I am at once deeply saddened and profoundly angry at the murder of Michael Brown and the subsequent militarized police action in Ferguson, Missouri. This is no ordinary police effort to maintain order; in Ferguson, the police have invaded and occupied a community they were hired to serve and protect.
But far more disturbing to me is the realization that the events in Ferguson do not represent an anomaly, that they are but one manifestation of a hyper-militarized, profoundly racist law enforcement culture and that that law enforcement culture is in turn representative of a systemically racist national culture to which all of us white Americans have contributed. Racism permeates our society from a law enforcement culture that kills, brutalizes, arrests, and imprisons blacks far more than whites, to neighborhood and school segregation, to racist housing and hiring policies, to dumping toxic wastes in minority neighborhoods, to a racist majority on the Supreme Court and throughout the judiciary, to unprecedented, highly vitriolic attacks on our President, surely based on racist attitudes. I had originally planned to post here a much longer article with copious statistics on our systemic racism, but I was unable to get some of the sources to link. Then I decided that most of us are already aware of the statistics anyway and that they are available elsewhere, notably in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ superb “The Case for Reparations,”
and Vyan’s well argued diary on yesterday’s front page, "How Often Are Unarmed Black Men Shot Down by Police?" So this diary will be much more personal than my original.
I was raised to treat all people as equals. I have tried to live up to that standard. When I was in second grade, a black friend of mine was punished for starting a fight he was not even in. When, against the urging of my black friend, I told the teacher what had happened, that another friend of mine who was white had started the fight, she simply shrugged, smiled, and ignored me. Later that week, the white student’s parents called my parents to complain; my parents, who had the best of intentions and never to my knowledge intentionally slighted or harmed black people, told me I needed to learn when to be quiet.
In 1962, when I was a senior in high school, elders in the church I belonged to, against the pastor’s wishes, refused membership to a black couple. I left the church, renounced the faith, and did not return to any church until my daughter was born fourteen years later.
A few years later in college I signed a petition and marched with other students to the college President’s house, demanding he lead the college in admitting black students and hiring black faculty.
In 1987 along with several other interested people, I helped found a local affiliate of Habitat for Humanity. For five years I served as President and spent nearly every Saturday at a Habitat work site. Since then, Habitat in our town has built over fifty decent homes for poorly housed families, most of them black.
The point is not that I have done anything particularly meritorious; many of you have done far more. Friends who know me well enough to be aware of this history have praised these actions as courageous stances against racism. Those friends are wrong; in spite of my good intentions, my actions were impotent gestures. When my parents told me to learn when to be quiet, I, compliant and chronic law-abider that I am (no traffic violations in fifty-three years of driving), said nothing more about the fight at school. When I left church during my senior year of high school, I said nothing to the elders; I simply walked away and did not return. The president of our college answered our petition by saying that he could not find qualified black students and faculty; we left it at that. When we marched on his house, he was out of town. We created much “sound and fury” before an empty house.
As to Habitat for Humanity in our town, in recent years, because of health issues, my wife and I no longer help build. We do, however, take calls from potential clients. It breaks my heart that Habitat, because it is dependent on house payments to continue its work, cannot help 90% or more of the callers, some of whom are facing eviction and possible homelessness. Moreover, while a few families have become successful, most of the families for whom we helped build Habitat houses have continued to have problems. And it’s no wonder. We whites who worked with Habitat were able to return after working to our comfortable middle class homes in mostly white neighborhoods. But because Habitat did not offer job skills training and was rarely able to acquire or afford land in white or integrated neighborhoods, the families we built for worked long hours in low end jobs, remained in segregated, black neighborhoods while their children attended segregated schools, and suffered from all the attendant problems of such neighborhoods. It took only one financial setback such as an illness that kept them from working for our Habitat families to fall back into poverty and even occasionally lose the house we had built for them.
Brought up to believe we are all equal, I have come to the conclusion that we are not—we are not equal in most of the things that produce success in this country—family income, supportive neighborhoods, educated families, access to excellence in education, access to nutritious and affordable food, freedom from toxic waste, access to health care. Opportunity, as Malcolm Gladwell has conclusively demonstrated in Outlers, is more a matter of luck than of merit or hard work.
Some of you have said you “get it.” I do NOT “get it”—and I don’t think most of you who are white get it either. What we do get, at best, is that we do NOT get it. There is no way that those of us born to white privilege can fully understand the terror and hopelessness of growing up poor and black in contemporary America. The myth of a post-racial America is just that-- a myth. Our country is built on the oppression of black people. Simply by virtue of being white, privileged Americans, no matter how well-meaning our intentions, we inevitably have benefitted from the oppression of black people and cannot help but contribute to it. We are dependent on an oppressive and racist system from which there is no escape other than to re-invent the system itself.
I end with a quotation from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ masterful essay, “The Case for Reparations,” which summarizes what I am trying to say far more capably than I can:
white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.
And so we must imagine a new country.