During Derek Chauvin’s trial, I’ve heard from many good friends about racism in America and how officer Chauvin showed no signs of racial bias in his treatment of George Floyd. To a person, these friends are white/white passing conservative Christians, folk who live in a predominately white world, who’s ears are bent to narratives that lean decidedly to the right. Anything leaning the other way is quickly dismissed, leaving the other side of the story, and anything that might challenge their own, abandoned.
I do this too, by the way. We all do. The last thing our tortured souls need in this pandemic chapter is the idea that we might be wrong about something. It feels good to feel right, like there’s an entire cross-section of American culture that’s lost its mind, in need of our wisdom and guidance.
And let’s not forget that, for Christian America, “Feeling” right is often more important than “being” right.
So, before I get too sanctimonious, let me confess that my ideas and perspectives could also use some objectivity.
On the other side of the coin, I spent most of my adult life as a white, conservative, southern evangelical Christian, formally trained in theology at one of America’s most conservative evangelical seminaries. I know fairly well the conservative Christian mind, and lived for many years under the values that support it. I know what the Capitol rioters were thinking on January 6th, and why, when white people riot, the conservative mind sees a much more “understandable” and far less criminial gathering than, say, that of a George Floyd protest.
I also know that this particular branch of Christianity is too segregated — ethnically, politically, culturally — to have any compassion for the plight of folk outside of their camp, or to listen to any perspective that leans non-evangelical. This is one of segregation’s most significant legacies; to keep us and our minds separated from any perspectives that might suggest a different narrative.
The process of unsegregating my life — to a degree — has helped me to see a bit beyond my own boundaries, and exposed a different facet of racism’s past and present predicament. I was ready for this — to a degree — having lived in a hipster urban context for a few years, with plenty of challenging conversations and awkward encounters that forced me into realizing that I’m not always right. I’ve had multiple conversations about race, sexual orientation, abortion, et al. that I never had in my years of living in Arkansas, or Lubbock, or the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex.
So maybe I’ve earned a bit of holier-than-them sanctimony this morning. I’ve had hundreds of face-to-face, very personal encounters while representing both sides of this fence, now ready to spew my perspective, once again, and offer an invitation into some level of the only thing that can heal our rapidly unraveling united states:
Listening.
I’ve said this before: if we’ve never sat across from a fellow human and listened with great intent to a very different side of the race story, to the point where we can articulate and defend, the truth has escaped us.
To that, I’ll offer some facts and opinions about the George Floyd arrest, along with the general state of things, that have managed to escape conservative dialogue.
If you think that what follows is going to have holes in it, you’re right, but that doesn’t make it an unworthy journey.
First, officer Chavin is not on trial for racism, he’s on trial for murder, and rightly so, as full body cam footage of the George Floyd encounter will attest. It’s awful to watch, by the way, not just because it portrays a man slowly dying under the knee of a police officer, but because this officer was invited, twice, by one his partners, to turn Floyd over; a safe and simple act that would have saved his life.
Floyd was face down, subdued, no longer fighting, but Chauvin saw fit to keep him on his face, knee to neck, for a further nine minutes.
Why? Was he angry at Floyd? Angry in general? Racist? Stupid?
What causes one human being to treat another like an animal?
The narrative among many of my conservative friends is that Floyd would still be alive today if he a) hadn’t been on Fentanyl, b) hadn’t passed a counterfeit bill, and c) hadn’t resisted arrest. What idiot would argue that? If Floyd had instead decided to be an “upstanding” citizen and do what he’s told when the cops show up, like the rest of us do, he’d still be around. Unfortunately, as this narrative goes, he chose to put himself in a bad place, and he chose to resist arrest.
The message is clear: make the right choices, like us fine white Christian folk do, and you get to live.
This ignores the fact that, if you’re white and make the same choices George Floyd did, as whites often do, your chances of survival go way up (see this Yale perspective and do the math on this Statista data).
There seems to be no evidence that Blacks resist arrest more frequently than whites, or better, that Blacks choose to give police a harder time than whites do. Numerically speaking, whites are arrested more frequently and/or have more encounters with police than Blacks. As this report suggests (again, numerically), whites resist more frequently.
The data that I’ve laid eyes on leaves me questioning: why such disparity in deaths when the police get involved?
Here’s another facet of this problem that frequently gets passed over by the “Blacks just need to get their shit together” crowd.
If I were to take generations of your family and incarcerate them at the levels that we incarcerate Blacks, it would crush the backbone of your family structure and inject an unthinkable level of trauma into your very DNA (see this article on the epigenetics of trauma). On top of that, if you and your community were placed square in the middle of a system that ensures a smaller paycheck, higher unemployment rates, higher incarceration rates, and the law enforcement disparities I mention above, things would get much more complicated.
How easy would it be for you to stay away from drugs, or out of jail, much less do what you’re told when the armed ambassadors of this system tell you to submit?
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that there’s no data to back up the idea that law enforcement, for example, is skewed in favor of whites. The Bureau of Justice Statistics provides arrest data for the past 20 years (you can play around with their arrest data tool here, then do a quick search for BJS incarceration data by year). According to this, whites do more crime, including drugs and violence, while Blacks serve more time. You can argue my interpretation of the data if you like, but, sorry, there’s data, and you shouldn’t poo poo it until you’ve spent some time under its tutelage.
Another nauseatingly simple example would be the unemployment statistics that we’ve been tracking for the past 60 years. These clearly indicate that Black unemployment is always 2x that of white. Why? Blacks are more educated, resourced, empowered, and motivated than they’ve ever been.
The answer is simple: we’d still rather hire whites. They’re the first to be hired in an economic upturn and last to be fired when things go south.
It’s one thing to be ignorant of the mountain of evidence that supports mass incarceration and the other disparities we’ve talked about this morning. It’s another thing to choose to ignore it, especially since we’re preaching at the Black community about making right choices.
I’ll offer one more fact about racism in America, one that would change everything if we could manage to admit to it, and one that comes to bear on Derek Chauvin’s alleged racism.
We’re beginning to open a dialogue on systemic racism, even at church, and that’s great. But we utterly and categorically refuse to deal with racism at the personal level. We’re not going to ask, am I racist? And because we’re so segregated, there’s nothing to draw our personal racism out into the open, nothing to challenge America’s personal racism problem.
On this, we choose to look the other way, and rightfully so: it’s not unlike a gun being pointed in your face. Who wouldn’t resist?
But if we don’t have the faith or courage to face our own racism, how can we be the ones who decide that Derek Chauvin was simply “doing his job,” that race had nothing to do with his choices? As someone who’s recently come to grips with his own racial bias, and the bias of his church, I’m not convinced.
The only thing that would compel me to treat another human being like an animal is the belief that there’s something about them that isn’t human.
Why don’t Black people do what the police tell them to do? I think that they’ve come to believe that too many of us, including our police officers, see the Black community with the same eyes.
Photo Credit: Clay Banks at Unsplash
