In a Race to the Bottom

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Last sentence of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

An awful lot of people immigrated to the New World to escape religious prosecution.  The notion of tolerance, free speech, association and religious freedom (sustained in the First Amendment, for example) and ethnic diversity are anchored in our Constitutional Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution). While slavery was part of the original mix in our nascent form of government, we fought a very bloody Civil War to generate one more Constitutional provision, the Thirteenth Amendment, to abolish that abdominal practice.

Religious, ethnic, racial and, recently, sexual-orientation battles have been fought within this constitutional nexus. The constitutional imprimatur has been added to social groundswells – recently LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights – reflecting the necessary flexibility for a document hundreds of years to remain relevant. But constitutional amendments, supporting statutes, creating a new category of hate crimes based on laws against intolerance, cannot force personal emotional or deep-seated openness, tolerance and acceptance of such diversity.

There may be familial biases, inculcated into young minds by subtle or not-so-subtle messages. There can be intolerance based on powerful negative interpretations of religious doctrines. We often find messages of intolerance from peer pressure, from the workplace to gang-enforced segregation. Further, as history has shown us over the ages, harsh economic times yearn for scapegoats, targets for zealots and demonic firebrands whose very power derives from lambasting their perception of society’s “deviants.” The world, very much including the United States, remains mired in a seemingly never-ending economic malaise.

We often hide the existence of such fierce and less-than-fierce biases under the mantra of some colorable and rational justification, making us believe that we are tolerant and moral citizens, doing what is right. We see people battle to secure our southern border, for example, from (among other “risks”) penetration by terrorists and undocumented job stealers.

When you look at the kinds of jobs that “get stolen,” you find the lowest level of stoop farm labor, hard-knocks construction laborers, the bottom-end of kitchen help, folks willing to work in slaughterhouses… the kinds of jobs U.S.-born citizens will not perform at any price. And if you were a terrorist, why in the world would you attempt to cross at the heavily fortified “brown-skinned” border when you can easily cross a virtually unguarded “white-skinned” northern border? But standing up for strong border control – which almost always means only that border with Mexico – is considered patriotic and not racist. Really?

And when you look at the number of police incidents, stop and frisks gone awry, police stops over relatively minor alleged infractions that turn deadly, why is it that those dying from such moments are overwhelmingly black or brown and seldom white? There’s always an explanation as to “why,” one that justifies the death on a case-by-case basis, avoids the stamp of “racism,” allowing supporters to side with their police officers as duly-appointed representatives of our nation and our government just doing their jobs. The photograph above comes from Michael Brown’s Facebook page; Michael was shot to death by an officer from white-dominated police force in an African-American community, Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. We all “know” the story and its aftermath, and there are a lot of interpretations of “what really happened.”

But Michael Brown added another statistic of an over-reactive “cop killing” of a young black. How about the brown community? Same story. For example, on February 14^th, “[a]bout 500 people gathered at a park to protest the death of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, 35, who was killed [February 19^th in Pasco, Washington] after three officers chased him through a busy intersection with their guns drawn. As he turned to face them, raising his arms, he was felled by their bullets.

“According to police reports, Mr. Zambrano-Montes had been throwing rocks at cars and officers… His death was caught on video by a bystander and the footage has been widely disseminated on social media, fueling anger among the mainly Hispanic population of this quiet agricultural hub in southern Washington State, and drawing comparisons to the shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo.” New York Times, February 14^th.

As even our Supreme Court somehow could accept that the time of racially-biased voting rights discrimination is over, that we have an African-American president is touted by many, suggest that racial discrimination is no longer a particularly disturbing issue, too many smug Americans think that they live in an unbiased society.

The statistics tell us another story, one that has finally drawn America’s top cop, F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, into the fray. He looks like so many white detectives plying their government trade across the land, but his words are a bold, startling splash of cold water thrown in the face of those who have accepted those palpable explanations of disguised racism… a challenge to the entire American constituency.

“In an address to students at Georgetown University, Mr. Comey said that some officers scrutinize African-Americans more closely using a mental shortcut that ‘becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights’ because black men are arrested at much higher rates than white men…

“F.B.I. directors had limited their public comments about race to civil rights investigations, like murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan and the bureau’s wiretapping of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But Mr. Comey tried to dissect the issue layer by layer… He started by acknowledging that law enforcement had a troubled legacy when it came to race.

“‘All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty,’ he said. ‘At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.’

“Mr. Comey said there was significant research showing that all people have unconscious racial biases. Law enforcement officers, he said, need ‘to design systems and processes to overcome that very human part of us all.’” New York Times, February 12^th.

This was a seminal presentation, one that did not garner enough attention across the land. It expresses a definition of who we really are versus what we like to tell ourselves we are. It asks each of us to deal with our biases, to rise above such feelings and to implement the free and open society of “equals” we tell ourselves we are. There are no thinking human beings on earth without biases, preferences and level of tolerance. It is time to get real, face feelings versus fundamental values, and do what’s morally right… or give up the very notion of what it means to have an American democracy.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we have to embrace intolerance, let it be intolerance of injustice.