“I’d Want To Kill Them All”

And once again, we see a video of a white person engaging in behavior widely associated with racism, in the most recent instance a manager pointing a pistol at two black picnickers. Outrage, outcry, near universal agreement that this is unacceptable.

I am so delighted with the ubiquity of cell phone video. The precise same thing that convinces me that UFOs are mostly just “Unidentified Objects” rather than “flying saucers’ or the like: oddly, the better the recording technology, the fewer such events seem to occur. But now, we have a situation that is precisely the opposite: the better the recording equipment, the MORE evidence we’re seeing. Almost every damned day, we are seeing another example of a cop, a shop owner, a neighbor, a motorist or yes, a manager behaving in a manner suggesting or clearly indicating racist attitudes.

But every time another one surfaces, I’m starting to see a certain sort of comment, usually from good and caring people: alarm, dismay, and guilt that they had ever questioned the ugly reality implied by the endless stream of racist images.

And it occurred to me that my conversations on this subject over the years have followed a predictable pattern, one oddly similar to Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s famed “five steps of acceptance of mortality.” Remember them? Wikipedia lists them as follows:

1. Denial — In this stage, individuals believe the diagnosis is somehow mistaken, and cling to a false, preferable reality.
2. Anger — When the individual…