I don’t know if irony is a strong enough word to describe how a district, which in the last presidential election voted overwhelmingly Republican, can suddenly say, “Forget the debt crisis, let’s use big government’s tax-paying dollars to intervene in our lives and save us from being ‘invaded’ by a bunch of pool-partying Black kids.”
And I’m talking about McKinney, Texas, an area that is around 70 percent white and 10 percent Black. A place where a fight at a pool party and subsequent police assault took place. And all this happened after a grown woman who is supposed to know better curses at children, telling them that they don’t belong in her neighborhood and need to go back to their Section 8 homes. McKinney is a place where just last year, more than a 100 residents attended a city council meeting to speak out against a 167-unit affordable housing and Section 8 apartment complex slated to be constructed in their backyards. According to the McKinney Courier-Gazette, “Many expressed concerned [sic] with the Section 8 vouchers being permissible for each of the developments, saying they would bring down property values, increase crime in the area and negatively affect nearby schools.”
And I’m willing to bet that those developments would also increase the presence of Black and brown kids at their community pools…
What is at issue here is more than the misconduct of a single overzealous cop who did a tuck-and-roll before attacking children and slamming one girl to the ground. Believe it or not, he and the other officers who were summoned to the scene were just responding to orders. The orders of a paranoid community of people who use the police to maintain their borders and basically keep us out.
Long gone are the days of sundown towns that used to post signs at city limits warning Blacks, Jews, and other undesirables that they were not welcome in their town, particularly after the sun had set. That sort of outward hostile discrimination was made illegal by the Civil Rights Act of 1968. And by today’s standard, being blatantly racist is simply not polite form. Instead, more contemporary, and yet subtle versions of these sundown towns have surfaced. They manifest themselves in public bus routes, which limit travel to and from mostly White suburban enclaves (with the exception of suburban shopping centers, because somebody has to flip the burgers at the neighborhood Outback Steakhouse). Or this discrimination rears its ugly head in the always popular white middle-class concern about maintaining high property values. Complaining about this ensures that those low-wage workers who ride those limited bus routes never own property in the communities in which they work. This discrimination is also hidden behind gated communities and homeowner associations who rule by an alleged democratic process to determine through a system of coded rules, regulations and language, who is and who is not suitable for their neighborhood. And when all of that fails to keep us out, that’s when they use the police to do the enforcing for them.
As some members of law enforcement recently pointed out in a Reddit ProtectAndServe forum, some police officers are tired of white people, in particular, wasting government resources by calling 911 to report every allegedly suspicious Black person in their neighborhood. As one officer, in particular, noted:
“So I’m working last week and get dispatched to a call of ‘Suspicious Activity.’ Ya’ll wanna know what the suspicious activity was? Someone walking around in the dark with a flashlight and crow bar? Nope. Someone walking into a bank with a full face mask on? Nope. ‘It was two black males who were jump starting a car at 930 in the morning. That was it. Nothing else. Someone called it in. People. People. People. If you’re going to be a racist, stereotypical jerk… keep it to yourself.”
It was a call to the police about a suspicious black person who did not belong in the Walmart with a gun in an open carry state, which resulted in John Crawford II being gunned down. It was a call to police about a suspicious Black kid playing with a gun – made suspicious because obviously he did not belong – that led to Tamir Rice being shot down only seconds after police arrived on the scene. In the weeks before fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman made 46 calls to the Sanford Police Department, mostly about suspicious Black people who did not belong. And it was several calls by so-called concerned neighbors about the suspicious Black pool partygoers who did not belong in their community, which is most at fault for the incident in McKinney, Texas.
What we are seeing in Texas, and around America for that matter, is more than an issue of a few bad apples on the police force. What we are seeing are communities of predominantly white people using whatever resource is available to them to ensure that they stay predominantly white. What we saw in Texas was about more than Officer Eric Casebolt slamming a child into the ground and putting his knees in her back. It’s about the adults who made the decision that certain people were not welcome in their community and then stood around and watched – and in some cases aided – the police as they enforced their preferences. When we make this an issue just about what the police did in this particular incident, we fail to get at the heart of what is really going on here.
A similar incident happened in 2009 in my home state of Pennsylvania. Right outside of Philadelphia, a bunch of Black kids from Northeast Philly were denied access to a predominantly white private swimming club because they felt that the presence of these teens might change the complexion of the pool. In response, hundreds of families from diverse backgrounds throughout Philly drove out to that swimming club and protested every single day until they got the message that such exclusionary treatment had no place in modern society. Similar measures need to be taken for this Texas town to understand the same.
