These rumors were all nonsense—definitively false, as established by the medical examiner. But they were almost desperate attempts to will away the obvious fact that Gray’s death was an injustice. The idea that he was an innocent victim did not compute. Even in death he was presumed guilty, because he had been a denizen of the Colony, and c’mon, everyone there is guilty of something. Or in the infamous words used to describe Michael Brown, “he was no angel.” In the popular imagination, the Colony is a land that doesn’t breed angels.
To deny Freddie Gray his innocence is part of the machinery of repression that makes white fear so potent. Along with causing the Nation to undervalue the lives of those in the Colony, white fear also expresses the forbidden knowledge that all white people carry with them: We’ve got it better. And if white people have it better, then isn’t it only logical that black people will try to come and take what they have?
“They were coming downtown from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance,” famed New York newspaper columnist Pete Hamill wrote of the group of young black men who had allegedly gang-raped and beaten a white woman jogging in Central Park in 1989.
They were coming from a land with no fathers. . . . They were coming from the anarchic province of the poor. And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teeming with the violent images of the streets and the movies, they had only one goal: to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.
Of course, the “they” in Hamill’s column turned out to be innocent. The story of marauding black and Latino teens in the white precincts of Central Park raping and pillaging was nothing more than a dark urban fairy tale (though that was only definitively established after five innocent young men had done a collective fifty years in prison).
Hamill’s column was by no means an outlier. In fact, for a long stretch of my late childhood and adolescence, such rhetoric was more or less the default register of the New York media. “They”—the black and brown subjects of the Colony, the denizens of the “anarchic province of the poor”—are angry and wild and uncivilized and are coming for us, to take what “we” have.
White fear emanates from knowing that white privilege exists and the anxiety that it might end. No matter how many white people tell pollsters that “today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks” (60 percent of the white working class in one poll), we know that this story of antiwhite bias is not true. But we do know that having it “better” isn’t permanent, that it could collapse. We know equality might someday come, and it might mean giving up one’s birthright or, more terrifyingly, having it taken away. That perhaps our destiny is indeed a more equal society, but one where equality means equal misery, a social order where all the plagues of the “ghetto” escape past its borders and infect the population at large.
PETE HAMILL WASN’T FEAR-MONGERING on his own—he was involved in something bigger than himself. White fear is a collaborative production. A crowd can act in wild, terrifying, ecstatic ways, far beyond the cruelty of a single individual. Similarly, white fear is a collective experience: it is greater than the sum of its parts. It is neither a pure, organic, grassroots expression of the people, nor simply a construction of demagogues and elite guardians of white racial hierarchy. It is cultivated through a kind of call-and-response between speaker and crowd, between politicians and voters, between media and audience.
I understand this process far, far better now than I ever have. For several years I have worked in an industry that frankly thrives on fear. The job of TV news is to grab the attention of the viewer, and the most effective way to do so is to reach out through the screen, past the frontal cortex of the brain, the area of higher reasoning and consciousness, and straight down into the brainstem, where the most ancient, animalistic survival instincts hum and pulse. We are wired to identify threats, not to process statistics. And when it’s your job to grab attention, you learn to trigger those threat neurons over and over. We mash the keys until they’re worn out.
So, to take just one example: during the great Ebola panic of 2014, only one person died in the United States, but a poll in November of that year found Americans identifying it as a more urgent priority than any other disease, “including cancer or heart disease, which together account for nearly half of all U.S. deaths each year.” In fact, in a typical year more Americans are literally killed by their own furniture than are killed by terrorists, but when you ask them, they will tell you they are far more scared of terrorism than of nearly any other threat.
In fact, if you look at the American obsession with crime and then terrorism, you see a kind of crossfade between the two: in the aftermath of 9/11, as the War on Terror ramped up, the American obsession with crime began to wane.
Recent history can account for this shift. Law and order and the War on Drugs were a reaction to the real and genuinely scary escalation of crime, a reaction that dissipated as crime came down. Then the War on Terror was a reaction to a horrifying, unprecedented event: the 9/11 attacks and subsequent attacks by Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups such as ISIS. This story is on its face true.
But it’s also easy to see, in the smooth segue between these fixations, the churning neuroses of white fear seeking their expression, looking for the next threat to guard against and subdue. Sometimes the threats are on the frontier, sometimes in the fieldhouse, sometimes in the adjacent neighborhood, and sometimes in the dark men plotting halfway around the world. Certain people outside our borders—literal or metaphorical—wish to do us harm, and they must be brought to heel. George H. W. Bush beat the Massachusetts liberal Michael Dukakis by deploying terrifying images of Willie Horton; his son beat another Massachusetts liberal with images of the Twin Towers falling.