The Truth about Racial Profiling

‘AugusMawning’ come and gone. They’ve cast away the iron vices that kept us tethered to their borrowed land. They’ve packed up and returned to their own homelands. They’ve packed up and left us, physically free but bound in a chokehold of anger, pain and grief.

‘AugusMawning’ come and gone. They’ve vacated what we’ve come to know as ‘our shores’ but logs, we remain, rootless, adrift at sea, trying to find our way back to ourselves.

Discussion of the lost black identity and the legacy of slavery is not new. It has been had by poets, artists and doctors for a long time, but it is far from concluded roughly 300 years later, where black lives still don’t seem to matter.

It is the 21^st century and black men are still hunted game, still second-class citizens in a white supremacist frame. So today, the discussion continues, how do we, black men and Caucasian alike, free ourselves from the tentacles of (mental) enslavement? How do we, in a post colonial and supposedly post-racial world, navigate around our rich inheritance of mistrust and address what is being called the new face of racism—racial profiling, and class divides?

Roughly 300 years post slavery and white men still have the right, by all indications, to harass, accost and kill black people for no other crime than the possession of melanin. The white man doesn’t even have to be an enforcer of the law. Pause a moment in silence for the lives of Stephen Lawrence, Treyvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner…

In a cruel paradox, abolition of the iron shackles of chattel slavery liberated the limbs of one set of people, but has entrapped both racesin a shroud of mental captivity characterized by anger at and fear of one another. The reason for this is complex and layered, but at the forefront of the continued tension in race relations are these two facts:

• The fundamental paradigms that made slavery possible have yet to (and may never) be overturned;
• Black people have yet to ‘get over’ the trauma of enslavement and oppression.

 

Racism and class divides in a ‘post-racial’ society

In the past decade or three, it has become unacceptable to be racist in polite society; tospew indiscriminate hate on account of skin colour and ethnicity. Blacks and whites can now drink from the same water fountains, travel the same buses and attend the same schools, but the underlying values and attitudes that made racism and slavery acceptable,seem deeply entrenched in our collective unconscious, given subtle and often outwardexpression, although the majority of us, do not have any conscious desire to be racist.

Why then do we continually strive to classify and define ourselves based on gender, religion, sexuality, class…race? Is it a thing of nature?

According to Richard F. Taflinger in his study,“Taking Advantage: Social Basis of Human Behaviour, it is encoded into our DNA for survival and self-preservation. All animals form a web of mutual dependence to ensure the persistence of their species. Some, like the human, are more advanced and so create more sophisticated societal structuresfor purposes that extend beyond mere physical survival.

We “…band together in groups for mutual aid and protection. Such groups include families, friendships, associations, tribes, clans, states, nations. The members of these groups work together to help each other. since the group enhances the members’ chances of survival, individual members find value in contributing to the group, because the group will reciprocate by supporting the individual.” (Turner, 1996) Each member of the groupbrings with him a different skill set, which he uses to advance the cause of the larger whole. (Emile Durkheim, Division of Labour in Society, 1893).

 

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