In McKinney, Texas, young black teenagers went to a pool party in a community swimming pool in June. White neighbours did not take kindly to their presence in this public pool. One woman, Tracey Carver-Allbritton, and her friend began to yell at the teenagers—“go back to where you came from” and “back to section 8 housing” (section 8 housing is public housing, typically used by the poor). A man named Sean Toon, who had been previously jailed for animal abuse and violence, called the police to have them remove the black teenagers from the pool. At this point, it could have been possible for the police to see that this was not an issue of trespassing (the teenagers had been invited to a party) but one of racism, of those who objected to black bodies in the public pool. But that was not what happened. The police officers yelled at the black teenagers, mainly at the black girls, and asked them to leave. When they talked back, the officers—particularly David Eric Casebolt—went ballistic. Casebolt grabbed a 15-year-old girl, threw her to the ground and put his body weight on her back. Then, when some teenaged boys came to her rescue, he drew his gun and pointed it threateningly at them. It was a hostile and dangerous situation. The police came to uphold the prejudices of some people against the rights of the others.
Protests broke out across the country, just as they have for some of the other outrages, forcing the resignation of Casebolt. As the sociologists put it, “protests often serve as one of few avenues for expressing anger and frustration with the prevailing social order”. On the surface, these protests appear to be a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement—linking the current dissatisfaction to the history of the fight for rights. While that is true, it is not fully accurate. The “institutional policies” that define the current conditions are not rooted in older forms of discrimination but in more recent actions.
During the 1990s, the attack on welfare and poverty came alongside the growth of policing and prisons. The gun—rather than education and dignity—was the response to starvation. Protests against police violence in that decade led to the creation of civilian police oversight boards. These boards, which are largely defunct, occasionally reappear to good effect. In Los Angeles, the civilian oversight board found that police officers had acted inappropriately when they killed Ezell Ford, a mentally ill black man.
These protests do not exhaust the rage in the U.S. The real rage is not black rage, says Emory University Professor Carol Anderson, but “white rage”. Black rage might “capture attention” and it does often lead to investigations and reconsideration of policy. But it is not as powerful as the more sedate white rage. What is this rage? It “smoulders in meetings where officials redraw precincts to dilute African American voting strength or seek to slash the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment”, Anderson says. In other words, it sets the “institutional policies” that end up with a police officer pointing a gun at a black teenager. This rage “carries an aura of respectability”, Anderson says. It runs the courts and the legislatures and sets the policies that allow Tracey Carver-Allbritton to curse at teenagers and Casebolt to take his gun out and wave it at them.
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