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marble falls

(56,358 posts)
Mon Jun 18, 2018, 09:00 AM Jun 2018

The Racist Trope That Won't Die

The Racist Trope That Won’t Die

By Brent Staples

Mr. Staples is a member of the editorial board.

June 17, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/opinion/roseanne-racism-blacks-apes.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

The comedian Roseanne Barr resurrected one of the oldest and most profoundly racist slanders in American history when she referred to Valerie Jarrett, an African-American woman who served as an adviser to President Barack Obama, as the offspring of an ape.

This depiction — promoted by slave traders, historians and practitioners of “scientific” racism — was used to justify slavery, lynching and the creation of the Jim Crow state. It made the leap to the silver screen in deeply noxious films like “The Birth of a Nation” and haunted American popular culture well into the 20th century.

<snip>

That message comes through powerfully in research by several social scientists, but particularly in the work of the Stanford University psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt and Phillip Atiba Goff, president of the Center for Policing Equity at John Jay College in New York. In six studies published with collaborators a decade ago, Mr. Goff and Ms. Eberhardt found that even younger study participants who were born since the civil rights revolution and claimed to know nothing of the ape caricature of blackness were swayed by it when making judgments about black people. In one study, white male undergraduates who were subliminally exposed to words associated with apes — for example, “chimp” or “gorilla” — were more likely to condone the beating of those in police custody when they thought that the suspect was black.

<snip>

This process of dehumanization often leads Americans to view African-American men as larger and more fearsome than they are. This pattern of misperception is troubling. Police officers are often exonerated for killing civilians on the premise that they fired their weapons out of fear for their lives. This issue famously came up in the 2014 killing of Dontre Hamilton, an unarmed black man in Milwaukee who was shot 14 times by Officer Christopher Manney. Officer Manney later portrayed Mr. Hamilton as hulking and muscular, saying he feared being “overpowered.” An autopsy showed that Mr. Hamilton was actually of modest build — 5 feet, 7 inches tall and 169 pounds.

The tragedy of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was killed by a Cleveland police officer in 2014 while playing with a toy gun, fits this pattern. An officer at the scene described him as being 20 years old. Black children are often seen as significantly older and more menacing than they actually are. And, research suggests, the automatic presumption of threat provoked by a black face applies even the when the face belongs to a 5-year-old child.

Mr. Goff and his colleagues published a striking set of studies the year Tamir was killed. They found that when a group of mainly white college students were shown photographs of white, black and Latino boys, they overestimated the ages of black boys ages 10 to 17 by an average of 4.5 years. In other words, they perceived 13-year-old boys as adult men — and viewed black children as more culpable for crimes.

<snip>

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The Racist Trope That Won't Die (Original Post) marble falls Jun 2018 OP
They hung Emmett Till . He was 14 . lunasun Jun 2018 #1
Its just never stopped. What happened to Emmett Till before and after he .... marble falls Jun 2018 #2

marble falls

(56,358 posts)
2. Its just never stopped. What happened to Emmett Till before and after he ....
Mon Jun 18, 2018, 09:44 AM
Jun 2018

was lynched is hardly ever mentioned by anyone - it was horrific. Lynching was usually a lot more than 'just' hanging.

?quality=90&auto=webp

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/books/review/blood-of-emmett-till-timothy-b-tyson.html

<snip>

Then there is perhaps the most monstrous application of racial terror in our historical register: Aug. 28, 1955, when 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched.

<snip>

On a Wednesday evening in August, Till allegedly flirted with and grabbed the hand of Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who worked as the cashier at a local market. According to recovered court transcripts released by the F.B.I. in 2007, he let out a “wolf whistle” as she exited the store to get a gun from her car. Bryant later informed her husband and his half brother, who proceeded to uphold a grim tradition: Till was abducted, beaten, shot in the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. A 74-pound gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire, with the hope that he would never be found.

Black life in America has endured as little more than a fragile truth in the hands of white aggressors. And Tyson does well to remind us just how all-consuming racial terror can be when wielded with brute force: “Affronted white supremacy drove every blow.”

There are a number of facts to parse in this book — such as Till’s affinity for straw hats on churchgoing Sundays, and the sheriff’s belief that the body recovered from the river was part of an “N.A.A.C.P.-sponsored scheme” to disgrace Mississippi — but none perhaps more profoundly consequential than Bryant’s own admission to Tyson that the events that led to Till’s death didn’t happen as she had previously attested.

Outside private correspondence with her attorney, trial testimony and her unpublished memoir, Bryant remained tight-lipped about her interaction with Till. In 2008, in her only interview since that fateful season of death, Bryant admitted to Tyson that a crucial piece of her testimony in court was fabricated. Till never “grabbed her around the waist and uttered obscenities,” as she had avowed on the witness stand. “You tell these stories for so long that they seem true,” she confesses early in the book, “but that part is not true.” And so we are left with a sobering certainty, one that even Bryant herself is forced to concede to Tyson, more than 50 years later: “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

The sum of history is made up of recurring patterns. Each new decade has brought past sins to the fore. From Emmett Till and Henry Marrow to Amadou Diallo, Rekia Boyd and Alton Sterling. These deaths, old-world lynchings that have taken new shapes, are simply the mores and modes of a long-practiced American custom: white supremacy. “The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don’t want it to stop,” the novelist Chester Himes wrote to The New York Post upon hearing that Till’s murderers were acquitted. “If we wanted to, we would.”

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