White Lawbreaking

P6 highlighted an important article in Slate, probing "why and when we will tolerate lawbreaking."

Tolerated lawbreaking is almost always a response to a political failure-the inability of our political institutions to adapt to social change or reach a rational compromise that reflects the interests of the nation and all concerned parties. That's why the American statutes are full of laws that no one wants to see fully enforced-or even enforced at all.... when politics fails, institutional tolerance of lawbreaking takes over.

P6 argues that this describes "the politics around racism, desegregation, integration, diversity or whatever term 'diversity' is scheduled to be superceded by" and that "[t]his is the sort of compromise that allows people in places like Jena, LA and Paris TX to honestly feel they have no race problem."

I think it might be useful to reframe the history of racial violence that I am so interested in as the history of tolerated lawbreaking.

White people get away with everything around here, and most of the blacks know it, but [don't] dare to speak up. This place is low down and dirty, the police stay riding in the black neighborhood but never in the white neighborhood. Whenever a white person does something, to them it’s just a misunderstanding, but when the person is black it’s different.

That's a resident of Franklin County, MS talking about the place where Henry Dee and Charles Moore were murdered by Klansmen in 1964. In June 2007, one of the Klansmen involved in killing the two 19 year old Black men was convicted for kidnapping and conspiracy to deprive them of their civil rights (but not murder). Afterwards a local newspaper declared triumph:

[T]he truth, which had been submerged for more than four decades, finally rose again.

Justice finally found its mark as James Ford Seale, a reputed Klansman, was convicted for his involvement with the crimes.

This case proves that justice never sleeps; justice never gives up; and justice can never come too late.

But the Franklin County resident I'm quoting was not talking about Franklin County in 1964. E. Anderson was commenting on a post I had written back in January about how people in Franklin County knew that reports of James Ford Seale's death were false but did not tell the investigators who were pursuing the case.

It's important that Seale got punished for murder kidnapping and conspiracy, but nobody wants to spend too much time talking about why he---and others who will never be prosecuted---got away with murder for 43 years. E. Anderson uses the tolerance for white lawbreaking in Franklin County as a measure of the racism that has not abated.

I have been living in Franklin County for the last 40 years, and this place is still highly racist, except now they do it through the sheriff department, and the circuit court office. Check the record of the Franklin county courts and see how many blacks are sent to prison for crimes, and then see how many whites are sent for the same crimes.... Mostly all the white people in Franklin county are still racist, from the sheriff office to the school system to the court system. All the older white people in the county knew James Seale was still living, they just didn’t care for it was black men that got murdered, and they know of other murders that have taken place also, but they do all they can to cover it up, the bottom line is Franklin County will never change, it will always be racist.

According to Anderson, the white lawlessness that people might associate with the Klan activity of yesterday is still the norm today.

There's a brand of racial reconciliation that's getting popular in Mississippi, where whites disavow their hatred for Blacks and make a show of getting along with them. It's nice, for example, to hear James Ford Seale's cousin is preaching tolerance and goes to an integrated church in Natchez. But until Franklin County directly addresses its historical and present day tolerance for white lawbreaking, the tolerance of individual whites for Blacks will not lessen the effects of racism on people living there.