The recent murders of people of color has got me thinking about the pecking order aspect of racism, among other things. Pecking orders exist in all communities. The criteria behind them is almost always lazy, usually involving some obvious characteristic.
Absent of any meaningful diversity, the pecking order in the small town where I grew up was mostly determined by two things: history and wealth. Cops mostly hassled and arrested poor outsiders and newcomers.1
This is the police injustice I understood as a white boy living in a small white town —- disgusting, but not horrifying. Like many I suspect, my white small town experience led to white small town racist thinking. “Cops are bad, but they don’t just murder black people for no reason.”
It took leaving that small town for me to learn that not all pecking orders are equal.
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This isn’t to say the cops weren’t racist. They also hassled minorities when they could, but their opportunity to do so was already mitigated by the institutional racism that kept minorities out of my small town in the first place. ↩︎