The Long History of Presumed White Innocence and Black Guilt

[marmar]

The Long History of Presumed White Innocence and Black Guilt

Wednesday, 10 December 2014 12:46
By Claudia Garcia-Rojas, Bitch Media | Op-Ed


One hundred and twenty-two years ago, Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist who reported on the horrors carried out by white lynch mobs against Southern blacks, penned a oft-pronounced slogan that still rings true today: "This is a white man's country and the white man must rule."

This year, the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner further cement these words. In the past three weeks, grand juries decided not to indict the police officers who caused the deaths—Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo—for any crime.

Following the announcement of Wilson's non-indictment, the grand jury released his sworn statement. His words reveal a narrative so grossly entrenched in our American culture that it goes uncontested to this day: this is the narrative of white innocence.

"White innocence is the insistence on the innocence or absence of responsibility of the contemporary white person," argues Thomas Ross, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. What this means is that white people will not be considered guilty of a crime simply because on the color of their skin. This is due to the fact that white innocence is historically predicated on the criminalization and violation of (primarily) black bodies. The framing of whites throughout United States as inherently innocent and blacks as guilty not only encourages the continued perpetuation of white violence against black people, such as physical police violence, the discriminatory enforcement of laws, and mass incarceration, but also makes it a necessary condition of the state, as the state maintains its power and dominance through the criminalization of (mainly) black people. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/27930-the-long-history-of-presumed-white-innocence-and-black-guilt

[Gothmog]

1. That is an interesting article