"It Feels Like Insanity": Race Hysteria in the Age of Social Media
By HanaLyn Colvin – July 8, 2021
The following post came up in my FaceBook memories from July 2016:
My boss walked into the office this morning and we were huddled in the kitchen, crying and consoling one another. It is too much. Too much death. Too much trauma. Too much depravity, witnessing how black lives are disposed of like garbage and life moves on the next morning as if people in our country are not waging a war for their very right to exist. One of my employees, a young black woman, said, "It feels like insanity, trying to process and mourn every death and then waking up and going to work in a society that acts like nothing is happening." There needs to be an acknowledgment.
We were right about one thing. It WAS insanity. This was in the wake of the Philando Castile shooting, which was indeed tragic. A young man shot dead in his car in front of his fiance and young child, livestreamed to Facebook for everyone to see. I know how easy it is to be carried away by a frenzy of emotion surrounding incidents like this. It was a tragedy. But we have to be able to acknowledge that tragedies happen, death happens, and yes, even bad policing happens — without being caught up in a false metanarrative about what those individual incidents mean broadly. We have to assess facts without being swept away by race hysteria.
In 2016 our psyches were overwhelmed with images of black men gunned down by police. They were presented as merely a continuation of lynch mobs and slave patrols. Nothing had changed in fundamentals since slavery and Jim Crow, only in form.Political activists commanded, “Say their names” and dutifully we complied. We knew the names of maybe half a dozen black men who had been shot by police and from that we extrapolated that police posed an EXISTENTIAL threat to black life in general. From half a dozen cases over a period of several years. This was an emotional reaction, not a rational one.The trick the Left plays is to take isolated incidents, strip them of their present-day context, and conflate them with unrelated historical events. Thus police patroling high crime neighborhoods becomes the equivalent of slave patrols and lynch mobs. Any police involved shooting where the victim is black must be presented as a racialized encounter between an oppressed black victim and a white oppressor….whether or not race had anything to do with the incident and even regardless of whether the police officer was white. The officer in the Philando Castile shooting was not white. It didn’t matter. It had to be made to serve the greater narrative regardless of the facts of the case.Stories of white victims of police shootings, which would provide a balanced perspective, are intentionally suppressed by the media so that the narrative is framed exclusively around black victims. “The police are hunting black people” becomes a credible refrain when all evidence to the contrary is excluded from the public discourse.Is it any wonder why Leftists are pushing the racist lie that reason and critical thinking are traits of white supremacy and that black people are an emotional race who intuit knowledge through their feelings and are incapable of analytical thought? It is essential to keep people from thinking critically because when you begin to analyze the facts of each case, the metanarrative falls apart. Keep people frightened and hysterical because they are easier to manipulate. This is a form of psychological abuse.“It feels like insanity,” my coworker lamented. We are manufacturing race-based paranoia and neuroticism based on a deceptive narrative.2016 was Baltimore’s second deadliest year on record to date, with 318 murders. We have surpassed even that deadly record almost every year since. This year, this same coworker is grieving the loss of her own brother. But he did not die at the hands of police. He was murdered, one more in a growing list of Baltimore homicide victims. Our concerns in 2016 about black life were sincere, but we completely misdiagnosed the problem.