"I ain't got no quarrel with the VietCong... No VietCong ever called me nigger."--Muhammad Ali

So yesterday I was sitting around watching obscure movies, as is my wont. This week's selection was an old documentary by the name of The War at Home (Brown and Silber, 1979). Admittedly, my feelings going into it were most aptly described as tepid considering that a good portion of the time older documentaries tend to be rather amateurish relative to their contemporary brethren. As it turns out, TWAH, with it's thorough examination of the anti-war protests on the microcosmic University of Wisconsin campus during the 1960s and 70s was anything but. As I so often do upon completion of movies of its ilk, I trotted off to see if I couldn't start a fight about it on the IMDb message boards. Much to my chagrin, it's board was only possessed of a solitary thread containing one lonely post. Well, two posts if you include my response to the original lonely post.

At any rate, that post contained some things that started me thinking about the current state of race relations in America. The thing is, TWAH contained some pretty graphic scenes of police brutalizing some rather peaceful sit-in participants. Truth be told, I've been privy to so many books, movies, and documentaries about that era that no amount of police violence contained therein really affects me. Further, having grown up in a Deep South backwater, I've personally known a good many people who've been on the wrong end of such violence. Frankly, the only thing that's still shocking about police brutality, as I told the naive sod on IMDb, is that anyone is still shocked by it. To make a long story not so long, I could tell immediately by his horror that he was white.

And that's the rub. Within the documentary, on the one hand you had a bunch of white middle-class folks talking about how affected they were by the Kent State Killings (and I use the word 'killings' because to this day I maintain that the more common nomenclature 'massacre' is a misnomer; there were only actually four deaths, hardly qualifying as a massacre in my mind). That reaction was contrasted by two interviewees who were a pair of African-Americans, Wahid Rashad and his wife, who described feeling far less than visceral about Kent. The fact was, they said, between the murders of Martin Luther King and racist pig cops they were hardly surprised.

Unfortunately, to this day the distinction between white and minority thinking on issues like this persists. I say unfortunately because that difference in thinking is more or less exemplary of the latent racism so pervasive in the white community, a latent racism which indirectly in turn contributes to the persistence of problems like police brutality. Take for instance the Battle of Seattle and the popular reactions to it at the time. Why was it so hard for people to believe that the police there actually caused the violence despite the assertions of the protesters? Between Rodney King, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo, you would have thought people would have gotten the idea that the police were/are a rather untidy little group of jack-booted fascists. Why didn't they? I'll tell you why. The one thing King, Louima, and Diallo all had in common was the color of their skin: black.

I'm reminded of a conversation between two of a good buddy's co-workers after a company softball game. They were discussing the virtues and drawbacks of various parts of California when the discussion turned to Orange County. One extolled the area's virtues, the other expressed his disdain by saying, 'The police over there are fucked up!' The former just wouldn't buy it no matter how much the latter tried to convince him. I'll let you to work out for yourself which one was black and which one white. The difference of opinion, which could only stem from the difference in the way people of various races get treated by the cops, betrays a subtle racism in and of itself. Sadly, that conversation took place only two years ago, and given the recent murder of Oscar Grant by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle, it appears as though things (despite the election of a mixed race president) haven't changed all that much since the days of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.