The Racism/Patriarchy Connection
Any progress on one front requires facing the truths of the other.
Maybe it takes two months of restless confinement across a country beset by the stress of a pandemic and the manhandling of a delusional President before the national news headlines finally pay consistent attention. White violence against black people in America is, of course, nothing new. It was woven into the conditions of our country’s birth and lives in us, today, un-reconciled, as our worst legacy. The protests aren’t new, either, but the recent attention in the media, and especially, albeit incrementally, from more white Americans and American businesses might be seen as a bronze lining, at least, rising out of some of the direst months on recent record in American history.
But even amidst the promise that something positive might surface from the heart-wrenching death of George Floyd, something else that’s central to what is happening is not being talked about. Something so obvious, so visible, yet so internalized in most of us that we don’t even think to mention it: that is, that the violence enacted by police officers against black Americans is exclusively perpetrated by white men.
Like racism, which lives in our culture in insidious ways that evade mention, the kind of masculinity that feeds violence against black Americans pivots on a need to dominate and assert superiority in order to protect the underlying, fragility of patriarchal self-esteem. This factor contributing to the violence we are witnessing in America remains largely unconscious and absent from public dialogue.
We talk about violence as a human issue, but, if you look at who perpetrates most violence, all humans are far from equally prone to enact it. In the aftermath of these tragedies, networks stream talk about gun restrictions, the second amendment, Trump supporters debate Democrats on where the blame lies for the violence on the front lines of policing; if we are lucky, we hear mention of mental illness, but what is consistently missing in all this framing is that the violence, itself, is bound up with something equally central and visible that’s calling for our attention.
As a culture, we remain largely asleep to how norms of patriarchal…