The Real #Fearandrace: Where is NPR's Show About Why America Should be Afraid of White Men?

I am a black American.

I am also a man.

When I look in the mirror, I do not see a reflection of monstrous black masculinity.

I see a human being.

In contrast, the White Gaze views black men as something dangerous and frightening—a type of Other that only through proper training can be forced into some type of civilized behavior. A global culture industry reproduces and circulates images of monstrous black masculinity. It is profitable for a few, and provides pleasure and thrills for millions, even while it robs black men en masse of their full humanity.

But that threat, the idea of monstrous blackness being unleashed on a given white person who lets down his or her guard, is always there. A feral dog or well-trained monster is existentially dangerous; only a fool proceeds from any other assumption.

This belief legitimates the social control of the prison industrial complex, a racist criminal justice system, custodial citizenship, and fuels a “law and order” political logic that is reflected by how white folks who even when made aware of gross racism against black people by the American legal system, still support such measures.

White people are apparently so afraid of black people that social psychologists have designed techniques to soothe their racial animus and anxiety:

Short of that, you can do something very simple to fight prejudice: Trick your brain. UNC-Chapel Hill's Payne suggests that by deliberately thinking a thought that is directly counter to widespread stereotypes, you can break normal patterns of association. What counts as counterstereotypical? 

Well, Payne's study found that when research subjects were instructed to think the word "safe" whenever they saw a black face—undermining the stereotypical association between black people and danger—they were 10 percent less likely than those in a control group to misidentify a gun in the Weapons Identification Task.

Monstrous black masculinity also creates a type of derangement, where through white racial paranoiac thinking unarmed black men being choked to death by police are made into some type of threat, black boys playing in the park can be shot on sight by police, hooded sweatshirts are the uniforms of street pirate brigands, and harmless objects are made into lethal weapons because they are held in the hands of a person who is black and male.

As Frantz Fanon observed, we who are black and brown, living a life in a white supremacist society, must be careful of not accepting how Whiteness and the White Gaze envisions our humanity because to do so is to internalize one’s own oppression.

(White) American society fears black men. This is not a new discovery. In fact, National Public Radio’s show “Code Switch” recently featured two shows on the topic. 

It would appear that there is a political economy to the “national conversation on race”, one where talking in some flat version of "communicative democracy" is deemed to be a palliative for how white racism negatively impacts the life chances of non-whites.

The repetitiveness of this tired “national conversation” on race is tedious.

Yes, there has been clear, demonstrable, and obvious “progress” on many issues related to the colorline. But, the core value that America is a society structured around maintaining and preserving white privilege and white supremacy, remains untouched. This gem draws it power from how anti-black racism is treated as a type of novelty or aberration when in fact it is a structural feature of American society. It is only the willfully ignorant, the foolish, and dishonest actors who are truly shocked by white racism against people of color in the United States.

This shock and surprise does political work by creating a state of emotional exhaustion among the truth-tellers, who either through lived experience, direct observation, study, or scholarship, know that white supremacy is real and omnipresent (even in the lie that is “post racial” America), yet they are forced to repeatedly treat a “known known” as some type of riddle and “unknown unknown”.

The racism deniers can then hide behind phrases such as “I didn’t know”. Alternatively, those white racists who seek rehabilitation through some shallow act of public apology can say “I am sorry” when their backstage racism is brought out to the frontstage of American life.

The truth-tellers are left repeating the same basic facts...again, and again, and again.

The blindness of Whiteness, its false innocence, the fragility, the self-serving lies both big and small that sustain Whiteness as both ideology and social practice, are revealed in many moments.

For example, during the 1960s, when formal Jim and Jane Crow white supremacy was still the law, a majority of white Americans actually reported to Gallup pollsters that black people had an equal chance of success in the United States.

This delusion continues in the Age of Obama, when too many members of the white public continue to be somehow shocked or surprised by the repeated, videotaped, public episodes of police violence against African-Americans.

[Surprise and shock to which I respond as follows: when black and brown folks were telling you, for centuries, that the police and the courts are racist and violent against us, did you think that we were lying, crazy, or some combination of the two?]

In many ways, colorblind and aversive racism’s greatest defense mechanism is its capacity to exhaust the righteous opposition.

White America’s fear of black men, of what it sees as our monstrous black masculinity, is perverse, a derangement of rational thinking. If any group should be fearful, it is African-Americans who should be terrified of White Americans. The pogroms, lynchings, chain gangs, rape, murder, enslavement, land theft, job discrimination, mass incarceration, wealth stealing, and other indignities were not visited by Black America onto White America. Those crimes, both interpersonal and against humanity, were committed by White America against black folks. The notion that there is some type of shared responsibility for racism in America is one of the greatest and most onerous lies of the post civil rights era.

The power of that lie is so great that it has been suggested and legitimated by the United States’ first black president in his very problematic “A More Perfect Union” speech while also being echoed by the Right-wing hate media.

This lie is not alone; it exists in a constellation alongside such fictions as “reverse racism”, white victimology and “oppression”, and how “anti-white” “racism” is imagined by too many whites Americans as now being a greater social problem than discrimination against people of color.

America’s fear of black men is also contradictory and paradoxical. White America sees black men and our masculinity as something monstrous and dangerous while at the same time imitating, copying, and imitating black style, fashion, sensibilities, aesthetic, and the cool pose. White America’s historic and profound obsession with black men’s sexuality stands without need for comment on the obvious.

How White America has reconciled the cognitive dissonance that comes with being fascinated and compelled by and to the black body while simultaneously loathing and fearing it, remains of the great puzzles of psychohistory.

In a world that is unlikely to ever be made real except in the fantasies of Afrotopian dreamers, NPR would feature a series of shows called “America’s Fear of White Men”.

White men have started two world wars, destroyed the American economy by engaging in casino capitalism, commit mass shootings in America’s schools, and Right-wing domestic terrorists, a group that are almost exclusively white and male, constitute one of the primary threats to domestic security in the United States in the present.

White men are also at the forefront of organized, violent, anti-black hate groups.

Despite such facts, narratives of monstrous black masculinity are far more compelling to White America.

White masculinity is neither wholly benign nor morally neutral.

Monstrous White Masculinity has killed many thousands of people in the United States. Yet somehow, fictions of monstrous black masculinity dominate the news media and the white American collective subconscious.