Bucky Done Gun II

You can tell that a group of people has been designated to suffer when one of its members can be killed by police, not while committing crimes but while engaged in legal activities-- say, returning home from a bachelor party on the night before his wedding-- and none of the officers involved is found guilty. Try to imagine how a white community would react if one of its children was shot dead under similar circumstances, with a similar outcome. Try to imagine its reaction if such killings took place every few years and the outcome were always the same. Given the facts of the Bell case and the timing of the judge's verdict, the media finger-wagging over Jeremiah Wright is almost comically hypocritical. Never mind if the U.S. government conspired to give black people AIDS. It-- and, more demonstrably, state and local governments, including that of the most liberal city in the U.S.-- have fostered a climate in which it is permissable for cops to kill unarmed black men, if not by law then in fact. No conspiracy is necessary. All that's required is that the victims die and that there be no consequences.

In The Book of Calamities, I write that crime always entails a destruction of equality-- not social equality, necessarily, but the creaturely equality of beings who are universally subject to pain and death. "When one man kills another man, he declares that he is big and the other is small, is nothing. If the victim’s wife and children are forced to witness this, they too are made nothing. When a chemical plant discharges poison gas that wipes out a village, all its people are made nothing, and their annihilation is compounded when the officers of the chemical company are allowed to live on without consequence." (Trachtenberg, 175) This is true of judicial killings as well.

Few whites want to admit that racism still exists in this country. Part of the reason the Obama campaign inspired so much early excitement was because his victories seemed to signal that it had been definitively banished. So you can understand the shock and indignation that greeted revelations of Wright's sermons. In asserting that a racial double-standard still existed, and that African-Americans were angry about it, Wright challenged America's hopeful vision of itself. What happened next was that the black man was accused of racism, while Obama was accused of silently condoning racism because he had refused to denounce the reverend or storm out of his congregation. The candidate's ensuing speech on race was groundbreaking because it was the first time since the King era that a mainstream public figure had addressed the elephant in the living room. There are moments in history when the elephant is named, and they always raise the hope that it will then be driven outside where it belongs. But a number of individuals and organizations, beginning with the Clintons and including the Republican party and much of the news media, have made sure that the elephant remains in the living room. For the moment it is still visible in all its size and ponderousness, but already people are denying its presence or blaming that presence on cranky figures like Wright. But of course all of us are spattered with elephant shit.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/opinion/04rich.html?hp