Is Every Racial Incident, Racial?

The strength of America is that there are so many “others.” The people of the U.S. are of more different backgrounds than any other nation.

But is there a special tension between those people who are black and those who are not?

This is about a CVS pharmacy in Chicago. A black woman wanted to buy an item with a store coupon.

She posted this account of what happened on Facebook.
So, THIS just happened: I had the police called on me for attempting to use a coupon at a CVS Pharmacy in Chicago! I stopped in to make a purchase using a coupon mailed to me as replacement for defective product. The manager on duty said that he’d never seen a coupon like the one I had and said that he thought it was fraudulent.

When I asked for his name and his title/role within the store, he became agitated and rude. When I pulled out my phone to document what happened and exactly what he’d said to me (AND how he’d said it!) he turned his back and walked away from me. When I followed him and demanded that he answer my question, he ran to the back of the store and slammed a door in my face. Meanwhile, the other manager, who’d been helping me initially, came running back to tell me that I’d better leave the store immediately, because he’d called the police. [Slightly edited for readability.]

A store employee was rude. The store manager panicked. The woman was assertive. Social media made the incident known everywhere.

This type of incident is no longer unusual. It is the most recent of many such reports. But is it new or yet another event that we now witness because of technology? The answer is becoming clear. Technology allows us to see more. Black people are subject to more than their share of unjust behavior.

That is a problem for both kinds of people. Those who are black. Those who are not black. The culture of a people comes from birth and community.

Black people in the U.S. have a history that is unique. They came to this country against their will. Slave owners bought, sold and treated them as property. The Civil War liberated black people from slavery. But that did not erase a distinctive feature – the color of their skin.

The reasons are complex. But non-black people treated black people as less than equal. Some of this treatment was not on purpose. Some of it was. It has taken place over a long period. It has left scars. Scars that are not easy to erase.

As a result, even today black people are alert to mistreatment. Incidents like the one in CVS will continue. Recording of these events also will continue and increase.

It is not helping that Donald Trump’s America is at war with immigrants, legal and illegal. The President’s “America First” movement is not about “white people first.” But some Americans are coming to see it that way.

There must be new ways of reconciling people. They are not likely to happen soon.

Source: The New York Times July 16, 2018

.