Forman cites example after example of prominent black political figures using some of the dehumanizing language that we’ve since come to associate with the racist overtones of law and order politics writ large. D.C. mayor Marion Barry railed against the “drug thugs and gun thugs,” while Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson said those sowing fear in his neighborhoods had to be “hunted down like dogs.”
As crime hit historic highs, black people were terrified (in many neighborhoods for the most rational reasons), and white people were terrified (often completely out of proportion to the threat).
Because control over the machinery of the state in almost all places remained in the hands of an overwhelmingly white elite, a perverse form of “half-a-loaf” legislative compromise emerged during this period. Yes, black citizens, leaders, clergy, activists, and politicians in predominantly black neighborhoods recognized a crisis, and yes, they were demanding solutions. But the solutions they were demanding were full spectrum—more police and more jobs—while the solutions they got were entirely punitive.
In the fight over the 1994 crime bill, the NAACP excoriated the initial draft for its lack of investment in urban communities. The Congressional Black Caucus proposed its own alternative, with $5 billion more in funding for drug treatment and early intervention programs. But Republicans demagogued on the small amount of social spending in the Senate Democrats’ version of the bill, railing against midnight basketball programs as a government subsidy for hooligans. The bill then lost an additional $2.5 billion in social spending, but left in place billions for prisons and a long list of punitive measures.
This process was repeated in statehouses and city halls across the country: black people asked for social investment and got SWAT teams, asked for full employment and got gang units, asked for protection and got “stop and frisk.” White fear absorbed and appropriated black fear. Thanks to what scholars call “selective hearing,” black fear, combined with white political power, produced a state committed to managing and punishing black and brown subjects rather than empowering and protecting them.
As Mariame Kaba, a prison abolition activist, wrote of arguments that African Americans were a significant constituency calling for getting tougher on crime and harsher punitive measures: “to say Black people wanted this too belies [the] fact that Blacks in the U.S. are AMERICANS. Americans LOVE punishment.”
YEARS AGO, DURING A backpacking trip through South America, I was sitting in a café in a small town in Argentina, a few kilometers from one of the world’s most beautiful waterfalls, marking the border with Brazil. My wife and I struck up a conversation with a fair-skinned man in his fifties. He was handsome and slightly aristocratic with a gray ponytail, and as he dramatically pulled drags off his cigarette, he spoke to the two young gringos in world-weary tones about the country just over the border “In Brazil,” he said, “life is cheap. Especially among los negros.”
What differentiates white fear as a social and political force from the fear felt by an individual—white or black, Latino or Asian, immigrant or native born—is the belief structure, often implicit and almost never articulated, in which that fear rests. If life across the border is cheap, if violence is routine and tragedy a habit, then, the logic goes, “they” don’t experience fear the same way. On the other hand, “we”—the collective social we, we the people who have relative privilege, the hardworking (white) folks, who have come so far, who are so upstanding and special, should not have to fear. Sure in the ghettos, it’s scary, but for them fear is just part of life. It’s easier for them.
In 2015, a few days after the unrest in Baltimore, I stood outside city hall with three young men from the Westside. They grew up in Freddie Gray’s neighborhood, and two lived there still. The third man, the oldest of the group, had managed, after a stint in prison, to move out to the suburbs. They’d spent the day delivering groceries and goods to seniors in a housing development in the neighborhood at the heart of the unrest. They chuckled as they watched my TV live shot, and we struck up a conversation. Over the next forty minutes they reeled off a list of acts of violence and crime that they had witnessed or been victims of. The tally seemed incomprehensible. The youngest of them had had his sister taken from him when she was fourteen in a brutal murder on the Baltimore public transit. The other two had lost best friends, cousins, and uncles. And then the oldest man described the sheer ecstatic relief of his new life in the suburbs. “I can breathe,” I remember him saying. “Just sit outside and breathe.”
Later that year, after homicides spiked by 63 percent in Baltimore in 2015, a barber told my producer that twenty people whose hair had been cut in his shop had been murdered. Discussions of death had become “like saying, you know, ‘I brushed my teeth this morning,’ ” because the onslaught had become so routine. “That’s all we talk about.”
Opponents of Black Lives Matter protesters often make a strange, disingenuous pivot. They cite the devastation that violent crime wreaks among black Americans as a rebuttal to the claim that police are killing black people. But violent deaths at the hands of the police and those at the hands of gang members don’t exist in some kind of competition. They are two sides of the same coin. When those outside the Colony point with derision at the violence within it to justify its continued existence, they reinforce how undervalued black lives are.