Wesley Lowery
Little, Brown and Company
2016
248 pp
I moved from Canada to live in a small American town situated within an hour and a half drive of a major northern city. For two years I lived there and almost immediately upon my arrival I was exposed to racism. As a white Canadian I was treated well, even though my neighbors detected the accent of an outsider when I spoke, even though I was there to occupy a professional position that could have been staffed by a US citizen. My exposure to American racism under these circumstances only came in the form of invitations to participate in racial prejudice as townsfolk warned me about the Mexican families on my street or the black gangs that operated in town. Very quickly I realized that the general presumption was that all Mexicans were in the US illegally and all young black men were gang members. Small towns in the area that were only 80-90 percent white according to the most recent census data were spoken of as being overrun, or dominated by racial minorities.
While I witnessed racial prejudice on a daily basis, expressions of explicit racial hatred were rare. When I left the US, I left with an understanding that racial prejudice is very common in American society and systemic racism is a very real component of its structure, but also very few White Americans would consider themselves racist. My assumption is that the friendly Americans I met, with their friendly warnings to be careful with all the gangs (in a town with pretty close to 0 violent crimes but with about %10 black population) wouldn't consider their view of black men as gang members to be racist, its merely cautious realism, because to them real racism is using the 'n' word. Conversely, to many Americans real racism is raising race as an issue in a world where segregation and slavery and the most explicitly racist American systems are ancient history.
Wesley Lowery, a Washington Post correspondent, tells the story of covering the emerging Black Lives Matter movement, right from the day after Mike Brown's murder in Ferguson MO, where Lowery made a name for himself by being the first journalist arrested by Ferguson PD. I remember at the time of the Brown murder, images of Brown scowling at the camera (although some were captioned as Mike Brown but were clearly someone else) were circulating through social media as a way of legitimizing his killing. Lowery's story goes from Feruson to Baltimore post Freddie Gray, and other sites of police killing to note the rise of a new 'Racial Justice Movement'. This is the first book I've read that's clearly about Black Lives Matter, as other BLM media indirectly addresses the movement, such as Lezlie McFadden's (Michael Brown's mother) 2016 memoir and the excellent Netflix Luke Cage series.
No comments:
Post a Comment