Echoes

I am not a fan of the idea that non-White people shouldn't have to explain the impacts and effects of racism to White people. Mainly because I'm a firm believer in the idea that "if you want someone to know something, the best course of action is to tell them yourself."

But I was wandering through a subReddit that I happen to be a member of, and found a conversation in which I ended up, over the course of several comments and a couple of days, writing nearly four thousand words in a vain attempt to explain to my interlocutor that after many officer-involved shootings of people in general, let alone Black people, that later turn out to be unjustified, officers are scapegoated for problems that afflict American society at large, not simply police officers. And that those problems that are specific to police departments tend to be rooted in a lack of broader accountability, rather than simply a perverse love of misconduct on the part of law enforcement.

Reading it again after more than a year was a surreal experience, mainly because the person I had been attempting to explain all of this to had later gone and deleted all of their own comments, so the only thing left of the other side of the conversation were the times when I quoted them back to themselves in my quixotic efforts to drive home what I felt was a simple point:

Police officers are not the problem; the perception of the Black population of the country as willfully perverse agents of violence and anarchy is.

If that sounds familiar, it may be because that's the point that I was making with Standing Still, which I wrote while the Reddit conversation was still happening.

I don't know if I successfully made the point to any of the readers of Nobody In Particular, but I utterly failed to make it to the person I was attempting to explain it to on Reddit. And so I understand why so many Black, and other non-White, people simply have no time for the role of educator. It can eat up a lot of time, and a lot of effort, and not appear to have any impact on the broader world. And if it's going to seem futile, why bother with it?

But I suspect that many difficult things seem more or less futile. That's part of what makes them difficult; the sense that the effort put into them won't come to anything. And attempting to convince someone who is the hero of their own story that they're the among the primary antagonists in one's own is always going to be exceedingly difficult, if for no other reason than it threatens a sense in which many people find meaning; as researchers have noted: "people want to view their actions as having positive value or as being morally justified. That is, people are motivated to act in a way that reflects some positive moral value, or at least to interpret their behavior as conforming to ideals and standards of what is approved and acceptable." And making someone else's life difficult because of a perceived difference like "race" is no longer approved and acceptable.

The primary problem with "race" relations is no longer the open hostility, legal discrimination and one-sided violence of years past. It's cooled into resentments and grievances; and being resentful of and and aggrieved by, the resentments and grievances of others. And so people talk past one another, sometimes at length. And so attempts to change even one person's mind through conversation seem quixotic. But be that as it may, leveling rhetorical lances at windmills strikes me as a better choice than simply laying them aside.