The image put round the world reinforces the worst prejudices.
It's very, very hard not to succumb to those prejudices.
I was not racially prejudiced before I moved back to New Orleans in 1975. Somehow managed to avoid picking it up. Then struggled with it for years.
Finally what helped was the realization that the people causing the problems were ones who grew up in chaotic environments, and would probably never be able to overcome that upbringing.
This came about during an event I've mentioned several times before on SI, riding one night with an NOPD police officer around my old neighborhood. This annual event was organized by Oliver Houck, who used to be a Justice Department Prosecutor, taught Constitutional Criminal Procedure to freshmen law students, and runs the environmental law department.
His theory was that, growing up in privileged environments, Tulane law students would not understand the challenges that the police face when adhering to all the restrictions put on them by the law.
By a fortuitous coincidence, I rode with one black female cop, whose beat included the St. Thomas Housing Project, where I lived for several years as a young child.
She showed me the neighborhood -- when I was there, it was all white, called the Irish Channel, mixed blue collar Irish, German, Italian, and Southern white trash. (My dad was a full time dental school student and my Catholic parents had three kids, so despite the fact that my mother was a secretary, we qualified to live there.)
Now it was all black. She told me that two weeks earlier, she had taken six or eight children out of that apartment. They were alone, no adults. No food. Urine soaked mattresses on the floor, no sheets, no towels, no toilet paper, they were wiping themselves with their hands, and wiping their hands on the walls.
Why did they live like that? I mean, why did their parents leave them like that? I have no idea. But I clearly saw that they were not likely to grow up to become police officers themselves. It's not a black thing, it's something else.
The city is something like 80% black. There are black educators, black business owners, black lawyers, black judges, black doctors, black nurses, black cops, you name it, anything a black man or woman wants to do, they can do. Nobody stops them.
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Coda: when I was a kid in the St. Thomas Project, there was a family there of what we so politely called back then "poor white trash". My mother would not let us play with them. They had filthy habits, like picking up food that they dropped on the ground and eating it, or picking their noses, etc.. Runny noses all the time, and I mean bubbling snot, their mother never wiped it. We kids called them "the germ-eaters."
I doubt they grew up to be police officers, either. Or if they did, the changes along the way were something.
I think what shocks people who live in other countries is that the USA is so rich, so how can we have such pathetic, repulsive poor people?
Not the "deserving poor," the ones who want to work but can't, but the nasty in-your-face ones that refuse to work, would rather loaf and steal.
You can't blame it all on Johnson and the "Great Society", I lived next door to the germ-eaters in the 1950's.
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Coda two: I suspect that a high percentage of the worst of the worst have sub-standard IQs. |
