‘Die-in’ demanding justice for the death of Eric Garner, Grand Central Terminal, New York, 3 December 2014. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

The collective emancipation Martin Luther King envisaged for African Americans never came about. The result has been chronic confrontation on the streets

America has black professors, black business executives, black diplomats and black generals, and for the past six years it has had a black president. All this would have been unimaginable when Barack Obama was born or, to be more precise, it could only be dreamed. Yet black emancipation has not happened in the way Martin Luther King envisaged. Instead of the collective improvement to which he looked forward, there has been a starburst of individual successes, but they are successes that stand in stark contrast to the difficult and harassed lives of the majority of African Americans.

This is the context in which the chronic confrontation on the streets of American cities between young black men and young white policemen should be understood. It is a confrontation that has terrible consequences in the shape of deaths, injuries and real or perceived injustices almost every day of the week. There are, of course, black policemen who may also use excessive force, and white people can be at the receiving end of such force as well as blacks. But the general tendency, white against black, is clear. Colour sharpens the conflict, and history, in this case the history of slavery and discrimination in America, deepens it.

That is why incidents like the death in a police chokehold of Eric Garner in Staten Island in July and the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August lead to such explosions of anger, especially when the tragedies are compounded by legal decisions closing off the possibility of criminal proceedings against the policemen concerned.

It is not that black Americans believe the police are guilty of deliberate murder, although there have been instances of that in the past. But they do believe, many of them, that the police are guilty of not caring enough about black lives to proceed with caution and reason, rather than with the presumption that any able-bodied black man is a potential threat who may have to be “taken down”, in the telling phrase used by the officer who caused Eric Garner’s death. They believe, and the figures bear them out, that blacks are far more likely than whites to be stopped on suspicion, or harshly pursued for petty offences. These two quite different cases have thus become emblematic of the broader mistrust between African Americans and the police. There will be a civil rights inquiry into the Garner case, President Obama has promised, and a prosecution is still a possibility. But this roundabout federal intervention, with its uncertain outcome, must seem insufficient to parents who have lost a child and to families living with the nagging fear that their boys could be next.
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The visions of Dr King or President Lyndon Johnson, different though they were, shared the idea that a general uplifting of the conditions of both black Americans and poorer white Americans, together with integration in education and religion, would soften the racial divide. Many whites are still poor and insecure, but the proportion of African Americans in poverty is much higher. More are unemployed, more in prison, more in broken families. How to assign fault for this is a controversial and difficult question.

But such figures point up a situation which needs urgent attention. The racial landscape has altered. New minorities, Hispanics and Asians, have pushed ahead of black Americans in the queue for redress, political favour and advancement, adding to the sense that many blacks are in a trap from which they cannot escape.

This goes far beyond policing, but harsh and biased policing makes it worse. Dr King warned about black loss of faith in the democratic process, arguing that those “who make this peaceful revolution impossible will make a violent revolution inevitable”.

The traditional ethnic majority will, itself, be a minority in America within a generation, a development that will render unsustainable the kind of racial policing seen all too often now. The guilt that white liberals felt about the fate of African Americans has not disappeared, but it is less a driver of change than it used to be. The American social situation is fragile, and black anger and loss of hope are worrying portents. The problems of black Americans are not susceptible to chokeholds. And they are problems that cannot be policed away. It is time to read the writing on the wall.