Barack Obama wants us to discuss race in America. Okay, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned so far. Bear with me since each of the following anecdotes only provides a piece of the puzzle.
Most of my high school days were at a rural school composed of students from three small South Carolina towns. Integration arrived in my senior year in the form of three individuals. None of them were in any of my classes. My government class, therefore, was all white. My teacher asked me to write up the scenario for a mock trial that we would hold in class with students playing the different parts. I sketched out a murder trial that would not be a slam dunk for either the prosecution or the defence. Then, the teacher asked me to cast the parts. I thought long and hard about who would be the best in each of the roles, made up a list and handed it in. He read over the list and asked me if I was aware that all of my role players were from my town. I was deeply embarrassed because I hadn’t been aware any bias. I had simply chosen the ones that I knew best. I went back, mixed up the roles to give all three towns an equal share and was quite proud of the result. The lesson I learned is that discrimination is not necessarily an active thing. I had not excluded those kids from the first list, I simply hadn’t thought to include them—but the effect was the same.
Years later, I worked for the Veterans Administration in New York City. As I have mentioned before in this blog, the largest category of service-disabled are psychological, so it was not unusual to be confronted with individuals who were challenged. One day, as I stepped into the hallway to go somewhere, a shabbily dressed man stopped me. Is it possible, he asked, for someone to put bugs, i.e. microphones, in your clothes? As it happened, I had once worked for a private detective agency, and felt qualified to answer him truthfully. Yes, it is possible. However, it isn’t easy or cheap. And, then, whoever plants the bugs has to monitor them 24-hours a day—that takes a minimum of three people every day. So, I told him, intending to reduce his fears, no-one is going to go to that trouble unless you are a foreign spy or someone very important. Instead of showing relief, however, he flashed a proud grin. I had not only confirmed his paranoia, but elevated his status to that of a very important person.
Put these two lessons together. The idea that people of high rank are sitting around a table plotting to keep you from succeeding is much more palatable than the idea that all of the futility and frustration in your life is because they don’t think about you at all. Whites who don’t do anything bad to minorities and who don’t bear them any ill will believe that they are not discriminating. Blacks who only see opportunities flash past them and prizes dangling beyond their reach cannot believe that it is not part of a plan.
Reinforcing their belief, nearly every black person can relate some ugly white-on-black incident—sometimes violent--that happened to him/her or to someone he or she knows. I don’t know if most whites can say the same thing, but I can relate several ugly black-on-white incidents—some of them violent—of which I have personal knowledge. To be fair, I also have personal knowledge of black-on-black and white-on-white violence with some Asians and Hispanics thrown in for good measure. The point is that while violence seems to buttress arguments about the feelings of the larger community, it shouldn’t. Bad people do bad things and the line should be drawn between bad and good, not between ethnicities. The problem is that good people don’t always do good things.
But, enough about trying to be balanced and fair. I have put people in jail. During that time of my life when I was doing it, I kept score. About half of those I caught were black, about half weren’t. The demographics of the neighborhood played a part in those numbers, but the fact is that there were just too many innocent people for me to waste my time on racial profiling. What I learned was that I would rather catch a black or Hispanic crook than a white crook. The reason was that a minority might fight or run, but usually once he or she was caught that was it. They could see that I was going to treat them as fairly as I could under the circumstances, and we went through the process in relative harmony. Whites, on the other hand, rarely fought or ran, but they would never shut up. They were going to sue or have my job or they knew someone who could make it all go away or-- Well, you get the idea. Lest you think that my preferences affected my statistics, I should add that I always felt better about sticking it to some loudmouth who should know better than I did about locking up a poor person or even a junkie.
I’ve learned a few other things since my sheltered days in the segregated south. As a white man, I can move among white people and ignore pretty much everyone as I go about my business just as I am ignored those who don’t have time for me. In Harlem and in Jamaica, however, I learned to always greet black people and be polite. Whites are simply less social. That’s too bad. I have also had car trouble on three notable occasions when I needed help. White drivers didn’t have time to stop for a stranger, but on all three occasions—in three different states—a black man stopped to lend a hand.
Before closing, I would like to say something about Obama’s pastor and his “God damn America” speech. He has a right to his opinion and is certainly justified in his frustration at the slow pace of equal opportunities. However, I have been to Africa and I have seen how the average person lives there. What happened in the Middle Passage and under slavery and under Jim Crow was terrible, but the descendents of those who suffered so much are living far better and with more opportunity than their relatives who remained in Africa. All of the lynchings in our history do not compare to the recent slaughters in Rwanda or Uganda. The victims in the CDC syphillis study do not compare to the African victims of malaria—not to mention AIDS and the other diseases that run rampant there. Slavery is still commonplace on that continent. I saw the mentally ill wandering naked on the streets because there is no place to care for them. I saw corpses lying by the road waiting to be found by a relative who would take responsibility for burial. And, I saw lynch mobs taking down thieves because they did not trust the legal system. African-Americans should feel very grateful to be in this place at this time.
The greatest unintended consequence of American slavery was to give the black race a bigger voice in the world. From Ray Charles and Halle Berry to Michael Jordan and Condeleza Rice, making it big in the U.S. is infinitely richer and more influential than making it in Kenya or Cameroon. No population of slaves in the history of the world has risen to such prominence in so short a time as the people who were transported to this hemisphere—and their journey far from finished.
In the 21st Century, a clergyman—regardless of color—should talk about healing and striving to do better—and even forgiveness. Obama, who wants to be president of all the people, should not have waited for videos to hit the publicity fan before he either strongly counseled or walked away from a pastor who preached bigotry.
