Rapid City Mayor Steve Allender on the campaign trail. Photo from Facebook
Trouble brewing on the racist horizon
Brace yourself for some good old fashioned business as usual
By James Giago Davies This is the calm before the Archie Bunker storm. Kids are ready to go back to school, football season about to kick off, it seems like just another late August, but something is brewing, something disturbing moves in a mysterious way. Rapid City has a new mayor, and a half century of watching, and experiencing, how this town works, has alarm bells ringing in my head. At some point in the months to come there is going to be a racially charged incident, and past experience also tells me this new mayor is not going to be a peacekeeper, a wound healer, he is going to be in the pot stirring thick of it, and he is not going to be our friend. But this is only my opinion and at best an educated assumption. For those of us who grew up in this town, it is more than just decrying racism on principle, there is the small, inconvenient reality of having actually lived it, suffered from it. Those wounds may have some jumping at shadows, pointing fingers at paranoid suspicions; I have witnessed charges of racism where there are none. But lurking beyond the false positives are the actual racists, and they are not fringe misfits, hating from their powerless armchairs. Past experience tells me they are people who own businesses, sit on committees, they are cops, teachers, nurses, civil servants, social workers, newspaper employees; they hold respectable positions on all levels. None of that would matter if they did not act on that racism, not just impulsively on their own, but proactively, even institutionally, channeling that hate through policy and process, in concert with other like minded hate mongers. If you had a dollar for every Rapid City racist who stepped up and owned his racism publicly, you’d be dead broke, but you’d never work another day in your life if you had that same dollar for every time, when sure of their company, they not only spewed bile, but abused a circumstance or their authority to actualize it. Before I even started school, I experienced racism in Rapid City, but at that age you just assume this person doesn’t like you, or is making trouble for your family because they are just bad people. That perception persists even after school starts, until the first teacher steps up and brazenly expresses it, slaps the glasses off your face and says, “Finally one of you people comes along with some brains and this is how you act!” But that teacher is just getting warmed up. There is an art class for gifted students held in the gymnasium every Thursday, but you and your breed Oglala best friend, Bryan Janis, are not selected for that art class by this teacher, even though you are the two best artists in the school. Later, when confronted with this, when asked by other concerned teachers why she sent the two White kids instead, she screams at the school principal—“I wanted the opportunity to go to students I knew would take advantage of it!” I doubt childhood experiences like that are anything unique and special, and for a breed Indian in this town, they are business as usual. The police came to our house one time, over a neighborhood dispute, and they stood by calmly and respectfully, while our White neighbor told his side of the story, but when my mother attempted to have her say, and despite the fact she never smoked or drank and had never been in trouble in her Catholic schoolgirl life, the cop’s hand immediately went to his gun butt, and he told her to shut up. I doubt her experiences are anything unique and special, for a breed Indian in this town, they are business as usual. There is no doubt there is a disproportionate amount of crime and violence among the urban Lakota, and real Lakota criminals are arrested and justifiably sentenced for their crimes. But even here racism makes matters worse. Lakota with the same criminal history as White counterparts receive stiffer penalties—that’s a fact, twice verified over three decades, and even acknowledged by a prominent South Dakota judge. Why does it happen? Are they sitting in their back rooms plotting racist schemes to mistreat incarcerated Lakota? No, I think in their hearts, they are decent people, and to be fair, the most dehumanizing experience of my life was the night I spent in Pine Ridge lock up. Tribal police are as bad or worse than any dominant culture cop. When they sentence Lakota with the same criminal history as White counterparts to consistently stiffer penalties, they do so because he doesn’t look, think or act anything like them. Nothing triggers their empathy, their compassion. Had he been White he might have resembled their nephew or cousin or best friend, but they cannot see past his brown-ness—the parsimony of perception only allows them to consider the worst part of him as his defining nature, while routinely factoring in the redeeming characteristics of the White defendant. Voting in as mayor, a regimented law enforcement authority figure who has thrived in such a biased justice system, may have its drawbacks but we will just have to wait and see. (James Giago Davies can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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