External threats vs internal threats...

The problems facing the Black community here in the USA

A white man’s perspective

Do you remember where you were on September 11^th, 2001?  I was on a golf course that morning.  I’ll never forget how I felt when I came into the clubhouse and saw the news playing on the TV showing that a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York City.  I sat there for a while watching the news reports and was horrified as I saw, live on the air, the second plane hit the second tower.  I continued to watch and eventually saw the buildings come tumbling down.  The next few days and weeks were filled with a swell of patriotism.  The country became united against a common foe.  We had real enemy in Osama Bin Laden and the terrorist group Al-Qaeda; an enemy that was willing to kill Americans and willing to come here to do it.  We had a real external threat that all people in the country could come together and oppose.  It was easy for white, black, brown, and all colors to suspend petty differences and be united against this common enemy.

During this time racial division was at an all-time low because of our common enemy; our external threat.  That stands in stark contrast to our country today where racial division is at a high not seen since the 1960s.  You see, as we waged the war on terror and as more victories were won and as the fight against terrorism seemed more remote and less “front of mind” we lost sight of the external threat and began to fight amongst ourselves.  If you look back through history you’ll see that anytime our country had a significant external threat we as a country always came together to oppose that threat (terrorism, Soviet Russia, Nazis, all the way back to the British in 1776).  When the coast is clear and no large external threat presents itself then we tend to divide and fight amongst ourselves, breaking down along group lines, whether those lines be racial (white, black), political (Republican, Democrat), or economics (wealthy, working class).

This point is brilliantly illustrated in the movie Independence Day.  During this movie the World, with all its squabbling and warring countries, suddenly finds itself invaded by extraterrestrial aliens.  In order to defeat this external threat the countries of the World must rally together (with the help of Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum) to defeat this common enemy, this external threat.  In order to survive, these countries must put aside their differences and focus on the commonalities.  They had to remember that we are all human.  Every man woman and child on the earth shares this common element, our humanity, and humanity itself was threatened and on the verge of extinction.  In that moment, trade wars and boundary disputes no longer mattered.  We must defeat the external force if we are to survive.

Now, that’s not to say that the countries of the world didn’t have legitimate problems that still needed to be addressed.  They absolutely did, but those problems must be put on hold until the survival of the species was ensured.  And while it wasn’t addressed in the movie, I can only imagine that on the day after the invading force was defeated the countries of the world mostly likely resumed their petty differences.  What is more likely to happen I wonder?  That the world might be invaded by aliens (assuming for just a moment that they are real and motivated to do such a thing) or that we might destroy ourselves in a volley of nuclear destruction from our own missiles?  The question may seem silly today but folks in mid-October 1962 probably would have said “nuclear fire”. 

If therefor we can assume that external threats will always ensure that we come together to defeat them, then one could suppose that the greatest threats are the internal threats.  The threats posed to ourselves, from ourselves.  From one opposing group to another.  North vs South.  The civil war of this country is one of the best examples I can think of where the danger we faced was a self-imposed danger created when two groups could not agree.  These tensions, if left unabated, always lead to violence and eventually death.  Sometimes the scale is small like we’ve seen over the last few weeks and days in the form of race violence between the black community and police offices.  Sometimes the scale is very large like the aforementioned Civil War.

So what is the Black community to do?  It almost seems as though I’m making a case that they should ignore these perceived wrongs they feel have been committed against their community in the sake of maintaining the peace of the whole country.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Racism is real, and racism can be found in almost all places.  For anyone to make the argument that there are no racist police officers, who have over the years mistreated and abused and even murdered members of the black community, simply have their heads in the sand and don’t want to admit the truth (on a side note, anyone who says all police office are racist are equally wrong).  The black community has a right to seek justice for what they perceive as an external threat.  White racism, for the black community, represents an external force that threatens their whole community.  But like a country, or even the world as a whole, the black community must be careful that they do not spend all their time focused on defeating the external threat while ignoring the internal one.

Yes I’m talking about groups within groups within groups at this point and it’s starting to get a little deep into the weeds now, but hang with me.  Like any other group of any other size (say a country for example), racial or ethnic groups are just smaller versions of these larger groups.  And like their big brothers they face both external and internal threats.  I laid this out already in the example of the movie Independence Day and the example of the Civil War.  The black community is no different.  Right now the black community, and all the members of it, are focused on the external threat from white police office racism and the violence those offices commit toward the black community. As a result the black community as a whole (not all individuals mind you) spends all its time protesting and speaking out against this issue.  But while they are focused on the external threat the internal threats are destroying their community.  It’s all kind of like a man fighting off a swarm of bees while unbeknownst to him he’s dying of cancer.  That’s an extreme metaphor but you get my point.  The black community leaders, including those in the black lives matter movement, talk about the numbers of young black men who are shot by police, but this numbers pales in comparison to the number of black on black homicides each year.  Yet the leaders of the black community say nothing about black on black violence.  Where is Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or even President Obama on that issue?  Nowhere to be found.  If the black community is being hunted and eliminated then a strong argument can be made that they are hunting themselves.  These internal issues such as gang violence, drugs, the breakdown of the family, and chronic employment do more to hurt the black community every day than a few rouge police officers ever could.  The black community must not spend all its time focused on the wrong issues.  My grandmother used to say that people like that would strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.

There are times, when the aliens are attacking, that everything else must be set aside to face the common foe that we all have.  But for individuals in the black community, it is my belief that their greatest threats come not from without, but from within.

Abraham Lincoln said this of the United States: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”  I think the same can be said of the black community, and all of us for that matter.