Thinking in Black and White

The spontaneous demonstrations of the past two-plus weeks have been stunning.  They’ve led to a reckoning in so many places and ways.  And a lot of introspection.  I’m an academic, and in my patch, this has only begun and who knows where it will all lead?  I hope to positive change—real, lasting change.

I’ve been reluctant to write.  Yes, I can’t stand outside this struggle but in important ways it’s not mine in the same way it is for my colleagues-of-color.  I take fully on board the words I’ve seen online saying this is not the time for White voices to come to the center. Not a time for “White-splaining.”  But I have colleagues I care about who are saying that White voices need to say something.  They are right.  But the less the better.  There will be plenty of time for cerebral reflection, post-mortems, and observations from our disciplinary perspectives.

Now is a time to speak personally.  My significant other (let’s call her Kaz) and I share in common the sense that three events shaped our beliefs and moral consciousnesses more than any others:  the cold war (“duck and cover”); Vietnam; and the civil rights movement. We both think that the latter actually shaped us the most.  The events of the last few weeks have taught me why that is the case.  I now realize that my understanding of what it means to be a citizen here was shaped more by Martin Luther King Jr., than by my teachers, scoutmasters, or other influencers.  He explained, and showed—and the experiences that have led up to the last two weeks have brought into full relief—why and what the Constitution is and was about.  I don’t mean that in the trivial way it may sound.

The Constitution and the whole project of the Western Enlightenment—of which I am a child—means nothing unless it can encompass the meaning and significance of difference, particularly the searing difference of race.  If we can’t finally address this (and it hasn’t been quick or easy) then the project has failed and will continue to fail.

I regret now to admit that I and people like me kept thinking—after the gains of the civil rights movement—that things were being “fixed” and getting better.  Police reform, police commissions, community policing, more people of color as officers and chiefs and mayors, more scrutiny.  I know it is more than just about policing per se.  It’s the legacy of Reconstruction,  the uncontested emergence of the “Lost Cause” movement, that policing is also the Jim Crow that the North developed in response to the Great Migration, and the redlining of the 50s that left Black people out of post-war (publicly-financed) economic expansion, and that voting majorities bear much responsibility for the situation because of their complicity with conservative politics in making spending on policing sacrosanct when spending for areas of social good that would make policing less necessary is not.

We knew it wouldn’t be fast.  I’m enough of a social scientist to know that deep change is incremental (and the fact that younger people today are much more woke than we were is evidence of that).  But it wasn’t fixed.  Ferguson (and scores of other incidents) have proved that.  The intransigence of politics against the BLM movement got in the way, and may now have been swept away. I hope so.

But, I have lived through the five decades since the death of Dr. King (something that shocked and saddened us more than either of the Kennedys’) and am convinced we still have a long road ahead.  The forces against change are staying quiet and mostly keeping their powder dry, but they’ll come creeping back, probably before the Fall election.  And many of them will cloak themselves in the armor of religion and our public and media discourse will largely let them get away with that.  But that is too cerebral.  I said I’d be personal.

So, how to think about where we are.  Hope?  Fear? Portent? Resolve? I know that I and people like me need to do more.  We need not to leave it up to others to combat racism.  Its not enough to not be racist, we have to fight racism.

I have never been able to understand White people who say they don’t see race or that we’re beyond it as a nation.  My parents taught us to think about race and be conscious of it, that it is a continuing feature of American life. We were not to say certain words and were to confront stereotypes.  They made us think about it as something that has been a long struggle. Part of the family lore were stories of crossing and confronting the racial barrier, including by forbears who took direct action.

The events of these past weeks sent me to the story of Edwin Coppock, one of those ancestors.  He and his brother Barclay stood with John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.  Both were martyred to the cause, remembered in this history written by the American Socialist and organizer, Eugene Debs.  Edwin was executed by the state of Virginia on December 16, 1859, two weeks after Brown himself.  Debs’s account includes a letter Edwin wrote to his uncle just days before he was hanged.

the time may come when [God] may still further remember the cause in which I die. Thank God the principles of the cause in which we were engaged will not die with me and my brave comrades. They will spread wider and wider and gather strength with each hour that passes. The voice of truth will echo through our land, bringing conviction to the erring and adding members to the glorious army who will follow its banner. The cause of everlasting truth and justice will go on conquering and to conquer until our broad and beautiful land shall rest beneath the banner of freedom. I had fondly hoped to live to see the principles of the Declaration of Independence fully realized. I had hoped to see the dark stain of slavery blotted from our land, and the libel of our boasted freedom erased, when we can say in truth that our beloved country is the land of the free and the home of the brave; but that cannot be.

Are we, like him, only able to imagine things as yet unseen with hope to see them but doubt that we will?  Or can we have more hope because—unlike him—we have lived to see the “gathering strength” of the cause?