In my Jan . 2 column, I indicated that some whites have the tendency to talk themselves into imagined racial victimhood. It generated a predictable heap of flack, much of which amounted to the insistence that this phenomenon is not true. What typically followed were examples showing how and why white people have it tough.
In fact, on Thursday morning — days before Martin Luther King Jr. Day — new “victims” came out of the woodwork after activists made the point that “black lives matter” by shutting down traffic outside Boston. The protesters held up morning commutes, and commuters expressed their outrage (“ What if your mother was in an ambulance?”), ignoring the rationale for how we got to this point.
The ambulance question is hypothetical. Meanwhile, black kids are being slaughtered by authorities and those left alive incarcerated. The public response is sympathetic in passing, I guess. But when kids are getting shot in the streets and you’re still going about your business as usual, maybe it’s time somebody shake you out of that reality and literally stop you in your tracks.
A better question:”How would you feel if your kids were shot in the streets and nobody did anything about it?”
For some reason many are better about confronting hypothetical existential threats — brown shooters in Paris remind us that there are ideological radicals who want us dead — that distract us from the reality that’s closer to home.
It will be here any day, we believe. Meanwhile, we express concern but don’t act when black children are killed by white police officers. We grieve for brave cartoonists snuffed by ideology. We pay no attention to the hundreds to thousands of black lives ended by similar ideologies in the same week.
A missing white child drives the news, but how many campaigns can you name off the top of your head designed to bring home a missing black child? That doesn’t make the news. Do you think black kids don’t go missing?
Let’s stop everything for a minute — interfere with whatever is distracting you from this reality — and think about it.
A protest chant exclaimed at recent Black Lives Matter events goes: “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it, shut it down.” Confronted with a shortage of justice, people are acting accordingly. People interfering with a system as a means of shaking it awake are doing more to celebrate Dr. King than the quote you plan on sharing via Facebook on Monday.
Some have a tendency to bring up Martin Luther King Jr. as if he were the whole of the civil rights movement, which grossly implies that it was an event that existed and is no longer necessary. He reminds us of working together and standing up to what is definitively and unquestionably wrong — the ugliness of overt racism, ignorant sheriffs and firehoses. His image, while worthy of the requisite adulation, places our responsibilities in the past rather than in the present that activists are protesting.
Civil rights are fought over every day, and the need for action against the struggle isn’t going anywhere soon. King was a great man, but he did not finish because the struggle was over; his life was cut short because he was murdered for his contribution. He was murdered by white supremacy, it continued to live on and those committed to the movement continued to fight after he was murdered as they did before he came along. The fight for the recognition of black dignity continues today.
Black lives matter, sure, but why, when hundreds to thousands in Nigeria are killed in one week, a small fraction of white lives get a week’s worth of attention? The image of King reminds us of a time when bombastic bigots were the primary problem. Today, the problem is a status quo that accepts the disproportionate placement of value on white lives as business as usual.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager and is a former candidate for the Legislature. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
