By Dr. Brenda Wall
Texas Metro News
https://texasmetronews.com
Sometimes tragedies are so protracted and complicated that the entire community suffers along with the families most immediately impacted. Healing and recovery seem impossible.
The recent verdict of a 35-year prison sentence for Karmelo Anthony in the stabbing death of Austin Metcalf is such a major trauma.
Two adolescent boys had an adolescent fight with an unimaginable outcome: death for one son and imprisonment for another. In an effort to determine a fair outcome, the element of racism was denounced and declared irrelevant in deconstructing what happened and what should happen.
Sounds good, but this is way too simplistic.
For anyone living in the United States of America during this 250-year effort at this American experiment, there has been a systematic failure at recognizing how pervasive and destructive the dynamic race has been.
Ignoring racism does not make it go away. In fact, denial permits its danger to metastasize.
In listening to Austin Metcalf’s father’s diatribe following the outcome of the Karmelo Anthony trial, it is clear that race and racial anger are well integrated in his grief. His comments are interlaced with hostile, dated stereotypes and insulting assumptions stemming from unconscious perceptions of white superiority. His hate no longer contained by a gag order did not develop in the two years following the tragic death of his son.
The stereotypes he so freely expressed are baked into community, church and culture. Those most affected are not only the targets of racial hatred but also those typically overlooked: the ones who maintain the cycle of violence.
The white disconnect from African Americans (and other non-whites) is normal for them and the source of their family and community bonding. Thus, generational racism. Unfortunately, that isolation has always been short sighted in the service of privilege.
The hate expressed by Metcalf after the trial comes from a longstanding place of isolating white advantage resistant to change. Culture maintains it. Racism does not appear to be particularly dangerous to the racist. They are not the ones who are lynched; they do the lynching. They are not the ones with the fear of deportation; they do the deporting.
They are not the ones who are unfairly incarcerated; they do the incarcerating. Only the targets see the toxic impact on white society.
Racism has its most debilitating influence on the racist. It does not seem so.
However, in deconstructing the precipitating fight that occurred on that rainy evening at the stadium, there was one perspective from white students who did not feel threatened because of their racial reality.
Their perception was influenced by the lessons of the fathers, the community and even the courts that seemed to offer them protection. It never really works. The hate killed and it killed the wrong person. That is an agonizing reality. There is no way that a father would teach his son lessons of hate, if he knew it would be deadly for him. Hate killed.
In this instance there is certainly enough grief to go around. Two fathers will never be the same. Nor will we.
We are compelled then to face the reality that racism affects all of us and it is always deadly. Ignoring it may buy time, but unchecked injustice blindly perpetuates certain death.
Remember Tupac’s acronym (and Angie Thomas’s book), The hate U give…
Brenda Wall, PhD Dr. Wall is a licensed psychologist who writes from Arlington and Atlanta.
