Monday, June 22, 2015

Layers of ugliness


I am about to start something I feel inadequate for. I need to write about race.

When I am not writing about political and social issues, I am still thinking about them, but I always feel like there is more to know, and other people are saying the relevant things. I didn't think I had anything to say about Rachel Dolezal. I felt like I did need to say something about McKinney. Then I waited, and something much worse happened.

So I'm just going to try and say what I feel I need to say, and hope that it can be helpful to someone. Before Charleston I thought there would be six posts; now I don't know. I was going to start with layers of ugliness though, and that still feels right.

The picture was ugly. Seeing a cop straddling a black teenage girl in a swimsuit was ugly. Seeing the video, where he manhandled her, where he ordered her to get down when she was already down - no, she needed to be face-down - and seeing her friends try to help and be chased off with a gun, and knowing how easily it could have ended up with them dead, all of that was sickening.

It's been a while since I've mentioned this, but one of my big wake up calls to racism was reading stories about street harassment, and seeing that when you are white, it starts later and is less likely to involve touching. There aren't the same boundaries in place for women of color, especially if they're black. There is a long racist history going back to slavery for why that is. A lot of these problems have a long racist history.

(That's one of the things that made me mad with Dolezal's deception - she did not have to put up with that when she was a blonde freckled child.)

I was disturbed by picture and video. It was clear that the officer was out of control. Even his fellow officers made him put his weapon down and were able to speak to the other kids peacefully. That's nice, but they still didn't make Casebolt get off of the girl. They were too accepting of his violation as well.

That was ugly enough, but then I was reading more about how it started, and it got worse. Some kids of multiple races are having a party, and some white people say "Go back to Section 8 housing." That is an insult, and unfair, and offense was taken, including by one of the white kids who started getting lectured about the company she keeps. When a black friend defends her, the black friend gets slapped.

That's uglier. There is open racism, the assumption of poverty based on skin color, and physical violence, again with no boundaries respected on behalf of a black girl. It got worse.


Section 8 housing has a history in McKinney. There is a highway running through the town. To the East, McKinney is 49 percent white; to the West, 86 percent white. There have been lawsuits and blocks to prevent any affordable housing from going up on the West side, you know, because that brings in black people. (Even though there were residents at the party who lived there and were black, and there are plenty of white people in Section 8 housing.)

There are no public pools on the East side.

It gets uglier going past there too. America has a long history of not allowing black people to swim, from pouring bleach in pools to filling them with cement to selling them to private clubs - anything to prevent having to share that space.


Many black people don't learn how to swim. That probably raised the death toll from Hurricane Katrina.

There were people reminiscing on Twitter about not being able to swim, or how their parents made them learn to swim. One person wrote "Swimming feels like freedom," but it's a freedom that often isn't available enough.

The deeper you look, the worse it gets. Get used to that.

We still need to look.

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