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Why black lives want white allies

Stephanie Wang
stephanie.wang@indystar.com
Part of the Point Blank protest, Indianapolis, Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2016. Rehema McNeil intends to take the project to a variety of cities, using local people to help her play the part of the red-painted targets.

The issue of disproportionate police violence against African-Americans divides the nation — and, perhaps too often, it feels like an "us vs. them" argument.

Black people against police officers. White people against black people. And, increasingly, it's the white response, or lack thereof, that is bewildering, frustrating and disheartening to those trying to build a coalition to bring change.

On a recent day, a tall white man in a suit outside a coffee shop had only this to say on the subject of police shootings: “I don’t have much to say about it.”

“Too political,” a young white woman said, waving away the question.

Noah Willey, 28, a white man walking in Downtown Indianapolis, started his answer with, "I'm not racist, but ..."

Then there is LeRoy Lewis III, who was so heavy with grief he couldn't make it through a recent morning. He quit his workout, left the gym and got into his car. Alone in the dark, he cried hard.

What good was it, he asked in an emotional Facebook video, to mentor black boys if some people will always see them as bad? How can he, as a black man, be strong when he is afraid — that he could be targeted and killed by a police officer, seemingly only because of the color of his skin?

And why, Lewis questioned, aren't more of you outraged, too?

If non-African-Americans “were hurting, if they felt the pain I felt,” he said later, “they would make change.”

Many black people say they feel weary, worn down by one police shooting after another, with no solution in sight. That weariness comes from a sense that they're the only ones fighting for change, while all of society has a collective responsibility to administer justice evenly.

White reticence on the issue springs from two camps: those who say they recognize institutional biases but aren't speaking up, and those who continue to deny the existence of a problem. Some whites have joined the cause, but so far there haven't been enough of them to bring about change.

"We as a community, being African-Americans and non-African-Americans, need to really try to understand one another," said Lewis, manager of provider experience for Eskenazi Medical Group. "Looking at a culture through a lens that is not your normal lens, it's hard to do, and I can respect that. But to discount someone's feelings because they're not yours is not right."

Instead, Malina Simone Jeffers said she's left with a feeling of abandonment.

“We’re not sure that we’re cared about as much as we care,” said Jeffers, an independent project manager for arts and culture, diversity and civic pride. “It seems like we’re really vocal and we’re very outraged, and we’re crying alone.”

She remembered rallying the city when the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was seen as a threat to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and the Hoosier reputation. She wondered — and worried — whether the city would rise up like that if her moment of need struck.

“We feel like every day we go super hard for Indianapolis, and we’re working to make this a welcoming city, and we’re staying engaged,” Jeffers said. “And it’s hard for me to feel like that Indianapolis might not go as hard for me.”

After the highly scrutinized police shootings last week of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Okla., and Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, N.C., Jeffers wrote on her blog about feeling isolated in her mourning.

“When white people smile at me these mornings, I don’t know if that’s a quiet way of saying ‘I acknowledge what happened last night,’” she wrote. “I can’t tell what people are trying to say with their eyes; I want them to say it out loud.”

The issues themselves resonate across races — to be treated fairly, and to hold people in power accountable — even if it can be uncomfortable, perhaps, for white people to acknowledge their privilege and understand a different experience. And some whites do respond.

​“It’s not just the black community should be worried about themselves,” said Grant Helms, 31, a white attorney in Indianapolis, as he left a coffee shop one recent afternoon. “Issues like this affect the entire country. It’s not one particular race or community. And the solution’s going to come from everyone.”

“We stay in our homogeneous clusters, and nobody wants to cross over into different cultures,” said Jodie Ferise, 47, a white professor at the University of Indianapolis who had just discussed race relations over lunch with Will Abong, a black nurse practitioner visiting from out of state.

“It’s my job to listen when people of other races say they feel afraid, instead of dismissing that,” she said. “As white people, we dismiss them so readily. I need to listen when he says, ‘Even if I am following the law, I don’t think that would matter.’”

There is, however, a lot of pushback and a lot of resistance from white people who defend police officers and their difficult life-and-death responsibility, who think that talking about racial tensions makes problems worse, who blame black people for not complying with police orders and who think the police have been justified in their use of force in controversial incidents across the country.

There are those who dismiss that black lives matter in their insistence that all lives matter.

“Have you heard of mansplaining?” said Alex Lichtenstein, a history professor at Indiana University. “There's also whitesplaining — telling black people what they should do and not do.”

White responsibility, he said, comes in acknowledging a history of bias against African-Americans and speaking out against racism.

“It takes courage,” Lichtenstein said. “You have to be willing to say to your fellow white people, ‘That’s not acceptable.’”

In Downtown Indianapolis on Saturday, about 80 people marched for justice — again — while about a dozen Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers blocked traffic for them.

Holding signs and raising fists, marchers were a mix of faces: about half black, half white, with other ethnicities represented, too.

Organizer Dominic Dorsey welcomed the allies.

“It can’t just be black people,” he said. “It has to be all of us.”

IndyStar visual journalist Robert Scheer contributed to this story.

Call IndyStar reporter Stephanie Wang at (317) 444-6184. Follow her on Twitter: @stephaniewang.