“At birth, you are given a pair of binoculars that see black life from a distance, never with the texture of intimacy,” writes Michael Eric Dyson in his essay “Death in Black and White”, which is a New York Times article in response to the deaths of Alton B Sterling and Philando Castile by “the hands of the police.” Dyson is talking about how white America will always struggle to understand black people. White America’s inability to understand African Americans is echoed in Claudia Rankine’s essay, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning”. Rankine recounts the deaths of African Americans by the hands of the police, she expresses the fear that she and her friends have for their children, and she interprets the intentions of Black Lives Matter. Using recent black deaths as examples, Rankine reveals that “though the white
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However, in the case of African Americans, there is a multitude of reasons to mistrust police officers, and there is no reason to find refuge in the law. American history can make anyone cynical: a history full of racial injustice, cruelty, and violence. Eula Biss illustrates this in her essay “Time and Distance Overcome” by juxtaposing the history of the telephone and the history of African American lynchings. To her shock, she discovered through newspaper articles that telephone poles, which “brought the human family in closer touch”, were perverted as “crucifixes” for African Americans to die upon them (Biss 540). This sort of racial violence has been prevalent in America “from the middle of the of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century” where “black men were lynched for crimes real and imagined” (Biss 539). American history ultimately rationalizes Rankine and her friend’s fears for their children. According to her, every African American faces the natural fears of facing “the randomness of life” and the “institutional racism [that] works in
However, in the case of African Americans, there is a multitude of reasons to mistrust police officers, and there is no reason to find refuge in the law. American history can make anyone cynical: a history full of racial injustice, cruelty, and violence. Eula Biss illustrates this in her essay “Time and Distance Overcome” by juxtaposing the history of the telephone and the history of African American lynchings. To her shock, she discovered through newspaper articles that telephone poles, which “brought the human family in closer touch”, were perverted as “crucifixes” for African Americans to die upon them (Biss 540). This sort of racial violence has been prevalent in America “from the middle of the of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century” where “black men were lynched for crimes real and imagined” (Biss 539). American history ultimately rationalizes Rankine and her friend’s fears for their children. According to her, every African American faces the natural fears of facing “the randomness of life” and the “institutional racism [that] works in