I wrote a while ago about how much of the law around police behavior - the law that essentially excuses preemptive violence almost all the time - is predicated on a false presumption of black dangerousness. But I'm thinking about another part... salon.com/2014/10/31/why…
White America is deeply invested in two seemingly contradictory projects: (1) Embracing "post-racialism" and a self image as racially egalitarian; & (2) Maintaining entrenched residential and educational segregation. How can this be done?
White people need to believe in a race-neutral justification for the status quo of segregation. In the case of education, that justification is the seemingly dispassionate, mathematical truth of test scores. "We don't care about race, we just want great schools."
In the case of residential segregation, the justification is safety. "We don't care who our neighbors are, we just want safe streets." The problem there is that the vast majority of segregated, non-white neighborhoods are basically safe.
They're not as safe as white neighborhoods, but they're still mostly safe. So putatively non-racist segregation needs a narrative of danger. Police and their backers offer that narrative, through a regimen of training that literally treats every human interaction as a threat.
Our whole legal approach says, in very reasonable-sounding, official ways, "These neighborhoods are so dangerous that we need to give police untrammeled discretion to kill." That makes voluntary white segregation seem like the only responsible choice for white families.
And since most white people don't really know many black or Latinx people or spend real time in non-white neighborhoods, the myth of those neighborhoods' being prohibitively dangerous is easy and useful to believe. It lets them double down on inherited racial privilege...
under the unexamined assumption of safety and responsibility. When the Sacramento cops who killed Stephon Clark get off without real punishment, as they likely will, white people can assume that there must be some good reason that the legal system allows cops to act this way.
That is a much easier assumption, because it says, "Your self-segregation is rational and not racist. Carry on."
