The price of dehumanization
23rd May 2016 · 0 Comments
By Susan K. Smith
George Curry Media Columnist
It never ceases to amaze — and trouble me — how it seems that this society has no sensitivity to or regard for the need for African Americans to get accountability for injustices they have suffered.
When Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, the lack of sensitivity shown to his parents was simply appalling. Their unarmed son had been killed by a would-be security guard who, from accounts given, was clearly in the wrong. That the all-white jury acquitted Zimmerman was painful in and of itself, but over and above that pain was the pain that this society seemed oblivious to the need of these parents to obtain justice.
It is perhaps the lack of justice, the lack of assigning accountability to police officers who kill African Americans but who are given a slap on the wrist, if that, and sent back onto the streets that causes the deepest pain in the African-American community. Our lives matter. The American justice system, however, has never seemed to acknowledge that.
The United States Constitution is largely to blame. The 3/5 clause in our foundational document gave white people permission to consider Black people as less than human. Chattel slavery was heinous in and of itself, but the fact that it resulted in Americans believing it was OK to treat African Americans as property, as objects, not subjects, had a devastating effect, long-term, on how African-Americans are still treated in this country.
While African Americans held on for dear life to the words found in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal,” the fact is that the founding fathers of this nation did not consider African Americans to be “men” or “women.” The gracious extension of rights and privileges given to American citizens was never intended to reach past white, land-owning, males. Historian Richard Morris wrote, “the people of ‘we the people of the United States,’ a phrase which was coined by a wealthy white landowner, did not mean Indians or Blacks or women or even white servants.”
Colonial society was not democratic, nor was it egalitarian, said historian Howard Zinn in his seminal work A People’s History of the United States. This nation was dominated by men “who had enough money to make others work for them.”
African Americans were nothing but objects, never worthy of a fair trial tried by a jury of their peers. The Fugitive Slave Laws made it OK for White men to capture escaped African-American slaves and to kill them without repercussion. There was no accountability then, and there is little to no accountability now when African Americans are killed by law enforcement officers. America is living out its legacy of the dehumanization of Black people.
What escapes America is that African Americans are human beings, regardless of how bad and complete has been their dehumanization and criminalization. When Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered, her family wanted O. J. Simpson to pay for the crime. When Chandra Levy was murdered in Washington, D.C., her family wanted the murderer found and be made to pay for the crime. When the little children at Sandy Hook were murdered, those families wanted the killer to pay for the crime. When the terrorists planted bombs at the Boston Marathon, the victims wanted the terrorists to pay for the crime.
Human beings want justice, be they Black or white, but it seems like the cry for justice by African Americans is regularly ignored. And that must be that because for too many people, African Americans are just not human.
Did the officers who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice see him as a child? Did they see his sister, whom they threw in the back of a police cruiser, as a human being, distraught because her brother had been killed and she had been blocked from attending to him?
Did the officers who left Michael Brown’s body on the hot Ferguson, Mo. pavement for four hours after he had been shot and killed see him as a human being? Did they wonder how seeing their child lying dead on that pavement would affect his parents? Probably not.
The problems that have arisen for the African-American community because of having been dehumanized have been legion; much of the anger that erupts on urban streets from time to time comes from bottled up resentment that comes whenever any person, regardless of color or nationality, feels dehumanized.
This nation is on a dangerous trajectory. No nation can survive that has dehumanized its own citizens. It is not only African Americans who have been dehumanized, but so have women, people with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ community, Native Americans. Langston Hughes asked what happens to a dream, deferred? And Plato said that tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.
All human beings yearn to be treated as such, and when that does not happen, rage boils into active revolution. America seems not to understand, and that will ultimately be a tragedy for us all.
This article originally published in the May 23, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
