The Corona virus has been
temporarily replaced as the outstanding narrative in the United States by the sadistic
murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
As a symbol of the horrors of centuries of white oppression, it has
triggered a range of responses from peaceful demonstrations to violence to
looting and property damage. Governors
and mayors all over the country have painstakingly tried to separate out the
legal peaceful activities from the illegal violent and destructive ones –
encouraging the first group of activities and taking a firm stand against the
second group.
The looting and property
damage can be broken down into two categories: looting in central business
districts and white suburban malls, on the one hand, and looting in the poorer
black neighborhoods on the other. And it
is here where an important question can be raised? Some of the small businesses in the black
neighborhoods are owned by Asian immigrants, and some are owned by blacks. However, they all serve the essential needs
of the black residents. Why are these
businesses being looted, damaged, even burnt to the ground, when there will be
nothing to replace them for a long time?
And chain stores – grocery stores, drug stores and discount department
stores – that should have been treasured for what they provided. Also looted, damaged, and sometimes burnt to
the ground.
Granted that some of the
looters may have been opportunistic organized gangs that came from outside the
communities. But certainly not all. So how can sane people be swept into such
activities that lead to short-term gain, short-term kicks, but such long-term
despair and suffering? What are people
going to do for food in areas of their cities that in the best of times were
already considered to be food deserts?
How can the looters justify what they did?
The most common
explanation is that they were lashing out against white oppression. But, if so, why get involved in something
that is going to hurt black people so much?
I think the answer lies in how we define the nature of the harm that has
been done to black people by racism.
Much of the time when we talk about this situation, we use the term
oppression to mean the way that white policemen treat black people. This implies two things: white physical
aggression, but more fundamentally, white direct acknowledgment of the
existence of black people. It implies
maintaining a relationship, even if it means a negative relationship. It implies that white people care, even if it
is in a perverse negative way, about blacks.
In many ways, all this is
valid, but in other ways, another kind of relationship has developed. And that is a relationship of
indifference. The scars of racism after
all these centuries still exist, but many white people, who wouldn’t openly
espouse a racist philosophy to themselves, don’t want to deal with black people. Because of modern technology, the model for
the proper functioning of society today is that of a smooth-running, relatively
frictionless machine. These white people
live in the numbness of androids.
Although this relatively frictionless machine has created psychological
pathology for them, this is what they are used to. For white people to have to really deal with
the scars of racism, it would require them experiencing a level of stimulation
that they would find at this point to be simply painfully overstimulating. It would require dealing with the very human
needs of people who have problems that go beyond the surface solution of trying
to superficially integrate them into a smooth-running machine. To ask many white people to really feel the
problems of many African-Americans today is to ask them to feel analogous things
that in many cases they can’t feel in their own lives. If you talk about disinvestment in black
schools, the white establishment can say that school budgets are based on local
property taxes, the same rule that applies to everyone else. If you talk about lack of access to loans
from banks, bank officers can say that their loans are based on the reliability
of their debtors to pay off their debts.
For businesses and homes, these loans can be based on the quality of the
neighborhoods.
Because blacks are being
shunned by this so-called system, in many ways, they also experience themselves
as living in numbness, in an experiential vacuum. This aspect of their relationship to American
society can be, to a certain extent, as difficult as or even more difficult
than dealing with the physical aggression of policemen. At least, in the latter case,
African-Americans have a defined discrete enemy to focus on. How do they pin the blame when they are
dealing with a whole nebulous system where people with power can say that they
are just following the rules.
This is what black people
were living with when the cruel murder of George Floyd gave them a focused
symbol to act as a vehicle to help them explode out of their numbness and start
their protests and rioting and violence and looting and burning. Which leads to the answer to the question
posed at the beginning.
African-Americans are burning down businesses in their own neighborhoods
as an extreme method to pull themselves out of their numbness and, for a few
moments, feel very alive. It is like the
depressed people that practice self-harm: everything from cutting one’s wrists
to committing suicide. Suicide can give
a person a final rush of sensation to feel alive.
Combine this layer of
numbness with the numbness of sheltering in place for the Corona virus, and the
numbing loss of economic power as a result of the growing unemployment from the
Corona virus, and you have the perfect formula for a perfect storm. And this is what African-Americans have been
experiencing these past few days.
© 2020 Laurence Mesirow
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