It Really Is Open Season on Black People

“It just feels like they’re coming for us. It’s not paranoia. It’s objectively just looking at what is happening…It used to be people felt shame for being a racist or saying the word ‘nigger’. Not now.”

— Eva Patterson, founder of Oakland’s Equal Justice Society, on the murder of 18-year-old Nia Wilson by a white supremacist parolee.

The frequency and intensity of attacks against black people by both state and non-state actors is now a daily Internet spectacle. From online insults and threats, and in-your-face-challenges and hassles by store clerks and managers, and harassment by smart-phone-wielding protectors of public (read: white) spaces, to violent assaults and cold-blooded murder by an emboldened white citizenry and its paramilitary killer cop enforcers — all of these “events,” we once believed, were not happening any more than the usual public and private degradations blacks have always endured.

Indeed, people like actor Will Smith argue that there really is nothing new about these 21st century iterations of black debasement. The only difference now, he said, is that almost everyone sports a hand-held video camera which captures these “incidents.” These real time videos render these now quotidian outrages undeniable, or at least harder to rationalize as the exceptional acts of a handful of demented, abnormal, and…