White people and “Justice” Thoughts and a Request post-Trayvon Martin Verdict

I came to twitter last night about 20 minutes after the verdict was read. The response, as you might expect, was fast and furious.  There was anger, sadness, and resignation-because most people, especially black people, who had been following the trial, were expecting acquittal. This was in large part to the high burden of proof that a guilty verdict would have required. It is important to remember that the only reason that there was a trial is because of serious protests. As Andrew Cohen writes there are real limitations to the court system-regardless of the case or racial overtones. Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that as unpleasant as the reality is, the jurors did not have much of a choice.

But I feel safe in saying that even for those who predicted it, is still comes as harsh, cruel reminder that for all the allure of idea that we live in a “post-racial” world, where we are treated equally we do not.  As many in my twitter feed stated, the (criminal) system did “work”. That the “system” itself is, by design, an instrument of power. People of color are not, and have never been, part of that power.  When we talk of “institutional racism” this is an easy example.  It is simply the idea that the institutions that make up our civil society were wholly conceived and implemented by white people, usually white people with money. It has only been in the last 50 years or so that PoC (people of color) have been allowed in. Specifically, they had to protest, boycott, put their lives on the line (many did not get those lives back) and raise hell to get those doors to open. Even when those doors were open it has been a relentless fight to stay there, to “prove” they should be there.

It is interesting to note that while many (white) people easily comprehend the idea that we have an economic system that favors the few, that is not “fair”, this does not translate as obviously to the criminal justice system. Broadly speaking it is a certain group of white people who really, really, wanted a guilty verdict, to be able to say the “system worked”.  The narrative of “justice for all” is powerful, it is ingrained in the Western psyche-it goes back to the foundations of the West.  It is like breathing. It is hard for those of us to who have the privilege of not being targeted for the color of our skin to leave it behind. It has served us well.

But, if we really say we care about humanity, we need to recognize it is killing our brothers and sisters, literally and figuratively. You can pick any criminal statistic you want, any amount of similar cases you like, the evidence is clear. Blackness is a crime. People fighting for prison abolition, reforms of the criminal justice system, wonder why so few white people are not there. It’s very simple, white people live in an alternative universe where the same things that happen to black people don’t happen to white people.

I don’t pretend to know what to do right now. I feel new to this particular fight, I feel right now I need to listen to those who have been on the front lines, those who have had to fight every day just to survive. The 40+ years of indoctrination I have been subjected to are of no help right now. There are many people out there who have been working on these issues; they will not be on CNN or on any television set. They will be where the people without power always are, in the cracks and margins. You can find them if you try. It is my suggestion, to other (white) people, that you try to find these voices, listen to what they have to say. Consider what is going on in your own sphere of influence, and try to imagine something different than your whiteness.

Thoughts on "good people" and racism

Earlier this week Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a piece on Forest Whitaker being frisked at a deli. As a progressive white person I'd like to think this kind of thing doesn't happen anymore, and in New York?But it does, and that in this day and age that a person's humanity can be so denied is so depressing. Part of Coates larger point was the idea of institutional racism versus individual racism. Individual racism is between people, and any person can not like anybody else for any reason, color of skin or otherwise. Because people tend to see society as simply a blown-up model of their own individual reality there is a tendency for "good" people to assume that since they and the people they know are not racist, neither is society. Isolated incidents are just that, isolated incidents. But in this country that is simply not the case as Coates points out in a blog post :
"If Forrest Whitaker sticks out in that deli for reasons of individual mortal sin, we can castigate the guy who frisked him and move on. But if he-and other like him-stick out for reasons of policy, for decisions that we, as a state, have made, then we have a problem. Then we have to do something beyond being nice to each other."
I grew up in the era of the Rodney King beating, of the OJ trial, of Spike Lee. I remember after the King incident several news shows attempting to replicate the essence of the incident--that is a black man being stopped by the cops where a white man would not--and succeeding. It was not a shock to me but it was not knowledge I had before. I did not follow the OJ trial very closely, I saw it early on as more of a class issue. OJ was black but he also had money and people with money get off all the time. I felt sadness for his victims but I did not begrudge the many African-Americans who celebrated the fact that for once the black man got off, which is not the norm in a country where the vast majority of victims on death row are black not white. "Do the Right Thing" was controversial when it came out, Spike Lee was considered something of a radical for putting on the screen what was well known to be reality, at least among some people. I remember hearing a commentator stating that Spike Lee said in an interview that "blacks couldn't be racist." I knew when I heard that there was more to the story, and when I went to the Newsweek article there was, what he was referring to was institutional racism. What he actually said was that blacks could not participate in institutional racism since they did not have institutional power. It made sense to me then, it makes sense to me now, but what did not necessarily occur to me was the idea that racism is a creation and "If we accept that racism is a creation, then we must accept that it can be destroyed . . ." (from Coates blog).
What would destruction look like? Well it would be attempting to dismantle the structures that keep people of color from full equality, specifically economic equality. It would mean specifically in Chicago (and Philadelphia for that matter) to keep all public schools open, recognizing they are an important part of the community. It would be putting resources in those areas of the city, the south and west side, that have never seen it. Finally, there would be a real attempt, at a multitude of levels, to address the prison industrial complex that targets people of color. If we are really good people, shouldn't we be doing this?

Further thoughts on “Warmth” from a white person

       I think “Warmth of Other Suns” has affected me so much because it is so easy to see the long-term effects of the great migration in a personal light. I spent the most important part of my professional, clinical, life at Schwab Rehabilitation hospital in Lawndale. Turn one direction down the street from Schwab and the neighborhood appears to be entirely Hispanic, turn down the other side the neighborhood appears to be entirely African-American. The majority of the patients I saw were African-American, some Hispanics, an occasional white person or Eastern European thrown in there.  While most of the physical, occupational speech, and speech therapists were white like me they were not exclusively so, the physicians especially the residents were something of an international mix. The majority of the nursing staff and nearly all of the non-professional staff were African-American, with some Hispanic representation. 

            I am a physical therapist and typically at Schwab I would have a caseload of 6-8 patients, who would be seen for about an hour each. My patients by definition has some kind of physical deficit requiring them to be there—a stroke, a brain injury, a hip fracture etc.—and the session would typically involve strengthening exercises, functional training, ambulation training. When you do physical therapy you get intimate with your patients.  This is primarily physical—you are helping a patient get out of bed, to stand get up, to walk. As a physical therapist you are asking this person who barely knows you to trust you with their body.  But because the goals to move the patient to independence there develops something of a psychological bond as well.  As a physical therapist you are pushing them and challenging them to do things that they don’t think they can do, maybe don’t want to do at least at that moment. You are something of a coach, reminding them of the end-goal and trying to give them the confidence to do it.

            In-between the exercises and the walking you talk to each other, about the weather, the neighborhood, about families. It struck me early, that every African-American I talked to was not from Chicago. I heard Alabama and Mississippi the most. I occasionally thought about what it was like to grow up black in the south-I was aware of the struggle for civil rights in the 60s, and I was dimly aware of lynching, although not to the extent it occurred. But, like the vast majority of white people, I didn’t have any real concept of the day-to-day existence of African-Americans in the south or the north in the first half of the century. In the corner of my mind sometimes I wondered what these 60-80 year-old African-Americans thought about this young white woman telling them what to do. Were they used to it—was it expected? Or was it resented? I worked with a variety of personalities, some with more attitudes then others but I can’t ever remember any comments in regards to my whiteness.

            I feel I saw so many Ida Maes, (Georges as well) and the descriptions of her experiences brought so many thoughts to mind. Ida was not educated in the traditional sense; her vision was limited by her experiences in the rural south.  She was a woman who simply did what needed to be done. In that sense she is representative of so many women, especially African-American women, who have spent their lives working without a second thought. When the hospital workers at the hospital she worked at went on strike Ida did not. To be fair, it’s not clear anybody properly explained to her what the strike was about but I think she would probably have worked anyway, she had never not worked; it was a part of her being.  This incident serves as a reminder of the way race was used against organizing for better wages in US labor history—part of the reason African-Americans were recruited to the north was to keep wages down and African-American troops were often brought in to break up strikes.

      So while Ida might have not been able to identify with the idea of a union, she had a very strong sense of self—not exactly self-confidence but she knew what she was, what she could do and not do, and what she saw and what it meant. It was this strong sense of self that when asked for sexual favors by a man in a house she was working, she said no, in spite of obvious financial pressure. This sense of self led Ida to accept the reality of homosexuality—even though I’m sure it was foreign to her—noting the strong sense of loss exhibited by a man at his lover’s funeral.

            As noted in a Prison Culture post, “we (African-Americans) were not supposed to survive.” That the incredible poverty of sharecropping, the constant threat of violence—physical for African-American sexual for African-American women—did not kill off the descendents of slavery is kind of amazing.  They came to the north for a better life—and on a certain level the north was better. Ida herself noted that if she had denied a white male sexual favors in the south, she probably would have been killed. There were no “whites” only signs in the north but as Robert and George learned, there were plenty of boundaries and you might learn them the hard way.  Comparing the south and the north this way reminds me of our current political system--we are frequently told one political party is better then the alternative, on closer examination it is clear that both parties are for the status quo that leaves many in poverty and favors the few.

         Like anybody who has lived in Chicago for any amount of time I am aware of the severe segragation of the city. But until reading “Warmth” some logical outcomes of that never occurred to me. For one, there was simply not enough room in the area deemed acceptable for African-Americans for all the African-Americans who were coming. People did try to stop the migration but this was a successful as attempts to limit migration from Mexico have been. If people are insistent on coming, if they think their lives and their children's lives depend on it, they will come. The restriction of the migrants resulted in some incredibly dense poor populations of African-Americans who had no chance to develop any kind of wealth, as their best hope was to rent whatever small, overpriced, places they could get. These communities would never really change, they would never get any real chances at the wealth of the city and these same communities are now racked by violence as a result of years of neglect and poverty.

         The African-American experience speaks to the incredible will of survival of a group of people and it made me think of another disadvantaged brown group, Palestinians. Like African-Americans the Palestinians have been forced to live on too-small of an area, forced to take the least of what jobs are available, and live under a constant threat of violence from the state which does not represent them in any kind of way. Although the processes have been different most Palestinians have had no chance at wealth. Land was taken from them with the founding of the state of Israel, in 1967, or even today where Palestinian have to fight endless court battles for their land, to frequently see it given to Jewish settlers. As what passes for a peace process completely falls to the wayside, it is clear that it is the desire for Israel and her enablers is that the Palestinians will simply disappear.

        But they have not, as Palestinians refuse to just leave and the BDS movement gains strength. And of course African-Americans are not going away, the question if we in Chicago are willing to truly invest in these communities in a manner that will make them better.

The legacy of race

So earlier this week one Supreme Court justice slammed a prosecutor for using racial slurs, another called the right vote a “racial entitlement” and it is extremely likely that one of the most important attempts to right racial wrongs, the Voting Rights Act, will probably be repealed.  The week started with an awful slur about a 9-year-old African-American girl—Quvenzhane Wallis of the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild—that was supposed to be a “joke”. I don’t do a lot with Facebook but this is what I wrote on my wall after I saw the movie last summer:

Saw Beasts of the Southern Wild last night and it is still rattling through my brain . . . I wanted to see it because it sounded different, and it starred an African-American Girl. About half-way through the movie I started to cry and never really stopped, which was a little irritating because I had NO paper products with me, so I was constantly wiping my nose with my hands and then rubbing my hands over parts of my body—I didn’t want to stain the dress I was wearing. Plus the movie has a lot of just silence in it, and so I couldn’t just out bawl—I was very self-aware of my sniffles. It’s odd, because the movie is not really sad, the people in the movie are so proud and strong and the movie ends on a real note of defiance and hope—but it is the sense that nobody should have to go through what they do, and yet so many do. And it is a cruel irony that it is (in the conventional sense) the lowest of society that intimately understand the environmental crisis we are in and are most punished, but the people at the highest level of society—with all their privileges—cannot, will not, and will not have to suffer for it. Anyway people should see it.

BSW is not specifically about race—I saw it as more about class and the people both black and white that we choose to leave behind—but it seems more about race to me now as I have just finished reading “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” by Isabel Wilkerson. It is honestly not a book I would have picked up on my own but the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates went on a twitter rant about it and I felt morally obligated to get it. So now I have finished it and I feel just like I did after BSW, I am crying and feeling so much has been sucked out of me that cannot be returned. “Warmth” is about the great migration of southern blacks to the north, and focuses on three particular people and their families, one whom came to Chicago. It was suggested as something uplifting, and of course it can certainly be seen that way.  Millions of people with little but hope left everything they knew for parts unknown, most did ok if not they did not exactly prosper. Many important African-American personalities would be probably be unknown to us in the absence of the migration, and the people Wilkerson profiles had no regrets about leaving. But the sacrifices they made, the suffering they endured just to survive, is hard to comprehend and to digest. It is a harsh reminder of why there is a Voting Rights Act. Justice Roberts states that the Voting Act can go the way of the Marshall plan—it’s not needed any more. Because you can’t see any systemic racism out there, I guess higher arrest rates and incarcerations for African-American males, voter ID laws and Florida voter lines are something else

 “Warmth” brings to the forefront the issue of family wealth, how historically African-Americans could never accumulate it, as sharecroppers who always “owed” the owner, as laborers who always got paid the lowest when they got to work at all, and as renters who paid at time double—compared to whites—for the barest of space in a very circumscribed area. Unlike the other migrants, the Europeans, African-Americans could never escape their blackness, it would affect everything they do and what they could get.  The book brings us up to almost the present, although Wilkerson doesn’t make any comments on the current state of city. But the violence in ‘Chicago and the school closings are pretty closely confined to the south and west sides of the city, where the southern black migrants were forced, forced to settle and learn to live and make do with the least of what the city would offer them. The current conditions of the south and west side did not just happen, and just as in BSW we ignore these neighborhoods and their struggles at our own peril.  This city cannot function indefinitely siphoning what it can from the poor and middle class to give to the rich. The city as a whole is not going to work with such large areas neglected and abused. If really want them to change it’s going to take more then words and “family values” but a concerted effort to invest in these areas and give the residents what they have always deserved but never gotten.