Reverse bigotry

I'll comment on this:

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabitianyabwile/2014/08/26/the-one-thing-my-mother-would-not-let-me-become/

During the last week, some genuinely concerned people have admonished me about what they perceive to be an unhealthy bias against police officers. They have with good intention taken the position that those in authority should have our trust and support. I’ve had a running conversation with at least four officers or former officers concerned that I’m spreading distrust of them and their mates. They think it’s better if people with a public platform of any size would encourage trust for officers.
I’ve benefitted from these exchanges, if for no other reason than it demonstrates once again the very different lives African Americans and White Americans live in the same country. For my white interlocutors, the thought of not trusting the police never crosses their mind. It’s the right thing to do. It’s basic civics.

Ah, yes, because white Americans automatically think we should trust and support those in authority. White libertarians, Tea Partiers, and/or conservatives vest implicit trust in the ATF (e.g. Ruby Ridge), IRS (e.g. Lois Lerner), HHS (e.g. Kathleen Sebelius), DOJ (e.g. Janet Reno, Eric Holder), VA, TSA, EPA, NSA, NLRB, &c. 

Funny how Thabiti stereotypes white Americans. Isn't there a word for that? Prejudice?  

The idea that African Americans have lived in a police state in the United States may be something new to White readers of this post. That, again, just shows how different the lived experiences have been.

Notice he makes a gratuitous assumption about what white Americans allegedly don't know, then faults them for his own imputation. 

For nearly all of African-American life in the U.S., the police force has been the local arm of white supremacy and oppression. Ask yourself, How does white supremacy, racism and oppression get enforced for centuries even in cities and places where African Americans were the majority? How was it possible to enforce slave codes and Jim Crow segregation? What local means of power did the state exercise to “keep Blacks in their place”?

Was Jim Crow nation wide? After Reconstruction, didn't many Southern blacks move north (e.g. Chicago, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia) to put Jim Crow behind them? 

Since the late 1600s up to the end of official desegregation, the official local means for enforcing white supremacy was the police.
That’s been an everyday truth for most of African-American experience. It’s a truth passed down at dinner tables between mothers who love their sons and sons wanting to play with toy guns or imagine one day being officers. It’s a truth recounted in history books—not the official books of public schools, but the books African Americans have worked to write in order to remember their names and tell their stories first person. It’s an experience that shapes generations. So the moments when little boys and girls daydream with their parents about what to become when they grow up intersects the story of an entire people. Like waters flowing from oceans into rivers, the moving memories and sediments get passed along until they puddle up in some lake and there grow with each wave that enters. Memory is long. The memory of hurt longer.

Well, that's the problem. He's not describing the firsthand experience of contemporary black Americans. Today's black teenager doesn't remember going through that, because he didn't. Or his parents. Thabiti is talking about a story that's passed down from one generation to the next. 

And you may be asking at this point, “How long?” How long will the remembrance of past injustices dog the steps of inter-ethnic peace and progress?

Notice the key phrase: "the remembrance of past injustices." Frankly, social commentators like Thabiti are shortchanging blacks by trapping them in a now nonexistent past. A psychological prison. Not physical bars, but invisible bars. That holds them back. Fosters a defeatist mentality. 

First, how long do you think it takes a police system and a justice system to exorcise the poison of officially-sanctioned racial animosity? How long do you think it takes people and systems to move from embraced and open racism to something resembling a true content-of-character, love-believes-all-things heart?

What about when the Jim Crow generation retires? It only takes one or two generations to have a compete turnover in police departments or the judiciary. 

Are all the racists and the racist sentiments of a police force with hundreds of years of practice gone in one generation? Have all the attitudes and practices that made forceful subjugation of African Americans possible disappeared in a couple of decades?
But our police officers work in a system. And systems don’t change overnight. Systems have a way of molding the behavior and attitudes of the best of people. That’s true of every system, and it’s no less true of law enforcement. It’s true even when you put a black man in a blue uniform. They find themselves acting out prejudices or facing the prejudices inside the force. The invisible hand of systemic prejudice is always at work on everyone in the system.

Notice how he personifies the "system," as if that's is a long-lived human being.