I’m a Domestic Terrorist

Mary Walrath

I’m a domestic terrorist. If you’re White like me, you could be as well. So skilled are we at terrorizing a segment of the population that our work is hidden in plain sight. Although it has been going on for centuries, few of us are cognizant of it.

A few weeks ago I happened upon a black woman I knew from my volunteer work for Street Sense. She was standing on a public sidewalk close to a Metro entrance, selling the paper.

We talked for 10 minutes about an article she had been writing until she said, “Those cops drove off a minute ago.”

“What cops?” I said.

“You didn’t see them? The two White cops parked down the block? Been there half an hour,” she replied.

No, I hadn’t. I’m a successful, middle-aged White guy. The police are supposed to keep a lookout for me, not the other way around.

“Some of the White cops in D.C. are very racist,” she said. “They hassle me a lot when I’m selling the paper at this Metro. They didn’t hassle me now because you’re standing here.”

In that moment I saw, with an unwanted clarity, what it is to be an African-American in our country. I’ve brooded over this encounter. An understanding I would prefer not to have keeps presenting itself. Every day, most White people in America, including me, practice a covert form of domestic terrorism against African-Americans.

According to the FBI, if we seek to further a political or social objective by intimidating others through the use of violence or threats of violence against a person or persons, we are committing domestic terrorism. Given this definition, White people in the United States have been perpetrating acts of domestic terrorism against African-Americans for centuries. And we still do.

How? Everyday, White America reminds African-Americans they aren’t in our country on a first-class ticket.

Black Lives Matter isn’t just a hashtag. It’s also a question.

Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by the police as White Americans. Household net worth for Black families is one-twentieth of that of White families. Black people die about 3.4 years earlier than White people. Infant mortality among Black children is more than twice that of White children. The percentage gap between White college degree holders versus Black college degree holders is wider than it was 50 years ago. Schools, jobs, incomes, health — Black people don’t even come close to equality with White people.

On Sept. 19, 2016, a United Nations convoy taking food to starving Syrians in Aleppo was bombed and partially destroyed. But truth be told, it seems we know more about people who are so-called food insecure in Syria than in the United States. Few Americans are aware that more than 25 percent of African-American children live in households classified as food insecure by the U.S. government. This means that millions of children go through periods of time when they are unsure where their next meal is coming from or times when they simply do not receive the amount of food their bodies need. To be plain, they go hungry.

Could we make feeding these Black American children a priority over feeding hungry people in foreign countries like Syria? Yes. Do we? Of course not. Why? You know how it is, one argument goes: Having the government feed these children just makes their parents lazy and even more irresponsible. And to avoid this, to remind them who is boss and to ensure that not one struggling African-American receives a free sandwich from the federal government, we long ago gave up using the carrot. Nowadays we use the stick. The public policy of the United States is to keep millions of Black Americans on the edge of starvation.

The media and the government keep us in a low-level state of fear, that we will be killed by Islamic terrorists already here in America. Domestic terrorism, they call it. But who are the real domestic terrorists? Maybe it’s us, White people in America who refuse to believe that Black children in America go hungry. And no doubt, if we were convinced, we would refuse to support a federally funded program ensuring that millions of African-American children received enough food at every single meal on every single day of every single year.

Do Black lives matter? No. Who ever said they did?


Issues |Civil Rights|Hunger|Systemic Racism

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