THE GENESIS OF COUNTERFACTUAL BLACK PERCEPTION IN AMERICA

For many of us, and in large part because of the limitations of human abstraction, the world we live in began the day we were born. We see mixed schools, desegregated neighbourhoods, and a myriad of races in the workplace and surmise this as our experience: unity. We see the semblance of equality in the absence of legal discrimination, so if we are not paying attention, it is easy to wonder “what everyone is talking about” when the incendiary R word comes up—racism. Percolating amidst the chants for reform and petitions for change is the question, “what did I miss?” Well, about four hundred years, but that’s for another day. While those four hundred odd years should be diligently explored in your own time, this short article attempts to illustrate the genesis of counterfactual black perception in America in order to explain how systemic racism has regrettably gone unchecked for eons. With this in mind, we can begin to disassemble the untruths woven into our justice system's structural anatomy.

We all know the basics when it comes to American history and slavery, and although the chronology of events is recounted in western education ad nauseum, the detail that is almost always glossed over is “how?” How did more than seven generations of people either idly stand by or actively participate in the enslavement of black people? The answer is essential to understanding why the residue of early America furnishes the landscape of today’s systemic racism: anti-black propaganda. It is through this contortion of black identity that slave owners were able to justify a brutally enforced racial hierarchy, and why law enforcement implicitly finds justification for its use of excessive force against an entire community today. This article expounds on the genesis of counterfactual black perception in America in order to illustrate how this uncorrected illusion is at the heart of today’s systemic racism.

The Beginnings: Erasing of Identity

Anti-black propaganda found its origins in the intentional corrosion of African identity. Once Europeans recognized that uncompensated black labour could be exploited to construct developing nations, they quickly got to work on a plan to delegitimize black integrity. The system that was enjoying a transatlantic slave enterprise had identified best practices for justifying enslavement: dehumanization, dehumanization, dehumanization. These practices provided a springboard for the unsympathetic commodification of black labour, inasmuch as plantation owners were satisfied in suppressing, exploiting, and tormenting their slaves under the misbelief that black people were not only inferior, but indeed, not even human at all.

In order to create a new black identity, however, the first needed to be erased. Plantation owners divested enslaved Africans from their heritage by giving them white names like Betty or Johnny, and their owners’ last names as a mark of proprietorship. The western degradation of Afrocentric identity, later finding momentum through anti-black rhetoric, is integral to understanding the centuries-long passive complicity in the slave trade and the continued institution of racism that is responsible for George Floyd. Read on…

The Creation of a Counterfactual Identity through Anti-black Propaganda

The gutting of African identities would not be enough to dehumanize one race and spellbind another into complicity. More work needed to be done. In the 1700’s and beyond, anti-black campaigns were orchestrated to malign black reputation and preemptively deter challengers to the slave trade. Western education, the printing press, posters, signs, and postcards depicted black people as barbarians who, if left unoppressed, would pose a grave danger to the white man. The advent of “scientific racism"--which proposed anthropological typologies to distinguish human races as genetically superior--further gave credence to this theory. Not only were blacks painted as inferior, but warped scientific racism was used to ratify the misperception of their threat. A report by physical Samuel A. Cartwright in the Medical Association of Louisiana (1851) stated that, “Negroes, with their smaller brains and blood vessels, and their tendency toward indolence and barbarism [must] be kept benevolently in the state of submission.” (Source: the dawn of American Slavery: Jamestown 400 special report). The result of faulty science, eurocentrism, and negative black imagery was the legitimization of violence against an entire race. It is worth noting that this misperception was not, and has never been cured.

Post-Slavery: Reaffirming Black stereotypes

The failure to debunk the myth resulted in an opportunity to instead reaffirm it in a newly segregated America. Although abolitionists were successful in ending slavery, they had failed to demand black integration into white society. The black community—under the growing ethnonym “African-Americans”—were thus streamlined into impoverished neighbourhoods where they were denied access to proper healthcare, education, and employment. As a result, the late 1800’s to the mid 1900’s saw the rise of American ghettos, where restrictive real estate covenants and redlining—the systematic denial of federal funds to black neighbourhoods—continued to lock AA’s out of fair opportunities. Children were poorly educated in schools that were funded by local property taxes and received marginal allocation of resources. Marred by chaos and desperation, these children were plucked from their schools and ferreted into juvenile detention facilities in a practice that would come to be known as “the school to prison pipeline.” Criminalized for adolescent behaviours, these children would spend their lives in and out of correctional facilities.   

As a result of harsh ostracization and the denial of essential government aid, American ghettos saw a rise in drug trafficking as a means to sustain a living. Peaking in the 1970’s, Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs” was a government-led initiative to rigidly prosecute the consumption and distribution of narcotics in largely black and latino neighbourhoods, and is often considered the infancy of mass incarceration. Despite statistics demonstrating roughly equal drug use and sales amongst black and white races, research shows that prosecutors were twice as likely to pursue mandatory minimum sentences for black people than for white people who had committed the same crime. Additionally, even though black people made up 35% of those arrested for drug possession, they made up 75% of those imprisoned for it. So strong was the presumption of black guilt that only two-decades earlier, a 14 year old boy, Emmett Till, was lynched after being accused of wolf whistling at a white lady in a grocery store. In 2007, his accuser, Carolyn Bryant, admitted to a university researcher that she lied.

Nonetheless, what the war on drugs highlighted above all was America’s failure to recognize that it had created fertile breeding grounds for crime and then ruthlessly persecuted the fruits of its own doing. Now, through warped imagery and statistics, white America could wag its righteous finger and say “I told you so” as it pigeonholed black America into a new stereotype of "thugs and looters" (sound familiar?), an outgrowth of the original anti-black narrative. Abandonedly floating through bourgeois living rooms, above their scoffing and calls for over-policing, however, remained the true, overlooked statistic--that white crime was the highest percentage of crime among all races. (Source: Maguire and Pastore (1995), p. 388). The explanation? anti-black propaganda.

Implicit Biases in Modern Society

Centuries of eurocentric evangelism later, the distorted image of the black man has become all but defensible. How do you argue against a stereotype that has been proselytized from generation to generation through junk science, biased media, and intentional miseducation? As hard as it sounds is as hard as it is. Following the war on drugs, excessive policing methods against African Americans has continued to be shockingly commonplace in modern society, and while disproportional use of force has myriad psychological components, one of its key catalysts is the unreasonable fear of the black man. Although not directly exposed to scientific racism and the anti-black imagery of their predecessors, many Boomers and Gen X’ers have inherited hand-me-down racism in the form of implicit biases. This helps make sense of why institutional racism is still a thing. Despite being unarmed, despite being undangerous, and despite posing no conspicuous threat, officers are accustomed to using disproportional violence against African American’s because it is proportional to the threat in their minds. A threat developed through the centuries of intentional besmirching of black identity, from barbarians to gangsters. The explanation? anti-black propaganda.

Conclusion

The eruption of a race pandemic in 2020 is a relic not of accident, but design. To wake up in this world as a white person and say, “I understand that I am privileged, but I am not entirely sure why,” is a statement not to be faulted, due to the complexity of a caste system that has engineered both segregation and complicity. To make better sense of this, these two clauses need to be broken down.

“I understand that I am privileged” means to understand  that you are able to walk out of your house—or in Breonna Taylor’s case, to be asleep in it—without fear of being killed for the colour of your skin.

“But I don’t understand why.” The “why” is because you have no stigma attached to your racial identity. The white identity has not only been celebrated as innocuous, lawful, and benevolent, but for a long period of time, superior. Emergent outliers to this racial identity are labeled as rogues and misfits, well-meaning people who found themselves in the wrong crowd, or were failed by their parents. Minority races, on the other hand, are non-beneficiaries of the “benefit of the doubt.”

The contortion of black identity has a distinct chronology. In the first stage, early anti-black stereotypes were engineered to keep white people complicit in the commodification of black labour. To justify their suppression, black people were labelled as dangerous for their incivility. In the second stage, during the nineteenth and twentieth century, the anti-black narrative evolved to depict a novel danger: criminals. Instead of exploiting unremunerated black labour, the new agenda was "keeping the streets safe" from black and latino "thugs" through mass incarceration, despite overwhelming crime statistics showing either equal or higher rates of white crime. In the final stage, and where we have arrived today, these developing typologies have matured into implicit biases that show up as an unreasonable suspicion of the black man. This explains why when Treyvon Martin was killed, they said, “he probably deserved it.” This explains why when Tamir Rice was killed, they said, “he looked like a threat.” And this explains why when George Floyd was killed, they said, “but what did he do before they knelt on him?” In other words, he must have been dangerous, because what else could he be?

In short, privilege can be surmised as the ability to roam the streets without the crushing weight of mis-identity. A mis-identity engineered through racist propaganda. A mis-identity that has been involuntarily passed down from generation to generation not only because of a systemic failure to cure it, but a systemic intention to reaffirm it. A mis-identity that you have taken no part in creating, and that makes up no parts of who you are. A mis-identity that, on a good day, will mean the police are called on you for no reason at all, but on a bad day, will mean the end of your life.