I’m not offering anything new here. Everyone knows what people mean when refer to “inner city” or “urban” problems. Everyone knows that “thug” is meant as a gentler way of saying negro. And everyone knows that this is part of the process of dehumanization. And this process is key to any sustained effort to enforce second class citizenship.
After all, how could slavery and subsequently Jim Crow be tolerated if ruling caste were forced to admit that those whom they were oppressing are indeed people? Why do you think that the famous sign, so simple yet so profound, to be seen at many actions led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. read simply “I AM A MAN”?
It almost speaks for itself that humanity cannot confront its own inhumanity so we use coded language to help ourselves sleep. The tragedies in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Germany might have played out differently if the perpetrators of those horrors hadn’t convinced themselves that their victims were “snakes and cockroaches.” If our youth weren’t dismissed as thugs in the mainstream conversation maybe they wouldn’t be 21 times more likely to be killed by the police. Maybe there would be more of us college than in prison and not the other way around.
I repeat myself, I am not offering anything new. To the contrary consider this the permanent place that the city has had in the minds of bigots.In the leadup to the pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were preceded, predictably, by an uptick in anti-Semitic rhetoric and sentiment. When Russians referred to cosmopolitan culture everyone knew exactly who they were talking about.
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