![]() ![]() ![]() Jesse Jackson, one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders, when he spoke in 1993 about crime in the black community. The stereotype of the dangerous black man is burrowed so deep in our collective imagination that even many black Americans see black men as automatic threats.Ĭonsider this famous statement: “There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” Her father was called ‘the most dangerous racist in America.’ She wants a different legacy for her son.Black America is being hammered by a double pandemic.Coronavirus is bringing a plague of dangerous doomsday predictions.Am I racist? You may not like the answer.How ‘good White people’ derail racial progress.Trump called him ‘my African American.’ His life hasn’t been the same since.There is a body of work in literature and psychology that speaks to a historical tradition where some white people – white men, in particular – project the primal aggressions that they refuse to see in themselves onto black people. This fear of black men doesn’t just spring from racism. It’s why some social science experiments show that even trained police officers are biased to see black man as threats. We are Nat Turner, who terrified plantation owners when he led a 19th-century slave rebellion we’re Bigger Thomas from Richard Wright’s “Native Son ” we’re Marlo Stanfield, that ice-cold drug dealer from HBO’s “The Wire.” White America has long associated black men with criminality and hypersexuality. Why are black men still so feared in 2020? And what will it take for it to stop?Īsk where this fear comes from and there’s one easy answer. Still, these recent incidents prompted me to ask questions I’ve never quite asked before. There’s something about us that brings out the worst in many people. “As a six-foot-three black man, it’s possible that I haven’t gone a day in the last ten years without someone showing fear in my presence,” says Shayne Lee, a professor of sociology at the University of Houston.īlack men have long been a bogeyman in White America’s collective psyche. ![]() It’s part of the ambient racism of our everyday lives. All those incidents have a depressing familiarity to many black men. I don’t even look at many of these videos anymore because they’re so soul-crushing. A video, shot by the man, shows her vowing to call the police and saying, “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”īoth episodes came not long after the release of another video that showed Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year-old black man, shot to death after encountering two white armed men while jogging in Georgia. In the second incident, a white woman was walking her dog in New York’s Central Park when she got into a dispute with a black man who asked her to leash her pet. One showed a white Minneapolis police officer with his knee on the neck of a black man who was gasping, “I can’t breathe.” The man later died. This Memorial Day weekend saw the release of two disturbing videos involving black men. Millions of Americans shrugged off their fear of the coronavirus this holiday weekend when they flocked to crowded beaches, lakes and restaurants.īut there is another type of contagion that still keeps some of White America paralyzed: Fear of black men in public spaces. ![]()
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