Unfortunately, racism exists in this country, but the overuse of manufactured narratives belies real cases of racism, causing many people to tune out. The real issues cannot be addressed if false accusations continue to gain prevalence in society. In most cases the overblown and even false accusations of racism result from a combination of ignoring other factors, misunderstanding police actions, and deliberately creating false narratives.
Several examples follow that will show the problems in immediately blaming something on racism. The most recent example is of a black child who had the police called on her by a white woman for selling water. This has been linked to a case in Oakland where a white woman called the police on several black individuals for barbecuing in a so-called restricted area. These incidents immediately became a rallying cry for accusers of racism. Yet, part of analyzing issues includes dispassionately considering other options.
The woman who called the police on the child selling water said that the child and her mom were screaming loudly to the point that the women in the nearby office building couldn’t work. This is probably a poor excuse from a lousy human being, but it’s not automatically racism.
When considering the story of the group barbecuing, anybody who lives in a community with an HOA has experience getting hassled over minor issues ranging from a weed on their lawn to their garish Christmas decorations, and it happens to people of every color. Another explanation might be that this is a case of somebody being incredibly annoying and overzealous in trying to enforce park rules about barbecuing.
So my little cousin was selling water and didn't have a permit so this lady decided to call the cops on an 8 year old. #PermitPatty pic.twitter.com/SiL61pnAgl
— la madrina 🕷 (@_ethiopiangold) June 23, 2018
Another fairly recent case involved a manager at Starbucks calling the police on two black men in Philadelphia. In my lifetime, I’ve been asked to leave a business twice. I thought both instances were fairly ridiculous, but ultimately, I didn’t want to spend my money at a business that treated me that way anyway. Both times, I left without accusing the establishments of racism, or any other bias besides thinking the employee that asked me to leave was a jerk.
But if I refused the order I would have had the police called on me and been trespassed from the restaurant. So, I naturally thought the accusations towards Starbucks were specious. The manager was likely undertrained or being a jerk, wanted the space for paying customers, or might even have been truly racist, but this still doesn’t make the incident an emblem of the new civil rights movement. Being unfairly treated at a restaurant is not the exclusive domain of minorities.
The next category comes from incidents where a misunderstanding of police efforts and use of force generates accusations of racism. A recent study found that over 99 percent of service calls were responded to by police without using any force. Of those that did result in a use of force being employed, the vast majority of people arrested sustained minor or no injuries, which argues against the claims of police brutality. Yet the police are often hamstrung in enforcing the law, and then judged by an out-of-context cell phone video.
For example, the Harvard police are not allowed to use non-lethal means to subdue a perpetrator, such as tasers. Thus, when the police encountered a naked man high on drugs near campus, they had few options. They could have cordoned off the area until the man sobered up, but that would have disrupted thousands of people for hours.
They instead chose to arrest the suspect before he injured himself or others. They used appropriate force including some body blows to weaken the man’s resistance to being handcuffed. But the cell phone video of a black man being tackled by four officers and getting punched became a politicized example of police brutality, despite the justification behind why those tactics were employed.
A final example is the case of the leader of the NAACP in South Carolina, Reverend Jared Moultrie, who said that police pulled him over for driving while black in a nice neighborhood. But police body-camera footage reveals that the officer was incredibly polite and stated that he pulled over Moultrie for failing to signal his left turn. This is a minor infraction that results in police stops all over the country. The Reverend seemed so much more interested in his racial narrative, feeling like the victim, getting the officer in trouble, or whatever, that he essentially made up claims of racism.
Not every case is as blatant as Moultrie’s fake hate crime, and sadly there are still cases of real racism. But these stories combined with out-of-context cell phone videos that ignore proper police procedure make very potent political narratives. The activists that wield them often gain and often that gain is a lucrative career for their activism.
Politicians who repeat them get to relive the civil rights movement, defeat their political opponents, and ram through funding for social programs and changes that often benefit the activists who have stoked (created) the issues in the first place. The potent combination makes it popular with segments of the population, but it doesn’t make them the moral leaders of the movement, or even factually correct. This is why it is important to really evaluate any instances where an individual is accused of racism.
