You see how quickly black and white liberals and conservatives happily jumped out there with something they all could agree on? Yes, indeed, body cameras for police will immediately begin to ameliorate so-called “racial” tensions and the distrust it spawns in black and non-white Latino neighborhoods throughout America. Its rush to popularity even caused President Obama to hurry aboard.
Since medical doctors, scientists of all types, teachers, theologians and lawyers, especially, seem to be all in on this thing called “race,” I must apologize for my persistent outlying position on the issue. I’m stuck on my fascinating undergraduate explorations in physiology and anthropology through which I came to understand that human beings are the human race!
It is only through non-textbook readings where searches reveal that American and European medical doctors and scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries created the notion of “races” to proselytize “white supremacy.” They advanced that white people are the superior “race” of human “races,” and blacks are the most inferior of human “races.” Thus, the psychosocial justification for slavery and Native American genocide was manufactured.
White nationalism was implicit in the very founding and formation of this country. That is why both atheist and mostly so-called Christian men, were all involved, one way or another, in the lucrative Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade that constitutionally enslaved black people as mostly property and only part human. (Did you know that many presidents of the U. S. A. owned hundreds of African slaves?)
If white supremacy is the monster dragon, then white nationalism is the debilitating fire that the dragon spews. During the short lived Reconstruction period after the Civil War the South created the “Posse Comitatus” and the “Soveregin Citizen” movements. Posse Comitatus became an 1878 Act of Congress that stipulated that there is no power greater than the County – the County Sheriff is the only law.
Along with the white supremacist Soveregin Citizen movement (vigilante group), freed blacks were suppressed back into virtual slavery by County Sheriffs. Then came the terrible “Black Codes” and when that severe cruelty became too much for the nation to bear, “Jim Crow” was created, then came “share cropping,” which was yet another form of virtual slavery. Each County Sheriff and his deputies oversaw everything, including atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan!
Barack Obama may be the only President in US history to have scant knowledge of this reality having been smothered in mid-west white culture. While still a child, Obama was also raised in Hawaii, which just became a state in 1959. And, he went to school in Indonesia, as well. Unlike how white parents teach their children this history from the white nationalist point-of-view, I doubt Obama actually learned anything from a black perspective.
If you happen to see Rev. Al Sharpton and Marc Morial, our new self-appointed so-called national “leaders,” tell them to please read Dr. Gordon W. Alport’s 1964 definitive book The Nature of Prejudice. In the book, Harvard psychologist Alport tells us why body cameras and other such palliatives will not change the attitudes of white policemen.
Dr. Alport says there are five phases of prejudice. First there is Antilocution. The very young hear and are told negative things especially about blacks and other groups of people, as well. This leads to the second phase, Avoidance. As adolescents negative verbiage is used and isolation from blacks and other groups becomes a constant. This leads to Discrimination, the third phase. Physical Attack is the fourth phase and Extermination [genocide] is the final phase of prejudice.
Let us be clear, America. By your laws and by attitudes that you have allowed to become your unnatural “nature,” policing to you, white America, means so much that is negative to me. That is my historical reality; and that is my reality from experience, observation, and storytelling under the tree, from neighbors, through church gossip and heard in the club.
There are just two things that need to be done immediately and they are both cost-effective. First, all law enforcement personnel geared to work in so-called “minority” neighborhoods must be vetted by an ethnically diverse panel of officers and neighborhood registered voters. Secondly, recruit more black and non-white Latino cops to patrol in perspective ethnic areas as white cops already patrol white areas by a gaping wide majority.
Al Calloway is a longtime journalist who began his career with the Atlanta Inquirer during the early 1960s civil rights struggle. He may be reached at Al_Calloway@verizon.net
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