No more fearmongering, Mr. Schappert

Reading the recent letter signed by Robert Schappert, it should alarm us all. When a representative of the police - who are sworn to protect all citizens - takes a politicized position that suggests that any of us who align ourselves with the Black Lives Matter movement (as I do) might not enjoy equal protection by law enforcement when split-second reflexes can be deadly, we have crossed a very dangerous line from civil society to police state. 

I am sure others will write concerning Mr. Schappert’s misrepresentation of facts, so I will restrict my comments to one suggested reading to help us all understand why the Black Lives Matter movement at its core has nothing to do with violence or danger to any of us.

That reading is Resmaa Menakem’s “My Grandmother’s Hands.” A trauma therapist who has run workshops with police in Minnesota, he explains the mechanisms through which using bodily harm as a cultural practice to maintain control emerged in medieval Europe. (Recall the ghastly contraptions we all learned about at one time or another and believe to be part of a bygone age.)

The effects of that bodily harm did not vanish with the disappearance of contraptions. Instead, the trauma it inflicted (even on those who were not injured but rather witnessed the events) became internalized, to later become externalized in myriad ways and passed on to later generations. 

Initially, the harm was inflicted mostly on white people by other white people, but with the advent of slavery that enabled much of the economic growth of early American society, the bodily harm shifted to black people. (To learn more about the thousands of black people lynched - often as spectacles for whites to attend - visit the virtual sites of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian, and the Equal Justice Initiative.)

This fact leads Menakem to identify white body supremacy as a cultural practice that has taken form in three different cultures: white culture, black culture and “blue” culture. The latter refers to police culture, and Menakem has worked with police cultures who have had the fortitude to recognize their problem and to take steps to come to terms with it. 

For members of white culture such as me, his research helps me think about all three cultures in ways that open up understanding rather than defaulting to media-fed representations and misrepresentations. 

The looting and rioting that have accompanied protests organized by Black Lives Matter are troubling, but they represent the fringe rather than the core of the movement. And when seen as a result of four centuries of white body supremacy and its cultural practices of terror inflicted on black people, the reactive violence is at least understandable. Watching a handcuffed man on the ground being strangled to death, or another man shot seven times in the back in front of his children, or another man wielding only a knife get 14 bullets from police officers, or (the list is long), were I black, might well move me to riot. 

But I am not black. I am a white citizen who recognizes that the age of coming to terms with the country’s four-centuries-strong racism is at hand, and we can do so only through understanding and taking corrective steps rather than through fearmongering. So please, Mr. Schappert, read just this one book, then write another letter to the editor.