Maybe it’s a function of the power of social media to spread news almost instantaneously. Then again, maybe it’s representative of a real uptick in incidents in which white people have taken it upon themselves to “police” black adults and kids in incredibly mundane situations: the young woman taking a nap in the common room of her dorm; the 8-year old girl selling water in front of her house so she could go to Disneyland; the man doing repair work on his own house (where he lived!); the young people who moved some grass on a neighbor’s yard; and most recently, a young man who was physically assaulted by a white woman who didn’t want him (an invited guest) in “her pool”.

I fear these incidents represent a societal trend that hearkens back to America’s Jim Crow past. Everyday white folks, meaning white folks who do not work in law enforcement, are tapping into a kind of collective unconscious vis-à-vis race that hasn’t surfaced in a long time. As a person in his late 70s, I remember quite well those days in the 40s and 50s when even in Northern areas, not-so-invisible lines existed across neighborhoods, job sites, churches, schools and social events. The silence about these realities was so profound that we rarely complained except among ourselves. One remarkable incident in my life occurred during a vacation when an affluent white man aggressively pursued a “who are you” conversation with me, obviously offended that my wife and I were on the same tour that he was. It didn’t get overtly racial. His bluster peaked, then (fortunately) self-doused when he learned that I worked for Harvard University, which led him to attack “Harvard liberals” instead.

His anger, like that expressed in several of the incidents I reference above, is curious to me given the fear of black aggression. If it’s a universal characteristic, that we’re all supposedly dangerous Willy Horton types, why bother us at all and risk the dreaded “black rage”? Who’s really angry here?

I find it very worrisome that increasingly white folks seem to relieve the frustrations of their lives by displacing their animus onto black people they don’t even know and that what they’re threatened by seems so broad, ranging from fear of an 8-year-old girl selling water to a boy in a swimming pool. This not a direction I think we want to go in, but it seems that as a society, we are nonetheless charging into this unfortunate abyss.

I have labeled these kinds of incidents “mundane” but they really are not. We all have a finite number of days on this planet. Who has time for unprovoked attacks on one’s right to exist while going through everyday life? As we know from the research the impact of these types of stresses on the psychological and physiological well-being of individuals and the relationship systems they’re part of, is real. In most cases, we don’t have any recourse to address them effectively and so we absorb them, generation after generation. We had, or at least we thought we had the benefit of a couple of decades of some semblance of sensitivity or caution thanks to white-despised “political correctedness”. Unfortunately, even that appears to be crumbling as white people feel free to “break out” and summon up their old prejudices, which they apparently felt cheated out of airing.

One aspect of this situation merits close watching: many of these white confronters attempt to use police and 9-1-1- calls to enforce their wills on “offending” African-Americans. Given our problems with racially motivated police misconduct, black people’s intense anxiety about these situations is quite appropriate. Police’s ability to judge accurately whether or not these types of situations warrant action on their part will be stressed to the limits. The demand that black people “knuckle under” to police authority has been a core feature of many instances of excessive police force. How will that play out with everyday white folks demanding the same authoritarian privilege?

Typing While Black welcomes this guest blogger!