It's easy to ignore injustice when it's happening to someone else
Stephen H. Provost
I’ve never liked the term “white privilege” because, too often, it’s been used to shame people rather than inform them. Besides, I think buzzwords and phrases work better when preaching to the choir than they do in creating a broader understanding.
So, let me put it this way: There are some things many white people, especially if they were raised in middle-class families (like yours truly), aren’t exposed to. Such as racial profiling and police brutality.
As I wrote in a previous post, I thought we’d overcome a lot of the racist attitudes we’ve grappled with as a nation for centuries now, but I was wrong. I wanted us to have overcome those things, so I was looking for evidence that we had. Then Donald Trump happened. And Charlottesville. And right-wing militias. And George Floyd. When it hit me over the head, I had to take another look.
That’s the problem: We need to be hit over the head.
And we don’t like it.
Which is why we don’t go looking for ways in which we’ve failed to live up to our carefully cultivated self-image: baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and the Fourth of July. The legend of American exceptionalism. But, more crucially, once we become aware of the cracks in our mythos, we don’t like to be reminded of them.
‘Compassion fatigue’
As a result, this happened:
In the days after George Floyd’s death at the hands of police, when it was impossible to ignore the graphic and disturbing images on our TV screens, 53% of white Americans approved of protests against police brutality. Now, three months later, that figure is down to 35%.
Two things have changed: First, the image of George Floyd dying before our eyes has receded into the background, and has been replaced by images of protests that turned violent — because violence makes for good TV, and peaceful protests don’t.
Beyond that, however, some white Americans have simply grown tired of being reminded how bad this problem is. It’s easier just to ignore it; to pretend it doesn’t exist.
In an interview with The Associated Press, University of Michigan political scientist Christian Davenport referred to it as “compassion fatigue.”
“When this was all about the video and the visceral response to seeing someone’s life get squeezed out of them, that’s fine,” Davenport said. “But from the moment that topic is raised to awareness, the clock starts ticking with regards to, ‘How quickly can we resolve this so I can get back to my normal life?’”
This is a stunning statement.
In three short months, some white Americans have grown so impatient to “get back to their normal lives” that they’re willing to sweep the image of a man being brutally suffocated under the rug. How long, it must be asked, have Black Americans been waiting to get back to a normal life? In this country, many have never had one — if, by “normal,” you mean simply being able to live without fear of being pulled over by police because of your skin color, and potentially beaten without provocation.
White Americans who consider it “inconvenient” to keep worrying about police brutality against their fellow citizens aren’t privileged. That’s far too kind a word for it. We’re spoiled as hell and willfully ignorant.
Heads in the sand
Problems don’t go away because you ignore them. Actually, they tend to get worse. If you stick your head in the sand to avoid a storm, the storm happens anyway, and you get a mouthful of dirt in the bargain.
But here’s the worst part of it: Those head-in-the-sanders don’t tend to take responsibility for their lack of awareness for how things end up. They look for someone else to blame.
In this case, they’re blaming rioters and looters who’ve used protests against police brutality as an excuse to smash windows and rob businesses... not realizing that they, themselves, are using the violence as an excuse to ignore the underlying problem. Because they want to “get back to their normal lives.”
No one is condoning — or at least, no one should condone — violent responses. But here’s a question no one on wants to ask: What would happen to that violence if the underlying problem went away? What if we, as a society, actually had the guts to solve the intractable problems of racial inequality and police brutality?
Guess what? The excuse for the violence goes away, too. And so does the anger that helps fuel it.
An analogy
The violence is unacceptable. But make no mistake, the anger behind it is entirely justifiable. These are two different issues. Anger is never a valid reason for lashing out against innocent people. For rioting. For looting. It’s no more acceptable than a man robbing a bank because a con man swindled him out of his life savings.
On the other hand, though, violence is never an excuse for ignoring the problem that’s fueled that anger. Do you let that con man off the hook because the guy robbed a bank? No. You solve both problems. That’s the same thing we should be doing here: prosecuting rioters and looters and... oh, yeah... police who beat and kill civilians, too. This is not an either/or proposition.
But it’s easier to throw looters in jail than it is to end police brutality, so guess what spoiled white people focus on? Not the hard issue. The easy fix. So they can end their “compassion fatigue” and get back to their “normal lives.”
I’m sure Black Americans who have been targeted, profiled, and beaten by police officers wish it was that easy.
It’s not. But we can’t even begin to find normalcy if we keep sticking our heads in the sand whenever a new storm starts brewing.