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| A die-in at Grand Central Station in New York protesting the refusal to indict the cop who choked Eric Garner to death. |
An
old, stirring song written in 1900 by James
Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother John Rosamund Johnson began with the words “Lift every
voice and sing.” It was written at a
moment in time when Black Americans were
under incredible pressure. Almost all of
the gains save the abolition of chattel slavery had been erased by the
imposition of Jim Crow laws in the
states of the old Confederacy and in
border states as well. In the North
de facto segregation worked just
as well as that imposed by law in hemming in the opportunities for most people of color. Yet the song was a hopeful anthem.
It was first performed on Lincoln’s
Birthday in honor of a speech to be given by the apostle of boot-strap racial
self-improvement by education Booker
T. Washington at a segregated school in Jacksonville, Florida. It
would be widely popularized by the Fisk
Singers, the traveling choir from
Nashville’s Fisk University, then
the most prestigious Black college in the country. It was a song that spoke for the dreams and
aspirations of a sliver of the Black population—a tiny, educated elite that
felt it must lift the whole race on its shoulders.
The
song became known far and wide as the Black
National Anthem and continued to be sung through the Civil Rights campaigns of the 1950’s and ‘60’s alongside earthier,
more militant songs rooted more in Black gospel
and blues and less on European choral traditions.
Much
has changed since those hopeful words were first voiced. Hard won victories smashed Jim Crow. Voting
rights were won at a painful cost in blood and tears. The election of a Black man as President of
the United States was heralded by some as the inauguration of a new,
supposedly post-racial era.
How
quickly those gains have been eroded or shown to be illusionary. That Black President in no time became the
focus of rage for many whites many of whom barely understood
that the root of their anger was the fear of losing privilege and its racial motivation. A greater percent of children, North and
South, are in segregated public schools today
than in 1950. Blacks lost more jobs in
the Great Recession than any other
racial or ethnic group, have recovered fewer of them, and have lost the most real income collapsing much of what had
been a fragile Black middle class. Most shockingly of all, a fifth of all
adult black men at any time are incarcerated
and more than half will be jailed in their lifetimes. Police
departments, largely White but including many Blacks, have become occupation armies whose primary
function is the protection of White property and the preservation of systematic dominance. The rule of an oligarchic elite—the 1% in the term popularized by the Occupy movement—survives by exploiting
fear of supposedly animalistic Black
violence to prevent almost equally disenfranchised and marginalized Whites,
Latinos, Native American, and Asians from uniting with Blacks.
All
of this has come to a head with a string of ugly police murders of unarmed Black
males with seeming impunity.
You know the drill—Michael
Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; 12 year old Tamir Rice killed for playing with a toy pistol just two seconds after the arrival of a White cop; and Eric Garner a very large Black man who
may have been guilty—gasp!—of making some spare change by selling individual cigarettes to the desperate
who was swarmed by police and wrestled to the ground by an illegal choke hold as he gasped, “I can’t breathe!” In the first and last cases grand juries refused to indict the
killer cop setting off nation-wide demonstrations. In the case of young Rice absolutely nobody
expects a different result. And these
are not isolated instances, but just egregious examples of police killing that
have been repeated scores of time around the country every year. More than 500 American citizens are killed by
our own police every year—a hefty majority of whom are Black males, some
unarmed, and many other in questionable circumstances.
The
reactions to these events have divided the nation. Black almost unanimously are outraged and
hurt. They are becoming more willing to
confront the violent oppression on the streets which is a daily part of their
lives. Many Whites reflexively believe
that any police action against Blacks is somehow justified. Even many White liberals who annually celebrate Martin Luther King Day, who would never dream of uttering the N word, and who like to congratulate
themselves on being colorblind cannot
grasp that these killings are part and parcel of deeply ingrained racial
animus. They are taking affront by being
accused benefiting from White skin
privilege.
I
understand. No one wants their virtuous self-image called into
question. After all, they say, I never
owned a slave or oppressed a Black person. Quite seriously more times than you think
possible the next assertion is actually “some of my best friends are Black.” Talk of White skin privilege sound like an accusation
of personal racism. And it is especially
hard for those who may have come from less privileged background themselves to
hear.
We
will leave aside for the moment the even harder notion that society is so deeply saturated with
racism that even the most enlightened and well-meaning of us have absorbed its
assumptions and act on them every day.
And none of those assumptions is more deeply and viscerally held than fear
of Black men. This leads a lot White
folks to say stupid thing when discussing these incidents, most frequently by
trying to find some reason of individual behavior in each case that invited or
caused a rationally violent response by the police.
Look
I understand. This well-meaning White
guy with an actual history of working for and supporting Civil Rights is just
as apt to fall into these traps as anyone else.
May be more so. I can always
bring out my I-marched-with-Martin-Luther-King
trump card.
But
when I take the hard moment to look in the ugly mirror of reality I come upon
some brutal reminders. In my youth I was
often in the streets taking part in
demonstrations against the Vietnam War—think
the ’68 Democratic Convention. Things got hairy at times. I dodged tear
gas and police batons. But in my worst moments I never for a
moment believed that I might be shot, not even when the National Guard with Jeep
mounted machine guns came rumbling down Michigan Avenue. Yet in the
very same city earlier in the very same year Mayor Richard J. Daley had
issued his famous shoot to kill order against
Black rioters. The West Side became an actual war
zone with the Black corpses to prove it.
Even
in my later years I have led or participated in noisy and semi-raucous small demonstrations
out here in the boonies of McHenry
County touching on some hot-button emotional
issues like immigration and marriage equality. But my mostly White cohorts and I never
drew more than a couple of polite police officers who mostly stayed out of our
way and let us do our thing. But a
similar demonstration in size and noise by Black folk in many American cities
and town would be more than enough to bring out the SWAT Teams, the armored vehicles,
and phalanxes of cops arrayed for war.
Our demonstrations ended with us finishing up at the appointed hour and
going home. Black demonstrations might
well end in tear gas, police charges, and mass arrests. The media, if
they took note of us would describe us as demonstrators. They would describe the Blacks as a rowdy mob or rioters.
I’m
a working class guy and often more
than a little scruffy around the
edges with my beat-up old hats, scraggly too-long hair, untamed goatee, and seedy, often second hand
clothing. I could pass for any homeless dude. I know what it’s like to have a cop slow down
as her rolls by when I am walking down some residential street. I have
been stopped for questioning walking home late from a second shift job. As
insulting and inconvenient as it is, I know that I just have to present some
identification and politely explain that my house “is just over there” officer
to be sent on my way—sometimes even with an apology. Walking while Black in McHenry County, on the
other hand is a good way to get stopped, frisked, and thrown into the back of a
squad car.
When
my oldest grandson Nicholas was in high school he lived with us. He was tall and skinny with thick red hair down to the middle of his
back. He took to wearing all black
including in cool weather an overcoat that made people think of Columbine school shooting Trench Coat Mafia
and baggy jeans festooned with five
pounds of chains. He and his pals—we called them his posse—were into fantasy roll playing games. Nick
would roam the neighborhood with a five foot long reproduction English double-bladed broadsword. It was not sharpened, but quite heavy and if
swung with enough power could, I’m sure, separate an arm from a shoulder or
get a head half-way off a neck.
His friends carried a variety of swords, sabers, dirks and the
like, some of them quite real. One even
had a spiked mace on a chain. I’m sure they were a terrifying
sight. A couple of times local cops
stopped him and told him to “take it home.”
Now
try calculating the expected life span of a Black teenage boy under the
identical circumstances. Go ahead. It
won’t take long to realize that he would be riddled with bullets long before he
ever had a chance to explain that he was only playing a game.
I
get the point. You get the point. All of this is only the tip of the iceberg of white skin privilege when it
comes to our contacts with the police.
Some
White folk are learning to face this reality, as bitter a pill as it may
be. The demonstrations around Ferguson
and the Eric Garner case have included lots of White folks. Members of various religious communities have taken lead rolls. I am proud to say that my Unitarian Universalists have been there
and done that. Our ministers are, by in
large, doing a good job at talking to their congregations about it.
But
even notoriously liberal do-gooding
UUs are not immune from either
denial or of finding ways to justify police actions and the willful acts of
society to refuse to punish obvious criminal behavior. The Rev.
Victoria Weinstein writing in her highly respected blog PeaceBang notes that many of her colleagues have received
push back from resentful congregants. She wrote:
The denial is
staggering. My colleagues are weighing in, one by one and then in a rush,
commenting on Facebook and e-mails and in messages about their conversations
with white parishioners who don’t get it, who are sunk up to their knees like
quicksand in white privilege and denial and a worldview that wants to assume that this doesn’t just happen and he must have
done something and you don’t know everything and did you read the report? and
did you read it as thoroughly as I did, because if you did you wouldn’t be so
upset, you wouldn’t be sick and snarling and enraged and disgusted with
humanity right now, you’d be the nice, comforting minister I expect you to be.
It’s
tough. I know. And exhausting. I refrained since last summer from weighing
in. I told myself that others were
saying what I would say and they are saying it better. Who needs my voice? And I don’t want to become a nuisance or a
nag. And I am just a two-bit blogger with
a tiny following.
But
the time for silence is past, if it was ever appropriate. Dr. King used to go on about how the silence
of the good empowered evil. He said it
half a dozen different ways at different times. He knew what he was talking about.
We,
White folks who have finally grown tired of violence and oppression in our name
need our own Anthem now. Perhaps we
could call it Lift Every Voice and Cry.
Perhaps it would inspire us to speak out, to march, and, yes, just to
listen.
This
is my cry.
