by Noel Ignatiev
A white NYC lawyer threatened to call ICE against two restaurant workers speaking Spanish on the job.
A white woman called police against black people having a BBQ in an Oakland park.
A white graduate student at Yale called campus police on a black woman napping in her dormโs common room.
A white Philadelphia Starbucks employee called police on two black men waiting for a friend. A Latino customer found a racial slur written on his coffee cup.
A white woman in Memphis called police on a black real estate investor inspecting a house.
A white woman in Rialto, California called police on several black people checking out an airbnb, says they failed to wave to her.
Two Native American teens on a tour of Colorado State University were briefly detained by police after the white parent of another prospective student called police because she said they made her โnervous.”
The white co-owner of a golf course in Pennsylvania called the police on a group of black women, accusing them of playing too slowly.
A white employee of a gym in Seacaucus, NJ, told two black men, one of whom is a gym member, that they must leave or pay, sparking allegations of racial profiling.
The above incidents were taken from the press and social media, where some of them have received thousands of hits and shares. Most of the complainants were white women; let readers make of that what they wilI. In the Yale and Oakland cases, commenters made much of the advanced degrees of the complainants, revealing the commentersโ surprise that โeducatedโ whites could be โracists.โ
Every incident was the act of an individual, not an institution.
There have been several reactions:
The lawyer was expelled from his office. Thousands showed up outside his home to denounce him with a mariachi party.
Oakland officers wrote a report but issued no citations, madeย no arrests and allowed the barbecue to continue. Oakland residents held a huge cookout on the same site on May 10.
Yale campus police told the woman who called not to bother them with non-police business.
Starbucks shut down all its stores nationwide for sensitivity training and announced a new policy permitting people to sit there and use the rest rooms even if they do not make a purchase. (Were the sensitivity training sessions compulsory? Were employees paid for attending them? Did their pay include tips? Were black employees included?)
Memphis police told the woman who complained about the real estate investor, โYouโre going to let him do what heโs going to do. Listen to meโ if you try to do anything to stop him, Iโm going to take you to jail.โ
Officials at Colorado State apologized. The woman who called the police said she felt โridiculous.โ
The fitness chain apologized and promised to improve staff training.
Officers who came to the golf course determined it wasn’t a police matter and left. The women eventually left on their own and no charges were filed. The owner of the course apologized to the women the next day.
Several incidents took place at Waffle House restaurants: in Nashville, a gunman killed four young โpeople of colorโ before being stopped by an unarmed customer; In Saraland, Alabama a Waffle House employee called the police after a patron allegedly complained about customer service. The police tackled the patron, a black woman, “placing a hand on her throat and exposing her breasts,” and threatened to break her arm. In Pinson, Alabama a black customer said she was locked outside of a Waffle House while the restaurant continued to serve white customers.ย In Warsaw, N.C. police officers choked a 22-year-old black man who was at a Waffle House after taking his 16 year-old-sister to her high school prom. The incident was sparked by an employee calling the police after the patron allegedly complained about customer service. All that within two weeks. Assuming all the reports are accurate, that is not so many when the number of Waffle House restaurants (more than two thousand nationwide, mainly in the south), is taken into account. The incidents have sparked a call for a nationwide boycott. There appears to be something special about Waffle House; see the article from Eater (https://www.eater.com/2017/5/2/15471798/waffle-house-history-menu). Maybe Waffle House will introduce sensitivity training; one can only imagine how that would go over with its largely southern workforce, black and white, drawn from different social strata from the workforce at Starbucks.
Even counting Waffle House, of the millions of daily interactions in which whites serve black people (and the other way around), the vast majority go off with a courteous smile and a thank you, maโamโor at least without the calling out of the police.
Why does a single โracistโ act attract more attention than the millions of everyday exchanges where โnothing happenedโ? Perhaps the answer lies in the old adage, dog bites man is not news, man bites dog is news. Being a glass-half-empty sort of person, I have to say, nah, it canโt be that.
Not only do reports of bad (or allegedly bad) behavior on the part of whites crowd out stories of people going about their daily routines without incident, a single โracistโ act gets more attention and discussion than a study showing the persistence of inequality in housing, employment, health care and the criminal justice system. Why are people more interested in the retail than in the wholesale?
Many of those reading this column have seen Raoul Peckโs film about James Baldwin, โI am Not Your Negro.โ Baldwin was one of the clearest thinkers about the race problem in America, farsighted and bold. His writings have been important to me. The film is a good picture of Baldwinโs times. One emerges from it thinking not much has changed.
That would be a mistake: those who think everything has changed, and that the country has put the race problem behind itโa view heard less frequently since Trumpโs electionโare mistaken. Those who think that nothing important has changed since Baldwinโs times, that the country is as โracistโ as it ever was, are also mistaken. As usual, the truth does not lie someplace in between, but in a new synthesis.
As might be expected, the synthesis has something to do with class. In Baldwinโs time the task of subjugating black people was carried out by the mass of ordinary whites, in return for which they were socially defined as members of the dominant race. At that time the black โbourgeoisieโ (such as it was) played little role in keeping the masses down, and class divisions within the black community were relatively unimportant.
The triumph of the civil rights movement gave rise to a layer of black people, north and south, whose job is to administer the misery of the black poor, often in the name of โBlack Power.โ Black mayors, police chiefs, city councilmen, prison officials, superintendents of boards of education and welfare departments, heads of foundations now do the job once done by whites, who as a consequence have lost a great deal of their social function and the status attached to it.
The changes in the mechanisms of control are not limited to high-level administrators: many of the police in the black neighborhoods are black, along with social workers, schoolteachers, corrections officers, etc. It used to be that poor black people who went to the Social Security office or the DMV were insulted and humiliated by white clerks; now they are insulted and humiliated by black clerks.
The immiseration of the black poor and the existence of a privileged layer of black professionals in previously white spheres appear to be in conflict: How could such progress exist alongside such misery? There is a necessary connection between the two phenomena: neither could exist without the other; that is, without black faces behind desks, no force could stop the masses of black poor from tearing the country apart; and on the other hand, without the threat of the black poor there would be no black faces behind desks.
To understand the relationship between black progress and black genocide is the heart of class analysis today.
In Baldwinโs day the black community was the most advanced outpost of the new society, a society in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, and the black movement was implicitly oriented toward bringing that society into existence. I once asked a black women how she managed to keep from hating whites given how they had acted historically. Her answer: I was brought up to believe that we were put here by God to save this country, and therefore I could not give in to hate. I did not share her religious sensibility, but I recognized her commitment to bringing into existence a better world. That was the spirit that motivated a mighty movement.
Today, the black community does not exist, and what calls itself the black movement aims at removing every barrier to the full participation of professionals and entrepreneurs in the present society. Its slogan is, A piece of the pie, or, more crudely, Whereโs mine? The focus on โracistโ behavior on the part of individual whites (of which there is no shortage of examples) serves the agenda of professional civil rights activists, because it diverts attention from the system to individuals, who become the targets of never-ending efforts to reform them through โunlearning racismโ seminars and racial sensitivity training. In fact, if every white person reformed and all racial discrimination disappeared tomorrow, black people would continue to make up a disproportionate share of the poorest layers of society because of the sedimented effects of past racial discrimination: the person whose grandparents had access to a skilled trade or a college education has an advantage over the person whose grandparents walked behind a mule or a mop, and no โanti-racistโ program can address that reality. โAnti-racismโ is the ideology of a class of people who seek no alternative to the present systemโor who believe there is none, itโs the same thingโand those who act on it are like doctors who secretly love the disease they claim to be fighting.
One reason for their determination to scrutinize every inter-personal encounter between black people and whites may be insecurity; many reached their position through great sacrificeโstony the road they trodโand they fear losing it. These days, when the children of the white middle class are being pushed down into the proletariat and semi-proletariat, given the countryโs racial history, who can say what the future holds for the black middle class?
I referred earlier to the ordinary, everyday incidents in which โnothing happened.โ I was being ironic; there is never a time when nothing happens. I grew up and lived most of my life in the north: Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston (segregated all, and the last widely regarded as the most difficult city in the country for a black person to live). I had traveled a bit in the south, but never lived there. In 2009 I traveled by car to the Georgia and South Carolina Low Country, where I have spent part of every year since. Two things most impressed me: first, black men and women working on roadside construction projects operating heavy equipment, holding well-paying jobs once exclusively reserved for white men; second, the relations between black and white workers, especially in restaurants, where servers and cooks, black and white, male and female, inter-acted with an ease and comfort rare in the cold north. The epitome of this pattern was Waffle House.
Shortly after I landed I attended a gathering mostly of black musicians in a back yard in Jasper County, South Carolinaโsalmon croquettes, mac-and-cheese, collard greens, the usual. It got late and a neighbor (white?) called the police. Nothing happenedโbecause the mayor and chief of police were at the party. Meanwhile, Savannah, Georgia across the river resembles a northern city with its projects, drugs, gang wars and policeโunder a corrupt city administration headed by a black female mayor.
Nothing happened indeed! Notwithstanding their votes for Trump, their Confederate flags and their use of the bad word, not one in a thousand white Americans questions the presence of black men and women in those construction jobs. In Memphis (!) cops threaten to jail a white woman if she interferes with a black man carrying out his business. And when I am on the road I eat at Waffle House, for the ambience.
Photo: policewoman, Savannah, GA