I arrived in New York in 2008, in the midst of a bitterly fought election campaign. When Barack Obama declared victory, I was standing at the corner of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard, the historic heart of Harlem, as part of an emotional crowd watching the speech on a big screen. People around me were in tears. I have never been hugged by so many strangers. Even for someone sceptical about the new president’s ability to deliver on his promise of “hope and change”, the symbolism of a black family in the White House was deeply moving.
Everyone tends to see the world through the prism of their own experience, and I had been lucky enough, in Britain, to live through a period of real racial hope and change, from the frank terror I had felt as a “Paki” kid in the early 80s, to feeling part of a confident “second generation” of British Asians who were suddenly visible in many areas of public life in the late 90s and early 2000s. That period of progress was brought to a grinding halt by 9/11, of course, but those years left me with a streak of Whiggish optimism that now seems naive.
The viciousness of the backlash against Obama was, I thought at the time, only to be expected – all the watermelon jokes and Republican intransigence just the nasty death throes of a racist culture that was steadily being consigned to history. Still, it was a surprise to hear that we were suddenly living in a new “post-racial” era. It was self-evidently childish to imagine that the toxic social legacy of slavery could be eradicated at a stroke by one man’s election, yet many commentators were claiming precisely that; it was as if they couldn’t wait to draw a line, to consign it definitively to the past.
As Obama prepares to leave office, nobody is talking about a post-racial America. Since the Ferguson uprising of summer 2014, the largest movement for black civil rights since the 60s has coalesced. Their enemies have intersecting agendas. Adherents to the millennarian ideology that misleadingly calls itself conservatism are itching to tear everything down and build the City of God, which for a good many of them is apparently a place where white householders shall have justified dominion over the dusky races. Law and order fundamentalists see any questioning of the police’s use of deadly force as the first step on the road to anarchy, and point to the high murder rates in some poor black communities as evidence that, without armed white “supervision”, some innate racial tendency to crime will manifest itself.
Between these antagonists, social liberals hoping to drift off on feelgood post-racialism have found themselves in unfamiliar alliance with free-marketeers for whom the only relevant data point is that everyone’s money is the same color. For these people, protest is picturesque but not urgent, because they believe racism is an irrational superstition that will in due course be ground down by the great levelling mill of capital, or assuaged by some form of cultural therapy. Racism, being irrational, is also something that they, as self-certified rational people, cannot suffer from. Any suggestion to the contrary is met with particular outrage. The rest of us are still replaying whichever video or videos we can’t get out of our heads, in my case the year-old images of a Cleveland police patrol car rolling up on 12-year-old Tamir Rice and an officer named Timothy Loehmann shooting him dead before the car had even come to a halt.
I have no interest in debating the shooting of Tamir Rice. I don’t know what threat the officer perceived, but I am the father of a son, and the idea that he could be at risk of such a thing happening to him is sickening to me. Since I want safety for my own son, it seems I ought to want it for everyone else’s. In the last eight years I have learned a lot about living with armed authority, about the enforced brittle civility the gun culture has bred in Americans, and how encounters governed according to protocols and behaviours learned in one or other branch of this country’s vast military so often seem to escalate towards the use of force. The “war on terror” has seeped into the fabric of American public life like meth fumes into drywall. The percolation of military surplus equipment through the country’s police forces and the natural tendency of police departments to hire veterans mean that many Americans are overseen by organisations whose military ethos has hardened in recent years. So warrior cops put on their body armour and aim sniper rifles at Ferguson protestors, because that’s what they were trained to do in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What are the police defending? Public order, of course. But in Ferguson it turns out that the police department has also been acting as a revenue-generating arm of the tinpot local government, unlawfully extracting value from the largely black citizenry in the form of fines, fees and court costs. It is a model replicated elsewhere in the country. Delinquents get sent into one of an archipelago of prisons, operated on a for-profit basis, where further value can be extracted from them, in the form of cheap labour or by charging for “offender services” such as meals, phone calls and accommodation. Of course, felons don’t get the vote, and vigorous state-level campaigns of voter suppression also help whittle down the black electorate. Alabama just passed a law requiring voters to show ID at the polling booth – then the Republican governor shut down offices that issue drivers’ licenses in 31 majority-black counties. In a nation so entranced by the spectacle of its own democracy, this requires a special kind of cynicism.
Systematic racism against black Americans is not just a problem of “the south”, old or new. A New Jersey mortgage lender has just paid a $33m settlement for “redlining”, or choking off finance to black homebuyers, a practice crucial in forming America’s ghettoes, and which I thought had been eradicated 30 years ago. Which state has the most segregated school system in the US? New York.
Yesterday my son’s pre-school wrote to us about its new “anti-bias curriculum”. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, it seems so inadequate to the task in hand. It is surely a good thing to teach Brooklyn toddlers to be respectful to each other, but the creature is vast and it has many heads, and the demand for civility can be fully accommodated in a system that is still viciously unequal, which is to say that we can all be as polite as we like and people are still going to die. Americans are culturally averse to any explanation not based on the feelings and doings of the sovereign individual. Unfortunately, before he gets to right this particular wrong and ride into the sunset, the American hero will have to think about the ways in which he belongs to structures and groups. He will have to remember things he wants to forget, and see things he has tried, for a very long time, not to see.
