The South Dakota Advisory Council to the United States Commission on Civil Rights met Friday afternoon in Aberdeen to discuss ‘The Subtle Effects of Racism in South Dakota.”
D.J. Mounga, director of student life at Presentation College, said it can be hard to talk about subtle racism in a state with a history of so much overt racism.
That difficulty perhaps led to the program running over two hours late: I left at a quarter to six, and we still hadn’t heard from the 3:00 and 3:30 p.m. panels, never mind the 4:30 p.m. public testimony. I could say that running the meeting on Indian time was subtle racism against my White/Western sense of mechanical clock supremacy… but (1) I’m racist for even thinking the term “Indian time,” and (2) as SDAC-USCCR member and Rapid City lawyer Charlie Abourezk said in his astute opening remarks, racism is about the dominant race preserving its privilege and control at the expense of other races. The determining feature of racism, said Abourezk, is not prejudice but the superior position of whites and the institutions that maintain that position. No group or institution was trying to control me; the folks in the room were just trying to have a difficult conversation and allow everyone to be heard, regardless of my expectation that a public meeting strictly adhere to linear numbers and words printed in black and white.
How’s that for subtle?
That difficult conversation proved challenging for the Aberdeen Police Department. Asked to discuss how body cameras impact law enforcement interaction with minorities, Chief Dave McNeil and Sergeant Tony Bisbee gave a presentation that seemed designed to avoid any direct discussion of racial issues in local law enforcement. They presented three videos, none from Aberdeen or even, it seemed, from South Dakota. One video mentioned prejudice against Irish and Italians, which seemed laughably irrelevant to how Indians and Hispanics may feel dealing with cops and culture in Aberdeen. The video said police need to explain their actions so subjects don’t wrongly conclude that police are targeting them by race. Two videos of police stops—one taken by a civilian provocateur’s cell phone, not a police camera—showed police-civilian interactions with no apparent racial component. The presentation seemed to revolve more around justifying police action than changing it to check racism.
As a side note, Chief McNeil bragged about Aberdeen’s leadership in recruiting female officers. Advisory council member Scott D. German of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate pointed out that Chief McNeil consistently referred to unspecified police officers in his presentation with masculine pronouns.
How’s that for subtle?
Brandon Sazue, Sr., Chairman of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, said he wholeheartedly supports police use of body cameras. He said body cameras would have changed the outcome of the incident where police tasered an eight-year-old, 70-pound girl on Pine Ridge. The girl had a paring knife in her hand. The girl died from the tasering.
Chairman Sazue then addressed the institutional racism he sees in South Dakota’s response to the pipeline protests on Standing Rock in North Dakota. Sazue said he spent three months at the Dakota Access protest as the leader of his tribe supporting the “water protectors.” He said he was arrested and strip-searched, treatment to which he said no white political leader would be subjected. Sazue said that Governor Dennis Daugaard sent South Dakota Highway Patrol to help put down the protestors and that South Dakota troopers beat tribal members with batons. Then Daugaard pushed Senate Bill 176, the anti-protest bill that Sazue says targets tribal people as troublemakers on the impending construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.
Sazue said Daugaard has invited tribal members to a meeting on March 29 to discuss pipeline protests, but Sazue says those consultations should have happened before Daugaard drafted SB 176 and before he sent troopers to Standing Rock. Daugaard’s racist actions have prompted Sazue to decline the March 29 invitation and to cancel the groundbreaking agreement his tribe signed with the state in 2013 for cooperation between Crow Creek tribal police and the Highway Patrol. Council member and USD professor Richard Braunstein expressed his dismay: he said he has cited the Crow Creek/SDHP agreement as a great step toward cooperation between the state and the tribes.
So much for subtlety.
Dr. Naomi Ludeman Smith, chair of arts and sciences at Presentation and member of the Aberdeen Area Diversity Coalition, discussed her experience as an “interculturalist” studying Aberdeen and South Dakota since moving here from Minnesota two and a half years ago. She said her first signal of racism in South Dakota came from a Highway Patrol officer who told her not to drive through the reservations at night. Having spent time in conflict zones like the West Bank and Belfast, Smith found that warning absurd. She said the real threat along the highway at night is animals.
Smith called the “Americans First” meeting last August here in Aberdeen “one of the most frightening gatherings of citizens that I have experienced.” She recalled the anger with which fellow citizens responded when she asked the speaker for the sources of his claims about places she has actually visited. She recalled the frightening rage of one Aberdonian at that meeting threatening another resident’s life. (Yeah, I kinda remember that, too.) She said the Diversity Coalition and the rest of us have a lot of work to do.
Rosholt entrepreneur and speaker Lawrence Diggs laid out his argument that race is a “bald-faced lie.” “Racism is not the real problem,” said Diggs. “The belief in race is the real problem.” Diggs said the lie of race is used to manipulate us. “Now you know it, too,” he concluded. “What will we do?”
Braunstein said, “That is a lot to take in,” and noted that the construction of social difference for the gain of certain interests is a valid concern. Then, for the rest of the meeting around for which I was able to stick, the conversation proceeded as it had before, without addressing that concern, dealing with race, social construct or not, as a real factor with real impacts on behavior and policy in South Dakota.
(You can read more about Diggs’s position in Dakota Free Press comment sections here and here.)
At the beginning of the meeting, Charlie Abourezk said racism is a charged word because we don’t deal with it consciously often enough. We encounter it only when its effects explode into public view, and we deal with it only long enough to quiet things down. The length and breadth of Friday’s conversations reflect the difficulty of the issue. The speeches I heard don’t fit neatly into one package or one tidy conclusion… which was Abourezk’s point. We don’t get to avoid the issue, like the cops. We don’t get to philosophize the issue away, like Diggs. Real people, like Chairman Sazue, are arrested and humiliated and withdraw from useful agreements on principle when faced with racist actions from the highest offices in our land, like Governor Daugaard’s. Like Smith, we live in an intercultural nexus, and we all have work to do.
Passing Thoughts:
- In a somewhat testy conclusion to his warm welcoming remarks, Mayor Mike Levsen said Friday’s meeting was not at all about refugees or immigrants. “That question is decided,” said Mayor Levsen. “They’re coming, they’re here, we’re never going to be 98% white again.” The Mayor said people “with nothing else to do” can argue about it.
- Diggs prefaced his philosophical discourse with one political observation: “When your chief strategist is a white supremacist, your chief strategy is white supremacy.”
My Lakota mother was never fond of the Indian Time phrase, like your link showed, Indian Time was knowing the seasons. In fact, Indians had to be very timely because much of their food sources were available for only a short periods of time and preparations had to be made for the winter season when little or nothing would be available in terms of food or hunting.
As a result, I have found the contemporary use of Indian Time disrespectful.
Indian Time has become an excuse for not being prepared to meet obligations with people. I don’t like having to wait for others and neither should you.
As an example, Indians often complain about Indian Time while having to wait hours to see a doctor at an IHS hospital, that is neither cute or amusing.
Charlie Abourezk is an old time friend of mine, his words have always had iron in them with a need to the listener for more. Racism is so common in South Dakota that we have developed a scab on the wound. By having that scab, we never really heal the wound all we do is scratch at the itch.
I see first hand now that tourist seasonal business in South Dakota is hurting dramatically with the lack of immigrant workers. South Dakota has long ignored the unemployment numbers on the reservations as being something so foreign to them that they view those numbers as if it belongs to someone else. The workers are there, find a way to house them like the immigrant workers. Feed them and pay them scale wages for what work they perform. Maybe then the doors can come open to realize what is available. BTW, these workers will be on time too, just pay them and respect them for the work they do, simple stuff. Reach out and find a way. Hire American is a good slogan, but Hire First American is an even better one.
Roger, fascinating to hear that the phrase is turned by Indians themselves to refer to failings of the white man’s system. I hope my own use of the term—not a term I use often, lightly, or with malice—can be read as intended, as a reminder of the racist assumptions latent in the best of us.
I will note that the commission members did try to move things along at the beginning. When the Aberdeen PD reps spent a lot of time reciting personnel practices, council chairman Braunstein did ask them to skip to the main question of body cameras. In terms the terms you mentioned, Roger, of being prepared to meet obligations, one might argue that the police officers didn’t come quite prepared to focus on the matters under consideration by the council in the time alloted.
Thanks Cory, I didn’t take your comment about Indian Time as anything other than what you intended, in fact it is subject that requires discussion. As a person that is time orientated as I am, waiting is for someone is disrespectful. I worked in the private sector as a business owner and found out that time is often critical and that others don’t wait. If you don’t ship a product on time, you risk losing an account, if you don’t pay vendors one time you lose credit with them, etc.
Most of the tribal elders only mildly joked about Indian time but in fact were themselves very time orientated.
Also of interest today was the decision by the Rapid City Journal to discontinue the comment section on their online news content.
The Journal explained that they had hoped to inspire community discussions that addressed issues, but it turned into a handful of anonymous commenters that made hateful comments.
I used to verbally spar with many of the conservative commenters using my real name but eventually found their comments too predictable and tiresome.
The news stories that drew the most commenters were always something related to Indians. They would ignore important stories like EB-5 or Gear Up in favor of making subtle attacks on Indians.
Thanks, Roger! Interesting that RCJ has finally abandoned the comment section. We seem to have done a better job here of keeping the discourse civil… or at least not blatantly racist. Too bad RCJ won’t try a compromise, like maybe using the Facebook widget to identify every commenter. Making people use real names, real profiles, tends to tamp down the overt racism that made the RCJ comment section so vile.
Interesting to see racism crop up in the dark corners, fostered by the Breitbart-osphere but then get dragged out into the light at events like the Branstner event to which Smith referred in her statement to the council Friday.
it takes a certain kind of STUPID, to even consider the twist and spins of that low life Abourezk …. do your homework people!
No, jpwade, that’s not how we play the game. You don’t get to shout cheap, easy insults (“STUPID! Low Life!”) and then tell the people you shouted at to do their homework. You need to provide the evidence to support your affirmative claim that a source is untrustworthy. Plus, your cheap, easy insults don’t really offer us any reason to doubt the validity of the statement Abourezk made. You aren’t responding to the statement Abourezk made; it just sounds like you’re Googling “Abourezk” and then, any time you find him, splashing your angry slander wherever possible to hurt the man’s reputation.
Many people have made the same statement about the inherent role power plays in defining racism; even if Abourezk were every bad thing you might want to call him, that statement about racism would still be true.
[Note from CAH: In a shocking outburst of anti-Semitism, someone Going by the name Scott Roberts submits the following unfactual comment—I am not Jewish, not that there’s anything wrong with being Jewish; I am a registered Democrat, not a Communist; and I have had a shower. The YouTube link is over an hour of Scott Roberts reading my blog post and ranting to his camera about what he imagines is a global conspiracy of Jews out to destroy his White America. Roberts says all Jews should be expelled. Roberts issues continual anti-Jewish slurs, often emphasized with f-words and other vulgarities. I have given Mr. Roberts’s truly filthy, truly racist video more attention than it deserves just by skimming for the above information. If you want to be lied to and sworn at by an angry nut off his rocker, save yourself the grief of clicking Roberts’s link and just go to the bar and make some drunk guy mad. But Scott Roberts’s rank falsehoods, fantasies, and hatred are what we are up against. Thanks, Trump!]
The Goyim know, you filthy communist Jew:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VEoxYUuDLs
Cory,
For reasons I’m not sure of, I managed to watch all 105 minutes of this paranoid trash
Scott Roberts would be hilarious if he wasn’t so pathetic and dangerous to Americans.
My time could be spent dicing up his comments and responding to him, but he is so brain washed it would be pointless.
It is odd that he would use the Dakota Free Press blog to go on full anti-Jewish rant. We probably don’t have a significant population of Jewish people in the state so it appears he used the video to exert his big fat ego.
Cory Allen Heidelberger —-> as per your words —-> “it just sounds like you’re Googling “Abourezk” —-> a bit of my research and writings relative to that Syrian Peddlers Son, and his son also —-> Cory, enjoy your plate of crow :) —-> https://jpwade.wordpress.com/?s=abourezk
Again, jpwade appears to want to turn the discussion to his hobbyhorse. Just like Scott Roberts, who takes his uninformed interpretation of my religion, racial heritage, and agenda to spew his filth, jpwade posts his link to promote his own ax-grinding. Your link to your personal obsession is irrelevant to the accurate definition of racism that Abourezk repeated at this event.
Roger, indeed, an hour is a terrible thing to waste on Scott Roberts’s anti-semitism. Imagine spending one’s entire life making such uninformed statements of rage. Ugh.
Hobbyhorse, true that.
LOL! ta ta kiddo’s —-> enjoy the crow :)
jpwade, your mom says to turn down the tee vee in the basement.
I’m still trying to figure out just what crow jpwade thinks he served. Racism inherently involves a power differential, a privileged class using its power to oppress another class. Did I miss the rebuttal?
Roger, I understand the need to watch the video. You rarely get to see a person in the midst of full-blown psychotic episodes. Usually it is hidden beneath the surface and knows it is best to stay there.
That’s the only merit I could see to posting that link, Darin: making available the evidence of the man’s error.