Politics of White Resentment and our Police

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/why-twisted-politics-white-resentment-our-real-policerace-problem?akid=12648.294211.-4m7u6&rd=1&src=newsletter1029671&t=6

Many funerals of New York City police officers killed in action have been tableaus not only of pomp and grief but of the chasm that yawns between an “occupying army” of mostly white-ethnic officers and an “underclass” of inner-city, black and Hispanic men. I spent enough time there in the late 1970s to have wished that the sea of blue around Davis’ funeral — and now those of officers Ramos and Liu — would signify something better than a chasm.
But does it? Or have the examples set by Davis, Liu and Ramos on police forces given the rest of us excuses to rationalize the continuing, calculated, heavily policed and seemingly bottomless isolation of millions of black and Hispanic men and women? Are economic isolation and social stigmatization still driving some of the isolated — and those who police them — so crazy that it’s a wonder there aren’t even more police killers like those who killed Davis, Liu and Ramos?
Ramos and Wu’s killer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, was a perversely politicized, vengeance-crazed black man.

Where now are the Louis Farrakhans, the Vernon Masons and Alton Maddoxes (lawyers of Tawana Brawley infamy) and the Johnnie Cochrans, whose verbal threats and courtroom tactics sent chills down whites’ spines? Al Sharpton, whom I knew well in those years and described here in November, has climbed that learning curve: He said that the Ferguson, Missouri, protest movement “was not about Darren Wilson’s job. It was about Michael Brown’s justice…. We are not anti-police. If our children are wrong, arrest them. Don’t empty your gun and act like you had no other way.” Sharpton also led Eric Garner’s family in protesting Brinsley’s deed and mourning the deaths of officers Ramos and Liu.
Sharpton is a flawed leader, but efforts by Fox News’ flunkies to blame him and recent protesters for bad relations with police prove only that black leadership’s learning curve has been offset by some white male degeneration along the lines I sketched here.
 To overcome racism, we’ll have to reach past “black and white” story lines and find strategies that free the oppressed by freeing the oppressor. Police are trapped in the swamp I navigated in Brooklyn because all of us are trapped in a political economy that’s no longer legitimate or sustainable. Unless we confront what Joan Walsh is telling us has happened to the white working  and middle classes, and what AlterNet editor Don Hazen, economist James Galbraith and historian Eli Zaretsky are trying to tell us about the real roots of America’s white male problem, “black and white” explanations will fall short, on both sides of an enduring race line that leads us nowhere.