Godfrey's Guide

A COALITION OF RACIST CONFRONTATION ...
HAS ONCE AGAIN COME BACK TO AMERICA in the form of a white police officer shooting an unarmed African- American man.  This time in a small Missouri town.  The young man died while making an attempt to raise his hands in the air in an act of surrender, when 5 bullets hammered into his body and 1 hurtled into the top  of his skull, instantaneously causing his death.  That was when the outrage began.  Police wearing body-armor now roamed the streets, shooting rubber bullets at the protesters. When that failed to work, canisters of teargas were shot at them and at TV cameras filming all of it, journalists were cuffed and placed under arrest, molotov cocktails were thrown, shops were set ablaze by flash-bombs, a police officer threatened to kill a protester with a semi-automatic rifle aimed directly at the man's chest; and when all of that was botched in an attempt to quell the protest, the Missouri National Guard was called-in by the Governor of the State.  The town immediately filled with incoherent indignation and uncontrollable fear.

  This peculiar American capacity for anger seems to be without limit. And it is not only a matter of the anger of white-against-black or black-against-white.  Millions of women claim to be the victims of men, while men cite alimony laws and stake claims to their own status as victims of feminist hypocrisy.  The American day seems to begin with one long and penetrating cry: Look what they have done to us!  And they are  Catholics or Protestants or Jews, liberals or conservatives, northerners or southerners, members of the NAACP or the NRA, which often seems to be an illustration of Jean Paul Sartre's that Hell is other people.  In the end, all adherents of victimism have a few things in common.  They are full of self-loathing, despise their jobs and their wives, their husbands or kids or dogs, the city in which they now live and the town into which they were born, the politicians who disagree with them, people of a different color, and almost all foreigners.  

  As a case in point, not too many years ago, I was on a New York City bus listening to several black men talk about a photograph of Denzel Washington on the cover of Parade Magazine.  "What does that friggin' pretty boy know about bein' down an' out?" one of them said.  Another joined in, then a third and a fourth, soon the familiar rap was flowing.   They'd drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black, or poor and luckless, and therefore never had a chance in a World They Never Made.  Their fathers had run off when they were kids, or their mothers, or their girlfriends.  They'd been locked up by bad cops, beaten up or flunked out or abused by Army sergeants or heartless welfare investigators or cruel bosses.  It was then that one of them saw me looking at them.  He stared at me for a long moment.  I could see the hatred in his eyes.  And then slowly, almost as a matter of duty, he gave me the finger and asked, "What th' fuck are you lookin' at, white boy?"  I departed the bus at the very next stop. 
 

  And now, in Ferguson, Missouri, a town of 21 thousand, the blacks are filled with the same dread and dismay I felt on that bus so many years ago, only this time it is the fear of whites and what we stand for, so much so that they now are overwhelmed with alarm and panic at the mere sight of a white cop: Alarm for their lives and panic for the lives of their children and grandchildren.  This is a darker, more dangerous aspect to victimism.  It can be used as a license.  Like a white cop who shoots first and asks questions later, and a young man of 18 by the name of Michael Brown, who then lay dead in the street with only a sheet covering his corpse for 5 long hours before the ambulance came to take him to the morgue. 


  I am not sure  when or exactly why - racism has, once again, become a way of life; a  scenario which goes back to the State of Mississippi in 1958, when a 14 year-old boy by the name of Emmett Till was murdered for theoretically flirting and whistling at a white woman.  His eyes were gouged out and he was beaten to death, his body was then tossed into the Tallahatchie River;   then came Trayvon Martin, who was shot to death by George Zimmerman in 2012 in the State of Florida, simply because he was an African-American and Mister Zimmerman said that he was afraid of him, so Zimmerman Stood His Ground, and slaughtered the young man; and now, Michael Brown, assassinated by a white police officer named Darren Wilson, has been added to that rather disgusting list.  By all accounts Michael Brown was far from a saint.  He was, in fact, reputed to be a minor criminal; yet I cannot help but wonder what Officer Wilson's wiggle-room  excuse for the senseless slaughter of another unarmed African-American man will  turn out to be? 



  I also pause to wonder if there will ever again be a splendid exchange between the Black and the White on American soil: Hemingway for Alex Haley, Joyce for Satchmo Armstrong, O'Casey for James Baldwin, Mantle for Willie Mays; each celebrating our heritage and sharing it with one another in the simple faith of appreciation for each other and and the cultural traditions of our past?  Perhaps then, our Nation would have less adolescent posturing and gnashing of teeth, and more optimism and bawdy horselaughs shared with one another in the face of adversity.  And then in may be possible that there will be no more lifeless bodies of unarmed young men,  who lay dead on a street due only to the color of their skin...