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When I heard the story of Sherry McLain and James Crutchfield, I found myself both shaking my head and experiencing intense anger. The story, which went viral, is at first glance, quite straightforward. In the parking lot of a shopping center, the 67 year old Sherry McLain was loading her car. The 52 year old James Crutchfield approached her asking if she had a lighter that he could borrow for his cigarette. McLain, a licensed gun owner, allegedly pulled a handgun on Crutchfield claiming that she felt threatened. Crutchfield ran away, called the police, and McLain was arrested. The action was caught on tape.
Did I leave out the fact that McLain is white and Crutchfield is Black? This fact makes an already bizarre situation more frightening. Stories on the case have indicated that McLain claimed that she had never been so scared in her life.
When McLain was arrested she was, apparently, stunned, pointing to Crutchfield as the source of the problem.
The McLain vs. Crutchfield story immediately triggered for me the memory of the Trayvon Martin killing. In that case, George Zimmerman claimed to have felt threatened by the unarmed Martin and, therefore, justified in snuffing out the life of the teen-ager. McLain may have come very close to ending the life of Crutchfield out of an alleged fear for her life.
This entire set of circumstances led me to wonder whether it might just be easier to ban Blacks from initiating any interactions, let alone conversations, with whites. White fear of Blacks regularly knows no bounds. A recent case in Washington, D.C. was further illustration of the problem. A young Black man, a student at the University of the District of Columbia, stood inside the vestibule of a bank trying to decide whether to withdraw money from his account via an automatic teller machine (ATM). A white woman (along with her husband and child) entered the vestibule of the bank and, in fear, left the bank and notified the police that there was a suspicious Black man in the vestibule of the bank. The police arrived—en masse—chased and arrested the young man. Fortunately he was not injured, and was ultimately cleared of any allegations, yet the striking feature was that it was the fear of the white woman that was enough to bring about a situation that could have ended catastrophically.
The roots of this ‘fear’ have little to do with crime statistics. Contrary to the demagoguery of Presidential candidate Donald Trump, whites are assaulted and killed—overwhelmingly—by other whites. The source of the fear goes back to the white settler fear of the African slave and the Native American. This was a fear generated by the system of racial slavery carried out against Africans and the genocide carried out against Native Americans; a fear that those who were brutalized would revolt and carry out the terror that was carried out against them.
None of this is to suggest that each time that a white person sees a person of African descent that they assume that there is a revolt of the Blacks on the verge of transpiring. Rather, deep in the recesses of their minds is the assumption of danger and, unfortunately, the presumption of black guilt.
There are various actions taken in U.S. society to reinforce this fear, making racist oppression a perpetual motion machine. A classic example was that of the famous pictures taken at the time of the Hurricane Katrina disaster on the Gulf Coast. In one picture white people are struggling through water and there are items floating around them. The picture suggests that they are trying to survive and finding these items. Another picture has blacks, also struggling through the water, only to be described as looters.
There are too many examples of such ‘micro-aggressions’ and other forms of racist reinforcement carried out. At the end of the day, these various manifestations of racist reinforcement lay the foundation for reminding whites of the danger inherent in Blacks. In that sense, police killings of unarmed Blacks becomes much more understandable and rooted less in the ideas of any one white person, and rather in the expectations that police are taught to anticipate when dealing with the people of the ‘darker races.’
After the incident of the young Black man in Washington, DC, my wife and I discussed what we thought that the white woman who called the police might now be thinking (after it became clear to all the world that he was not planning on robbing the bank or attacking her). Assuming that she has followed the story, she very well might have concluded that she did the right thing because it is better to be safe than sorry. After all, we are told—in this atmosphere of the ‘war against terrorism’—that if we see something, we should say something. The same message can apply to observing the behavior of blacks.
The problem is, just as in the case of the so-called war against terrorism, when one racializes the problem—in that case, assuming that terrorism is primarily a matter carried out by Arabs and Muslims—one turns a blind eye to the real nature of the problem. In the case of terrorism, most terrorism carried out within the USA has been carried out, not by jihadists but by white supremacists. When it comes to crime, the assumption that blacks are perpetually dangerous means that the actual sources and perpetrators of crime can never be understood.
So, what is to be done, to coin a phrase? At the very basic level incidents need to be ‘unpacked.’ The McLain vs. Crutchfield story needs to be broadly discussed. In fact, I would suggest that whites, by themselves, need to have some discussions about this incident to elicit their views on what happened, why it happened, and whether McLain’s apparent assumptions were legitimate. Such discussions must introduce history, as well as contemporary facts.
Institutions must also engage in a reexamination. Black activists around the USA have, for years, been demanding not only civilian oversight of the behavior of the police, but a radical rethinking of police training and orientation, specifically on matters of race.
Race, in the USA, means that Blacks simply cannot make the same assumptions as can whites. They cannot assume that, if their car breaks down, that they can go to the home a white person in search of support…and not be shot; they cannot assume that they can go to an ATM, and consider their financial situation…without the possibility of being pegged as a potential bank-robber; and they certainly cannot assume that, should they have bad judgment and smoke cigarettes, that they can approach a white person for a light…without the possibility of having a gun pointed at their face. You see, after all, the white folks might get scared and that, and that alone, seems to settle discussions regarding right and wrong in the USA.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the host of The Global African on Telesur-English. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.
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