Is it really racism?

First some numbers-- according to a recent study by the Washington Post, unarmed black men are seven times more likely to die from police gunfire than unarmed white men.  Seven times.  The study controlled for other variables that might increase the chance that an encounter with a police officer would result in a fatality including mental illness, whether the person was attacking the officer, and the prevalence of crime in the area.  "The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black."

Merriam Webster defines racism as "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race."  We don't know the specifics of what each officer thought or felt prior to shooting the unarmed black men included in the Post's research, but the very fact that blackness predicts a man's chance of dying at police hands makes this a race issue.  But why is it so difficult for so many white people to make the leap from racist belief to destructive action, why is there such resistance to labeling these statistics, which translate into ruined lives and broken communities, a product of racism? 

The resistance to acknowledging racism is embodied in the AllLivesMatter hashtag.  It implicitly rejects the notion that black people experience police violence differently than any other group.  #BlackLivesMatter attempts to bring attention to the clear racial disparities in police brutality among other inequities experienced daily by black people. #AllLivesMatter denies the issue of police violence has anything to do with race, despite the overwhelming, graphic evidence to the contrary.

White people don't experience the same level of police violence as black people, so that is one potential reason for the doubt.  If it isn't happening to me, then it probably isn't happening.  This perspective, while wildly misinformed is based on the blissful ignorance of white privilege and reflects a willful belief in color blindness.  White people constructed color blindness as a means of attempting to acknowledge the problem of racism.  We all have the capacity for this sort of ineffective problem solving.  For example, if my husband has a severe substance use disorder, one that has directly contributed to our financial instability and the endangerment of our children, no amount of insistence that everybody drinks makes the problem go away.  My attempt at rationalizing the behavior of drinking doesn't really address the severity of my husband's problem, but it feels like I've done something to improve my situation by denying the problem even exists.

At a more insidious level, some white people deny racism because they think it's a problem that black people brought on themselves.  This frightening belief is racism that doesn't think it's racism.  But black people commit more crimes, and black men intimidate cops with their sagging pants and gold teeth and swagger, and if they would just speak clear American English, they wouldn't have all these problems.  They are asking for it because "they" are fundamentally different from "us."  They are more violent, they are angrier and more confrontational, they just make bad choices.  Blackness therefore is a threat.  Race determines human traits and capacities and racial differences produce inherent superiority of a particular race.  Race. Ism.

Every single human on the planet wants the same thing-- to be happy.  I don't know any universal recipe for happiness, but I do know that we won't find it by clinging fearfully to those traits that separate "us" from an always threatening "them."  Our attempts to define ourselves by our differences, definitions that have been shaped by a powerful few, have only left us feeling more isolated and afraid.  We can choose to open ourselves up to those that are different, to make compassion our default setting rather than suspicion.  Fear and anger invite pain, they don't protect us from it.

White people have more influence and more power than people of color.  Many of us don't feel powerful because our lives seem so hard and out of control. It takes acting in power to experience being powerful.  Every time a white person opens a soft heart to black neighbor's pain, the world becomes safer.  Every time a white person looks at a person of color and says no to the fearful thoughts that arise, the world becomes kinder.  Soft heart, open mind, compassionate action-- #everyonewins.