STATES OF THE MATTER. Black and blue

Early in July, the long-festering crisis of trust between law enforcement and the African-American community exploded in the US city of Dallas after yet another fatal police shooting in suspicious circumstances. As protesters poured out with “Black Lives Matter” banners, a military veteran enforced vigilante justice, shooting dead five cops deployed in crowd control.

Calls went out to declare “Black Lives Matter” a terrorist movement, and aggressive right-wing talk shows doubled down on “Blue Lives Matter” as a rejoinder, in reference to the colour of the police uniform.

Two weeks after Dallas, when the Republican Party held its convention to nominate the brash and bumptious Donald Trump as candidate for US president, one of the featured speakers, appearing in full police regalia, was the sheriff of Milwaukee county in Wisconsin. This was strange in itself since the blue is considered above and beyond partisan loyalties. Stranger still was his apocalyptic message, warning of a collapse of social order that Trump alone could arrest.

Milwaukee was at the time just coming off an outbreak of protests against what seemed disproportionate police violence on a black person. And for the sceptics who insisted that data did not support inferences of bias, there was a report from the US Department of Justice to ponder over. After a particularly grim sequence of events in Baltimore, the report released on August 10, indicted the city police for a record of “unconstitutional stops, searches, and arrests; enforcement strategies that produce severe and unjustified disparities in the rates of stops, searches and arrests of African-Americans; excessive force; and retaliating against people engaging in constitutionally-protected expression”.

In the post-racial society that the US claims to be, analysts on the right see asymmetries in police violence as reflection not of bias, but of objective factors such as greater susceptibility to crime among black males. This argument collapses on the briefest examination, since there is no data compilation that has successfully rid itself of all the biases of its social milieu. That leaves no firm datum for any judgement, only an infinity of mirrors going back, forcing an examination of the whole vexed history of race in the US.

For the right, racism vanished partly with the abolition of slavery in the 19th century and wholly with the civil rights laws enacted by the Kennedy-Johnson administrations a whole century later. With an African-American now occupying the highest political office, the case for racism in public life, they say, simply does not stand.

Equal opportunity is a fundamental element of the American creed, never to be confused with equal outcome. This tension reflects an old contest in doctrine between equality and freedom, upheld respectively by the left and the right. The conceit of the American creed is that it has created an “individualism” encompassing both. Individual ability and inclination is the intervening moment between opportunity and outcome.

It would be most impolitic though, to attribute disparities in status between one class of people and another to innate differences in ability. It is no less of a problem to publicly vent the widely held sentiment that blacks as a class tend to slack off on effort. Politeness then requires that blame be placed on welfare policy, which supposedly creates a culture of dependence and deters the effort to improve African-American status.

Against the single index of segregation, the signifiers of racism today are more numerous and subtle. Attitudes to crime, as also welfare and poverty, are found in several public opinion surveys, to closely track racial bias.

The older racism is supplanted by newer forms, which hold African-Americans in breach of basic tenets of the American way, such as personal responsibility and respect for individual achievement.

Lee Atwater, a Republican strategist instrumental in crafting winning campaigns since the 1980s, had the perfect explanation in an interview long suppressed and published only after his death. The strategy in the 1950s was to use explicit terms of race-baiting, such as the “n-word” to attract the white conservative. When that became politically costly, there was a shift in rhetoric to the violation of “states’ rights”, and the encroachment of federal authorities on personal choices, as in the forced desegregation of schools by “busing” in children from black neighbourhoods.

That made things more abstract. From the 1980s, conservative strategy shifted up a notch in subtlety, railing against tax impositions that destroyed personal initiative, welfare spending that deterred effort, and budget deficits that mortgaged the future.

Running through all this was the need to be tough on crime.

Subtlety and abstraction have been lost with Trump, whose visceral message was rewarded with a successful romp through the Republican primaries. But as he realised that untrammelled bigotry could prove fatal in the November elections, he has doubled down on the message that racism is not an issue, only its recognition as a problem requiring remedy. In words that could merit a place with the most bizarre campaign rhetoric of all time, he has asked for the black vote, simply because the community has nothing to lose: “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 per cent of your youth is unemployed... what the hell do you have to lose?”

The hidden codes of the conservative playbook are clear enough for all minority voters to make an informed judgement. The rhetoric on crime, welfare and the budget deficit, is decreasingly effective camouflage for a politics that has never reconciled itself to the US civil rights revolution of the 1960s.

Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in Gurgaon

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