[Content Note: Police brutality; racism; victim-blaming.]
"He wasn't unarmed. He was armed with his incredibly strong, scary self."—The relentlessly execrable Ben Stein, discussing the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.
That is a perfect, terrible example of the sort of horrendous, reprehensible, racist apologetics circulating among lots of white people, as though it is simply a fact, which all of us are meant to understand, that black men are "scary." Their very "selves" are scary. They are inherently scary.
And note that this racist characterization of black bodies serves a very specific twofold purpose: It serves to demonize black people, and simultaneously to write the narrative that racists' reflexive fear of black people is a natural reaction to innate scariness, rather than a totally unreasonable and unjustifiable projection of their own rank racism.
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