Second-Class Citizenry

It is much too easy to pass judgment on these United States. With all manner of television shows, an outsider could say that Americans are backward folks; that they are sexual predators, greedy, wasteful and a litany of other adjectives, pronouns and invectives. But accusations such as these are simplistic and mostly hyperbole.

However, the one thing that is being exhibited time and time again is the second-class citizenry of America’s African Americans. Case in point: Look again at the photograph above. If you have not already seen this video, go to google and find the incident at a pool in Texas. Once you get over your initial indignation, you must look at this picture again to find what is so odd about it. If you haven’t figured it out yet, let us help you. There’s a large man on the center left of the image. He is wearing denim shorts, a pair of sneakers and a polo T shirt. If you watch the video, you can tell that he is trying to help the police man – he is keeping the peace and watching, authoritatively, while someone’s daughter is subjected to semi-torture.

If you thought that this man is an undercover operative, we do not blame you. Well, he is neither a McKinney police officer nor a law enforcement type. His name is Sean Toon, a man who was sentenced to more than nine months in jail after pleading guilty to killing and maiming prize farm animals and covering them in paint. Police records also show that he was separately sentenced to two and a half months in jail for assault.

Now, just think for a moment: Would a person of color, an African American, with a prison record have been allowed to walk all over the ‘crime scene’ the way Mr. Toon did? Although he refused to give his second name in national television interviews, we found out that he is the one who called the police to say that chaos was building at the pool. And on television, he said that he did not see anything wrong with the policeman driving his knee into the teenage girl’s back. Many other people have agreed with Mr. Toon.

But when you juxtapose this pool incident with the deaths of black people at the hands of law enforcement officers and also due to black on black crime, a pattern may start to emerge around certain insulation; cynicism or even a blind eye when it comes to African Americans. It seems as though we have become so biased to blacks that many of us do not even see them as human anymore. When Americans talk about ‘welfare queens,’ they think about black women – even though blacks do not gain as much from welfare as whites do. When people mention the word ‘thug,’ you could almost hear the ‘N’ word under their breath. And just like happened in the Trayvon Martin incident, we seem to be so cut off from reality that we treat black children like the poor girl in the picture above as though they are adults. Because they are black, they do not get the sort of protection reserved for our young.

To us, the image above is not evidence of second-class citizenry. It is just indicative of the things we take for granted. It is much too easy to assume things about America, and for the most part, we would be wrong. Invariably, one cannot be wrong about the ‘otherness’ of America’s black population. One just needs to close their eyes and imagine what would have happened if the races of the people in this picture were, somehow, morphed into their polar opposites. What if that was a black officer on top of a white teenage girl? What if Sean Toon was a big black man amongst white teenagers in bathing suits?

The Habari Network Editorial Board
June 15, 2015.