by Chris Hayes
What differentiates white fear as a social and political force from the fear felt by an individual—white or black, Latino or Asian, immigrant or native born—is the belief structure, often implicit and almost never articulated, in which that fear rests. If life across the border is cheap, if violence is routine and tragedy a habit, then, the logic goes, “they” don’t experience fear the same way. On the other hand, “we”—the collective social we, we the people who have relative privilege, the hardworking (white) folks, who have come so far, who are so upstanding and special, should not have to fear. Sure in the ghettos, it’s scary, but for them fear is just part of life. It’s easier for them.
In 2015, a few days after the unrest in Baltimore, I stood outside city hall with three young men from the Westside. They grew up in Freddie Gray’s neighborhood, and two lived there still. The third man, the oldest of the group, had managed, after a stint in prison, to move out to the suburbs. They’d spent the day delivering groceries and goods to seniors in a housing development in the neighborhood at the heart of the unrest. They chuckled as they watched my TV live shot, and we struck up a conversation. Over the next forty minutes they reeled off a list of acts of violence and crime that they had witnessed or been victims of. The tally seemed incomprehensible. The youngest of them had had his sister taken from him when she was fourteen in a brutal murder on the Baltimore public transit. The other two had lost best friends, cousins, and uncles. And then the oldest man described the sheer ecstatic relief of his new life in the suburbs. “I can breathe,” I remember him saying. “Just sit outside and breathe.”
Later that year, after homicides spiked by 63 percent in Baltimore in 2015, a barber told my producer that twenty people whose hair had been cut in his shop had been murdered. Discussions of death had become “like saying, you know, ‘I brushed my teeth this morning,’ ” because the onslaught had become so routine. “That’s all we talk about.”
Opponents of Black Lives Matter protesters often make a strange, disingenuous pivot. They cite the devastation that violent crime wreaks among black Americans as a rebuttal to the claim that police are killing black people. But violent deaths at the hands of the police and those at the hands of gang members don’t exist in some kind of competition. They are two sides of the same coin. When those outside the Colony point with derision at the violence within it to justify its continued existence, they reinforce how undervalued black lives are.
In ways large and small and constant, the Nation exhibits contempt for the lives of its subjects in the Colony and indifference to their value. This is the central component of the white fear that sustains the Colony: the simple inability to recognize, deeply, fully totally, the humanity of those on the other side. It’s why the wave of protests has come to so many white people as such a surprise. The systematic devaluation of the Colony is so remarkably well hidden, so easily unseen.
“When we are waiting for our clients to arrive from the county jail in the morning, the deputies, the district attorneys, and the judges refer to our clients as ‘bodies,’ ” Oakland public defender Seth Morris once told me. “ ‘Are the bodies here yet? We have files but no bodies.’ I once asked a deputy to call my client a human being, and I was laughed at.”
One way the state expresses value for life is in its pursuit of those who take it. Homicide is the gravest crime of all. Violations of laws against extinguishing another person’s life should be most vigorously investigated and punished. And yet the national clearance rate for homicides was only 64 percent in 2012. The rate varies by locality, however, and in many large American cities—where the overwhelming majority of murder victims are black and brown—the clearance rates are even below 50 percent. Ferguson reported clearing 100 percent of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter cases in 2012 and 2013. New York City cleared around 72 percent of cases in 2013 and 2014. Baltimore, though, averaged a clearance rate of 47 percent for 2011 to 2014.
Perhaps most remarkably, over the past several decades, as crime has declined at historically unprecedented rates, as more cops have been hired and more resources have been poured into policing, that clearance rate has actually gone down in many places. Back in 1965 the national clearance rate was 90 percent. Even as homicides decline and the number of cops rises, police are getting worse at catching murderers.
Jill Leovy, who chronicled the work of homicide detectives in South Central Los Angeles in her masterful book Ghettoside, argues that this inability to solve and punish the most serious crimes is the flip side of a system that overpunishes minor infractions. “Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.”
When it comes to the ultimate punishment, death, the system makes clear which lives it values: the best predictor of whether someone gets the death penalty is race—not of the perpetrator but of the victim. White lives are far more likely to merit, in the eyes of courts, juries, and prosecutors, the ultimate punishment. White lives matter, and it hardly needs to be spoken.
The disparate value of life is painfully clear to people living in the Colony. Cynthia Swann, fifty-five, a resident of Southwest Baltimore, came out to survey the aftermath of the Freddie Gray unrest the day after the CVS burned. She told me she “became civically active when the police killed another police officer and no one was indicted.” In January 2011, she recounted, William Torbit, a black Baltimore cop, had been in plainclothes outside a nightclub in the middle of a fight. Several Baltimore police officers were called to respond to the melee, and when they arrived, they shot and killed him (as well as a twenty-two-year-old civilian). “There was never any indictment. Nothing was ever done about it,” Swann told me.
She compared Torbit’s case to that of Baltimore police officer Jeffrey Bolger, who in June 2014 responded to a call where a dog had bitten someone. When he arrived, he slit the dog’s throat. The officer, Swann pointed out, was immediately suspended and ultimately prosecuted. (He would later be acquitted). There was a lesson here about how much the system valued black life. The contrast between these two cases, she said, “tells the community and the children that an animal’s life is worth more than your life.”
This is why “Black Lives Matter” has emerged as such a simple, powerful rebuke to the unstated premise of the Colony’s existence. It simply asserts a basic principle that should need no enunciation. Yet the phrase has inspired intense backlash. Opponents have attempted to twist its meaning into “Only Black Lives Matter.” But save for a few kooky Black Israelites who used to rant black supremacist sermons in Times Square during my youth, it’s safe to say that no one believes “only black lives matter.” No, “Black Lives Matter” means “Black Lives Matter, Too.”
The backlash is rooted in the way white fear operates. In the days after the Freddie Gray unrest, quite a few Baltimore residents—all white—wanted to tell me the “real story” of Freddie Gray. Like right-wing e-mail forwards, they often attributed the “real story” to a “friend who’s a cop” who was in a position to know the truth—as opposed to the “politically correct” cover story being spun by District Attorney Marilyn Mosby. I heard numerous times that Gray had actually run from the cops because he was carrying drugs (he was a dealer, all these people took pains to point out), then had jumped out the window of one of the projects in Sandtown Winchester. The fall had been what snapped his spine. “They don’t want to let that get out,” one man told me, puffing a cigarette while warily watching the protesters outside city hall, “because now it’s all politics.”
These rumors were all nonsense—definitively false, as established by the medical examiner. But they were almost desperate attempts to will away the obvious fact that Gray’s death was an injustice. The idea that he was an innocent victim did not compute. Even in death he was presumed guilty, because he had been a denizen of the Colony
, and c’mon, everyone there is guilty of something. Or in the infamous words used to describe Michael Brown, “he was no angel.” In the popular imagination, the Colony is a land that doesn’t breed angels.
To deny Freddie Gray his innocence is part of the machinery of repression that makes white fear so potent. Along with causing the Nation to undervalue the lives of those in the Colony, white fear also expresses the forbidden knowledge that all white people carry with them: We’ve got it better. And if white people have it better, then isn’t it only logical that black people will try to come and take what they have?
“They were coming downtown from a world of crack, welfare, guns, knives, indifference and ignorance,” famed New York newspaper columnist Pete Hamill wrote of the group of young black men who had allegedly gang-raped and beaten a white woman jogging in Central Park in 1989.
They were coming from a land with no fathers. . . . They were coming from the anarchic province of the poor. And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teeming with the violent images of the streets and the movies, they had only one goal: to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white.
Of course, the “they” in Hamill’s column turned out to be innocent. The story of marauding black and Latino teens in the white precincts of Central Park raping and pillaging was nothing more than a dark urban fairy tale (though that was only definitively established after five innocent young men had done a collective fifty years in prison).
Hamill’s column was by no means an outlier. In fact, for a long stretch of my late childhood and adolescence, such rhetoric was more or less the default register of the New York media. “They”—the black and brown subjects of the Colony, the denizens of the “anarchic province of the poor”—are angry and wild and uncivilized and are coming for us, to take what “we” have.
White fear emanates from knowing that white privilege exists and the anxiety that it might end. No matter how many white people tell pollsters that “today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks” (60 percent of the white working class in one poll), we know that this story of antiwhite bias is not true. But we do know that having it “better” isn’t permanent, that it could collapse. We know equality might someday come, and it might mean giving up one’s birthright or, more terrifyingly, having it taken away. That perhaps our destiny is indeed a more equal society, but one where equality means equal misery, a social order where all the plagues of the “ghetto” escape past its borders and infect the population at large.
PETE HAMILL WASN’T FEAR-MONGERING on his own—he was involved in something bigger than himself. White fear is a collaborative production. A crowd can act in wild, terrifying, ecstatic ways, far beyond the cruelty of a single individual. Similarly, white fear is a collective experience: it is greater than the sum of its parts. It is neither a pure, organic, grassroots expression of the people, nor simply a construction of demagogues and elite guardians of white racial hierarchy. It is cultivated through a kind of call-and-response between speaker and crowd, between politicians and voters, between media and audience.
I understand this process far, far better now than I ever have. For several years I have worked in an industry that frankly thrives on fear. The job of TV news is to grab the attention of the viewer, and the most effective way to do so is to reach out through the screen, past the frontal cortex of the brain, the area of higher reasoning and consciousness, and straight down into the brainstem, where the most ancient, animalistic survival instincts hum and pulse. We are wired to identify threats, not to process statistics. And when it’s your job to grab attention, you learn to trigger those threat neurons over and over. We mash the keys until they’re worn out.
So, to take just one example: during the great Ebola panic of 2014, only one person died in the United States, but a poll in November of that year found Americans identifying it as a more urgent priority than any other disease, “including cancer or heart disease, which together account for nearly half of all U.S. deaths each year.” In fact, in a typical year more Americans are literally killed by their own furniture than are killed by terrorists, but when you ask them, they will tell you they are far more scared of terrorism than of nearly any other threat.
In fact, if you look at the American obsession with crime and then terrorism, you see a kind of crossfade between the two: in the aftermath of 9/11, as the War on Terror ramped up, the American obsession with crime began to wane.
Recent history can account for this shift. Law and order and the War on Drugs were a reaction to the real and genuinely scary escalation of crime, a reaction that dissipated as crime came down. Then the War on Terror was a reaction to a horrifying, unprecedented event: the 9/11 attacks and subsequent attacks by Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups such as ISIS. This story is on its face true.
But it’s also easy to see, in the smooth segue between these fixations, the churning neuroses of white fear seeking their expression, looking for the next threat to guard against and subdue. Sometimes the threats are on the frontier, sometimes in the fieldhouse, sometimes in the adjacent neighborhood, and sometimes in the dark men plotting halfway around the world. Certain people outside our borders—literal or metaphorical—wish to do us harm, and they must be brought to heel. George H. W. Bush beat the Massachusetts liberal Michael Dukakis by deploying terrifying images of Willie Horton; his son beat another Massachusetts liberal with images of the Twin Towers falling.
The wolf is always at the door. It just changes its clothing.
In fact, the War on Terror has, in so many ways, played out like the law and order obsession with crime that preceded it. Events grounded in truth—the crime rate really was rising in an unprecedented fashion, and the worst attack in the history of the Republic really did take place—morphed into panic. The panic then became so widespread that the communal experience of it—the urgent white fear that citizens, politicians, and media all collaborated in producing—overrode the reality that it was reacting to. Mass incarceration almost certainly wouldn’t have happened had crime not spiked the way it did. But mass incarceration was by no means the only available response to that spike. The War on Terror wouldn’t have happened without 9/11, and any society attacked like that would have responded, but 9/11 didn’t mean that an open-ended, multitrillion-dollar global war was the natural or appropriate response.
Through our shared cultural inheritance, Americans convert white fear into policy. When the system receives a shock—a crime wave, a terrorist attack—and we must answer the question What is to be done, our collective response is punishment, toughness, and violence. We build a bureaucracy and vocabulary of toughness that then take on their own power, their own gravity and inertia. We then bequeath the institutions of toughness to the next generation of politicians and policy makers, even after the initial problem they were meant to solve has dissipated.
Because white fear is a constant, because it persists even when specific threats have subsided, it functions as a one-way ratchet in constructing the architecture of the Colony. It can build prisons but not knock them down. For decades, Gallup has been asking Americans if they think crime has gone up, gone down, or stayed roughly the same. Every year since 2002 a majority of Americans have told Gallup crime had gone up the previous year, even though, in all but one year, it had declined. In fact, between 1993 and 2014 the rate of crime victimization fell from about 80 to 20 per 1,000, but by the end of that period, a full 63 percent of respondents still told Gallup crime had “gone up” in the previous year. In 2016 Gallup found American’s fears of crime hit a fifteen-year high, even as crime itself was near historic lows.
Undoubtedly the atmosphere around crime and policing today is worlds different from what it was in, say, 1968 or 1989 or 1994. Incarceration in many states is actually declining, and the beginnings of something like a political consensus—however tenuous and uneasy—has formed, between left and right,
that locking up millions of our own citizens has been an expensive, tragic, and embarrassing mistake.
But the law and order demagoguery of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, its aggressive celebration of white fear—of terrorists, immigrants, and black criminals—shows just how weak that consensus is.
Because white fear is always waiting in the wings. In Ferguson, the fear felt by the nonprotesting, overwhelmingly white citizens of the Nation was palpable. The people I met putting up “I Heart Ferguson” signs in a local coffee shop spoke with pride about the quiet orderliness and the trustworthiness of the police. But there were problems, of course, they would say vaguely, leaving you to fill in the blanks.
Problem areas.
Problem blocks.
Problem people.
V
The New York of my childhood was seedy. It’s a word my parents used a lot, though I almost never hear it these days. That may be because the condition it named has been so thoroughly, triumphantly banished; or perhaps sketchy has replaced it. Seediness was everywhere in the New York of the 1980s and ’90s, in the streets and subways and neighborhoods as well as in representations of the city in TV and film.
In its most common usage, seediness has to do with vice. A red-light district is seedy; it’s a place where no one wants their face seen. But in the context of New York, the adjective had descriptive force far beyond the peep shows on Eighth Avenue in midtown. (I remember clearly driving past them in the car with my family on the way home from visiting my aunt in Greenwich Village. We fell awkwardly silent in the presence of so much concentrated and unabashed seediness.)
Seediness was distinct from, but still somehow related to, danger. A neighborhood could be seedy but not necessarily dangerous. The iconically seedy Times Square of the 1990s never had particularly high violent crime rates, at least nowhere near as high as in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where gun violence was commonplace. But if Washington Heights and East New York and the South Bronx came to represent New York at its most dangerous, Times Square was New York at its seediest. Denizens of porn shops, peep shows, and SROs, vagabonds, homeless men and women, people struggling with addiction or mental health crises, panhandlers, hustlers—all congregated on the streets. People who lived on the edges of society took up physical space in the public square at the very center of the physical city.