I have begun to accept that, for some people, some lives matter much less than others.
After a recent murder trial and acquittal in Canada of a white farmer who shot a young Indigenous man, Colten Boushie, point blank in the back of the head, this point was driven home. All potential Indigenous jurors were barred from joining the trial under the pretense that they might prejudice the process. No bias there, the farmer faced zero convictions from his own white peers in a highly contested trial. After the trial, many of the cries for justice spewing across my Facebook feed were not for the young victim but for the farmer. The farmer walked away a free man. Boushie never had a chance.
Just before submitting this article, yet another high profile trial in Canada involving the murder of a young Indigenous girl, 15-year old Tina Fontaine, where a white assailant was again acquitted. This makes two not guilty verdicts in 2 weeks for the murder of Indigenous youth.
This is an outrage, horrifying for the grieving families and a further example of the gross lack of equality in Canada.
If we accept that some lives matter more, then certain deaths barely register on our conscience. We see this in the relative acceptance of the White supremacist movement by the current American president and the demonization of athletes who take a knee. The first group fighting against a perceived loss of social and political power and the other over the very real loss of many innocent lives.
Where is the justice?
While there is much support for justice in the numerous tragedies we face almost daily in the media, there is also a substantial and disquieting backlash against this justice. Whether it be for the killing of many unarmed youths of various color, creed and cultures or the sexual assault of an alarming number of women and girls, the justifications are swift, unrelenting and shockingly consistent. A cruel and deeply disheartening rush to blame the victim, sometimes subtle in its desire to appear balanced, often overt in its racist or sexist overtones while, at the same time, loudly decrying those unappealing labels.
The justification of grave injustice against minorities is insidious in its desire to dehumanize the victims and survivors while at the same time pretending to be above the white supremacist ideology that drives this stance in the first place. But make no mistake, there is deeply engrained myths of superiority at play in these arguments. It blames victims for the crimes, sins and behaviors that we ourselves are also guilty of.
- A young man can be killed for playing music too loud, another for being drunk and disorderly.
- A woman can be raped for trying to look attractive.
- What would it take to justify the murder of someone you loved or respected as an equal?
- What does it take to justify the murder of someone you see as inferior? Not much apparently.
If you can justify the death of one so easily, then you’ve already justified of the death of all who don’t look like you, act like you, love, talk or pray like you. We see it spewed across social media, infecting the mainstream news media and all levels of the cultural and political landscape. Eventually, we turn away because, after all, it’s not me or my family or my people.
It’s just them and they deserve it.
This profound injustice also forces victims and survivors to justify their own victim status. As if the original tragedy were not enough to deal with already. They themselves and their entire community become suspect in a dichotomizing ‘us versus them’ discourse. We witnessed this with the recent Colton Boushie murder in Canada in much the same way it happens regularly in sexual assault cases, the frequent killing of unarmed young black men and boys, and in the constant assault, incarceration and denial of services to Indigenous and marginalized communities. It’s how we keep the conversation focused on the “problems” with oppressed communities rather than on the systemic issues within white mainstream culture, media and politics that create, perpetuate and justify the gross levels of inequality and our own self-righteous impunity and violence.
I used to think our acceptance and justification of the targeting of people of color was a toxic combination of fear of reprisal based in underlying guilt over generations of obscenities committed by both powerful and powerless white folks on people of color. Now, I’m beginning to realize that it is a sense of superiority that infiltrates every aspect of white culture and that has created a strong sense of impunity. When it comes to people of color, we can do no wrong.
All our actions are warranted.
If similar things happen to whites, as they sometimes do, the outcry is much louder, the rage is visceral. How can this happen to us? No one sleeps until justice is served. When it happens to people of color or otherwise marginalized individuals or communities, the silence can be deafening and the justifications overwhelming.
While we may easily justify the cold-blooded murder of anyone who doesn’t look like us, we never hear disdain for white culture or for the white victims of mass shootings, most often committed by other white people. And why would we, that would be abhorrent. Yet the response to another murder of a young African American or Indigenous person is often cruel, fallacious and dehumanizing. Would we be so quick to justify if that was my own drunk son gunned down or your best friend’s child who, had stolen a cigar and pushed the store owner on his way out but didn’t deserve to be executed with his hands up and then left face down in the streets to cook for 6 hours.
I am just beginning to understand that we are all white supremacists. We are all recovering racists (Carriere & Richardson, 2013). Some further along the road to recovery than others. But in the daily reality of people’s lives, every assault, every murder is an equal tragedy for those affected. Each is a profound injustice for us all.
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