrated, racism is insidious and covert, and difficult to identify without taking into account entire systems and mechanisms of power, a conceptualization that is out of reach for many. (Coincidentally, this is also why disenfranchised workers misfired and elected Tea Party Republicans in 2012.)
Unless there is a history, an ongoing narrative associated with a group or individual's reality, it is difficult to even pick up on subtle modes of oppression and control, even as whites have historically embodied--and continue to embody--those modes. When the Palestinians and the Israelis talk about each other, the Palestinians' reference point is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank & Gaza, the humiliating and ubiquitous military checkpoints, economic embargoes, and incessant harassment at the hands of the IDF. The Israelis blame Palestinian terrorism for the disproportionate and continuous expansion of Israeli "security" policy and paraphernalia, and in recent weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu blamed the Palestinians directly for the Holocaust.
The willingness for the oppressor to suppress the realities of his own action against others is indeed universal. The only answer, truly, is to continue to chip away at widely-accepted cultural narratives, and to support efforts that call attention to the misuse of power to discriminate and oppress others, especially when it comes to members of the majority who fail to recognize those modes of oppression. Demonstrate, as clearly as one can, how these modes and mechanisms of power operate and how they are used to maintain the current power structure while oppressing minorities in both obvious and subtle ways. And it is up to the majority to pay attention, to care that it is not living up to its own expectations. As long as there is one group or individual who is not being served in a way that is fair and just, the society cannot call itself "free." Every unjust society has been free for some, and hell for others. Only a just society is free for all.
Books:
The Two-State Delusion by Padraig O'Malley
Being & Time by Martin Heidegger
Discipline & Punish by Michel Foucault
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