WTF? WTF!
I’ve been writing about race for a long time, and every once in a while I still have a WTF moment. I had two last month.
The first one actually starts back in January, when the Maine press reported on a spate of anti-Semitic graffiti from Brunswick up to Camden. It was happening so often that an armed Bath police officer was posted outside the Beth Israel Congregation. Some speculated at the time that members of Maine’s African Muslim population were to blame, perhaps acting in response to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. One reason for this speculation was the absence, in most reports, of the fact this vandalism wasn’t limited to anti-Semitism — “nigger” had also been spray painted near an apartment complex where African asylum seekers reside.
As it turned out, the racist vandals were a white father-and-son team! They went around painting swastikas and “nigger” and “Gas Jews” all over Brunswick and Bath and Harpswell and Topsham, I guess as a sort of family outing. The father is probably one of those old-fashioned types, but the son is a member of the same gang of masked Nazis that paraded through Portland this time last year. As a reminder, after their parade, those Nazis attacked members of the city’s LGBTQ community in front of City Hall. The police stopped the attack, but let the Nazis all leave without so much as getting a single ID.
What was the reason for the father and son’s racist public defacement? I mean, it’s best not to try to apply logic or sense to these kinds of people, but according to court documents, the father “stated that he had been upset about the immigrants moving into the Cook’s Corner area and was angry at Jewish people for both promoting the COVID-19 vaccine and ‘sending the immigrants in to clean the white race out.’”
In other words, these two are just stunningly stupid and easily convinced by whatever hateful thing they happen to randomly come across. It is nothing but a shame that our society allows people to decay in such a way, but it’s also nothing new. In fact, it happens so predictably often that you’d think we would’ve figured out how to prevent it long ago. But that would mean addressing the wider system.
That wider system, of course, includes police. If you’re unfamiliar, you should know that police started out as the “Slave Patrol,” recapturing Black people who’d escaped enslavement. Later, when police forces were created in the North, officers were known to kidnap random Black people and sell them into slavery in the South. It’s not exactly a job from the right side of history, and morality still isn’t in the job description.
For example, when Mamadou Dembele was brutally attacked in a Portsmouth, N.H., diner the night before last Thanksgiving, of course the local police were called. But, according to New Hampshire Public Radio, “Police say … Dembele said at the time that his assailant used language that made it clear the attack was racist. According to the New Hampshire state police, Portsmouth police officers encountered Aaron Goodwin on site shortly after the assault and, realizing that he was a former Portsmouth officer, asked state police to investigate the incident to avoid any conflict.” WTF!
Goodwin, a resident of Eliot, Maine, was arrested last month for the attack, which NHPR says, “left Dembele — a vice president at Bangor Savings Bank — wearing a leg brace and walking with a cane, and became a rallying cry for civil rights leaders across the state, who said it underscored the fears and risks faced by people of color in New Hampshire.”
Now, look, as I said, police were created for racist reasons. They also continue to over-patrol Black neighborhoods, just as they always have. They still disproportionately stop, arrest and kill Black people, just as they always have. There are countless on-the-record cases of individual officers displaying personal, as well as systemic, racism. And there are countless cases of police covering up everything I just mentioned. So, am I going to say that Aaron Goodwin is a racist? Legally, I’m not sure I can, but do I really need to?
Here’s what I can tell you. According to Seacoast Online, Goodwin, “was fired from the Portsmouth Police Department in 2015 after being accused of exercising undue influence to get an elderly, mentally impaired woman to leave most of her multi-million-dollar estate to him. A probate court judge voided the trust that made Goodwin the prime beneficiary and restored an earlier trust that gave the money to her grandson, Shriner’s Hospitals for Children, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and others.”
There are your two WTF moments for the month. I hope that’s all you have.
Samuel James also writes “Banned Histories of Race in America” at samuelj.substack.com.
