Winter, and Pulaski and Madison

If you saw my last post, you know it was based upon my comments to the items on a list compiled by Time Out Chicago of things Chicagoans would like to see "ghosted" in this city. (The original list was published last Halloween, hence the term). Most of the items on the list were general in nature, things like traffic, the weather, food, certain biases of Chicagoans, etc. However, one item stood out to me as it mentioned along with the weather, a very specific place in the city which inspired a post of its own, actually two posts.

Here's the item:

Winter, and Pulaski and Madison.

I don't have a problem with winter in Chicago, in the winter that is. I'm not too crazy about winter in April and May however, which is not uncommon here.

I do have a personal connection with the area around Pulaski and Madison on the West Side of Chicago as long ago, it was the location of my pediatrician's office. 

Consequently, I will always associate it with the painful shot in the rear end I would receive at the end of each visit. Perhaps the commenter who singled out this specific corner of the city has a similar association with it. 

But I doubt it.

 

  

The corner of Madison and Pulaski, March 5, 2023

My late cousin Bob Hoggatt used to refer to the West Side Irish of Chicago as "lace curtain Irish". Look it up if you don't know the term. One day I asked him how then he would characterize the South Side Irish, such as himself. His answer, typical for him was hilariously self-deprecating but, uncharacteristically crude.

I'll just leave it to you to imagine what he said. 

Driving west on Washington Boulevard past Sacramento, Bob's assessment of the West Side rings true today as the magnificent gold dome of the Garfield Park Fieldhouse comes into view as you pass the ornate facades of the elegant late nineteenth and early twentieth century houses and two flats, those that survived decades of turmoil and neglect on the West Side.

The fortunes of the neighborhood around that park first took off after the construction of two elevated lines in the 1890s. Madison Street, between the two lines, became the main drag after the L tracks cast a permanent shadow over Lake Street, the previous main thoroughfare. 

Just west of the park, the intersection of Madison and Crawford, later named Pulaski Road, was the heart of one of many neighborhood "downtowns" that sprung up throughout Chicago at that time. So large and successful was the Madison/Pulaski Shopping District, that it served as the commercial, entertainment and business center for the entire West Side throughout the first half of the twentieth century and beyond.

But it was the twenties when the area really boomed, seeing the construction of grand hotels, department stores, and two movie palaces, the Paradise and the Marbro, both of whom rivaled the Chicago Theater in the Loop in opulence and size. Perhaps the most conspicuous symbol of the success of the area was the construction of the Midwest Athletic Club which, when it was built, was the tallest building between the Loop and Des Moines, Iowa. The building still stands, you can see it in the background of the photograph above. 

The boom ended as it did everywhere, during the Great Depression. But the neighborhood kept plugging along mostly intact through the difficult thirties and forties, with the exception of the Athletic Club whose building became a hotel. Many of the "lace curtain" residents left for lacier dwellings to the west. They were replaced by new residents, many of whom were immigrants from South, Central and Eastern Europe and their offspring. The community then took on a more working class feel. 

That is illustrated by the construction of a Goldblatts Department store in the shopping district in 1951. Goldblatts for decades had been recognized as the "workingman's Marshall Fields", whose stores were always situated inside architecturally impressive buildings, despite the discount prices they offered inside. 

It was the construction of one of their stores or their chief competitor Wieboldts, sometimes both, that set into motion the development of the commercial centers around them. 

 

Not so at Madison and Pulaski where Goldblatts was bringing up the rear.

Here is a photograph of the grand opening of the store on the SE corner of Madison and Pulaski featuring its bold Mid-Century-Modern entrance in April of 1951.

The same building, greatly altered, can be seen on the right in the contemporary color photograph above.

I'm sure the store's appearance in the district made many of the remaining lace-curtain types who like my mother would have never set foot in a Goldblatts, throw up their hands and say: "well there goes the neighborhood!" 

But the riches-to-rags story of the community would come a decade and a half later. It's sadly a familiar theme in Chicago, and many similar cities around the country.

 

It begins with a rumor, usually propagated by phone calls, often in the middle of the night. "The neighborhood is changing..." says the voice on the line, "and it's time to get out or else".  It usually took only a few bites before panic set in and pretty soon practically everyone on the block was packing their bags and heading out. What they meant by "changing" as you may be able to guess if you've been around these parts long enough, was that black people were starting to move in.

Now in a just and perfect world, nobody would bat an eye over something like that. After all, in a big city like Chicago, neighborhoods change all the time. As we just saw, West Garfield Park had already gone from lace curtains to vinyl window shades. But that change took place over a couple generations and was the result of upward mobility of families, both those leaving, and the new arrivals. In other words, they moved on their own terms. This was different. 

Black people immigrated to Chicago for the same reason as members of other ethnic/racial groups before and after them including my father. In a word, that reason was opportunity. Most of the black people who came to Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century (commonly referred to as "The Great Migration"), came from the rural American South, especially the Mississippi Delta. hoping to leave behind poverty, the injustice of institutional racism, the brutal share-cropper system, and perpetual second-class citizenship. The rapidly growing industries of Chicago provided the opportunity of work, a steady paycheck, and the hope for a better life. 

Chicago was never a particularly welcoming place for new groups of arrivals. The Irish, the Germans, the Bohemians, the Poles, the Jews, the Italians, the Chinese, and many other groups, all faced discrimination and hatred when they came here en masse. Quite often the worst abusers were members of the group who had just proceeded them. But the sum of all that hatred directed at those groups would not add up to a fraction of what was directed at the black people of Chicago. The tragic story of Chicago, the Segregated City, is based upon the fact that when black people moved into a neighborhood, white people almost invariably left, quick as their legs could carry them. 

For many, the reasons for "white flight" are simple. If you ask one group, they might say it was about personal safety and property value. Ask another group and they'd say it was flat out racism. They're both right to an extent but the story is much more complicated than that. There were bad actors to be sure, plenty of them. Add to that, bad public policy, bad life choices, bad business decisions, bad landlords, bad faith, bad blood, bad parenting, bad luck, bad logic, bad manners, bad timing, bad choices, bad this, bad that, and a whole lot of good people, black and white, caught in the middle. 

Those middle-of-the-night phone calls were not idle threats. 

The people on the receiving end probably didn't know anything about the city's long-standing discriminatory housing covenants that determined where black people could live and where they couldn't, forcing people into over-crowded, dehumanizing slums. 

They more than likely didn't know about the disinvestment caused by federal government maps of neighborhoods which lending institutions used to color code communities depending on their viability. The neighborhoods with red lines drawn around them, 

hence the term "redlining", were almost always in the city, consisted of older housing stock and more often than not, were (or were about to be) inhabited by black people. These neighborhoods were deemed too risky to lend money to. Consequently, the communities lacked the funding from banks necessary for home improvement, new development, and any hope to keep them alive and vibrant. 

It's also unlikely they knew about the true motives of those blockbusting callers, contract sellers who bought up property at bargain basement prices then turned it around overnight, well above market value and financing it themselves while charging exorbitant interest rates. These people made a killing by preying off the fears and prejudices of the white people they bought the property from, and the lack of other options for the black people to whom they sold the property.

Nor did the white folks understand many other systematic, pernicious discriminatory practices that all but guaranteed segregation in the city and second-class status to people of color.

What they did know was what they could see with their own eyes: once thriving neighborhoods deteriorating rapidly not long after black people moved into them.

The people in West Garfield Park didn't have to look far. In 1951 when Goldblatts opened at Madison and Pulaski, there were virtually no black people living in the community. That same year in neighboring North Lawndale to the south, the population was 13 percent black. Ten years later that number was 91 percent. It wasn't merely the complexion of the community that changed in a decade, the new arrivals found massive unemployment as the moribund industries in the area were not hiring, at least not to them, and despite the population of the community at an all-time high, due to redlining, no new housing to speak of was constructed, which resulted in the rapid deterioration of the existing housing stock and the infrastructure of the community.

By 1960, the black population of West Garfield Park was 16 percent. Given the rapid change next door, there was legitimate concern and tension in the neighborhood, especially following a riot in 1965 sparked by the death of a young black woman who was accidentally struck by a Chicago Fire Department vehicle.

After that incident, virtually the entire West Side of Chicago became a tinder box ready to explode.

It wasn't a match that set the tinder box ablaze, but a bullet.

Martin Luther King Jr. was no stranger to the West Side. As part of his "Campaign to End Slums", in 1966, King and his family moved into an apartment at 1550 South Hamlin in North Lawndale. It was during that time when Dr. King led marches for open-housing in the then all-white neighborhoods of Gage Park and Marquette Park on the South Side and also in the suburb of Cicero. 

Needless to say, Dr. King was not warmly welcomed as the beloved figure of peace and love who just wanted all of us to get along, as he is pictured today among members of the white ultra-right. I vividly remember the parents of my best friend at the time rhetorically asking: "Why doesn't that colored guy just mind his own business?" Those were some of the milder comments about him, It was on August 5th of that year in Marquette Park, where King was hit in the head with a rock, inspiring this statement: 

I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’m seeing in Chicago.

Not a quote seen too often in collections of quotes about our great city. 

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and cities all over the country went up in flames. While there were flareups in the more established black communities of the South Side, cooler heads there prevailed and community leaders, including gang leaders, intervened to help control the damage.

But not on the West Side. 

Here is a link to a short film produced by the CFD (obviously told from their perspective) on Chicago's West Side riots after Dr. King's assassination.

It made so little sense to so many, especially white people, why people rioted, looted and set fire to their own community, leaving thousands homeless, vital businesses destroyed and the neighborhood in a state of ruin from which it has yet to recover, more than fifty years later.

I had an epiphany of sorts several years ago when I read in its entirety, Dr. King's most famous speech. Here I'm quoting myself:

As I became re-acquainted last week with the "I Have a Dream" speech, one line particularly spoke out to me. Dr. King said early in the speech:

"One hundred years later...", (after the Emancipation Proclamation), "...the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land."

Perhaps for the first time in my life I put myself in the shoes of the people in the African American community who rioted in cities all over the country after King's murder. No longer do I feel that the violence, regrettable as it was, was not justified. With the image of people exiled in their own land in mind, I could understand why folks threw up their hands believing that this country had nothing left to offer (them). Martin Luther King preached non-violence in order to bring about justice for his people, and where did it get him? Dr. King did nothing more than confirm the rights guaranteed in our constitution. The only difference was he added the "for all" part that American children recite in school every day, preceded by the words liberty and justice. For that he went to jail in Birmingham. For that bricks were thrown at him in Chicago. For that he was killed in Memphis.

While many white folks claimed Dr. King who advocated non-violence would have been appalled by the response to his murder, King shortly before his death prophetically revealed the truth of the matter:

Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena... They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking.

During the sixties, roughly 40,000 white people left West Garfield Park, replaced by the same number of black people. With its commercial heart all but destroyed by the riots after the assassination of Dr. King, black people who had the means to do so, left the neighborhood as well. Between 1970 and 1980, the total population of West Garfield Park diminished by thirty percent. In the following decade, it diminished by nearly another thirty percent. In the latest census, the population is nearly thirty percent less than that. 

Here is a link to an article from WBEZ Chicago which describes the latest newsworthy event that took place around Madison and Pulaski, and it wasn't good. Once again, the neighborhood experienced riots and looting, this time after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. The article begins by quoting Thomas Morris, a lifelong resident of West Garfield Park who participated in the 1968 riots. Like Dr. King, Morris was measured in his response, viewing both sides of the issue: 

I’m looking at the consequences of being stupid. You torched stuff in the community that you [need]. Now, you got no place to buy food, medical [supplies], because you destroyed it... And you dishonored the man who lost his life.  

On the other hand... 

It seems like for us to get any attention, we have to do wrong...it's just systemic racism in America...and this has to change and we have to do things to be fair.

The article points out that Morris is "frustrated and angry with the damage" but also angry that people in 2020 still have to:

...protest and fight for the same things (we) fought for in the 60s... how the hell can the racism in the 60s be allowed today in the 2000s?

I'll let these words of Mr. Morris that cut to the chase better than my poor words ever could, close this post. 

This was long and as I stated at the top, it's only part one.

As I said, this is a complicated issue. 

Until next time...

What Is Race Anyway?

Whoopi Goldberg, celebrity co-host of the daytime talk show The View, got herself into a heap of trouble last week after a comment she made about the Holocaust. The comment which could best be described as "clueless", set my incredulity meter to the highest point it's been since 1976 when I heard President Gerald Ford tell the world during a televised presidential debate, that Poland at the time, was not under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. His opponent, Jimmy Carter, appearing as shocked by the comment as my livid, staunchly anti-communist Czech father, responded something to the effect of: "try telling that to the Poles." Ford's blunder was very likely the pivotal moment of that election which stamped the then Governor of Georgia's ticket to the White House. 

Goldberg's remarks didn't shock me so much because of their inaccuracy or insensitivity, I've heard much worse. But like the former President of the United States, the 66-year-old public figure and professional broadcaster with many years of experience behind her, should have known better. What on earth I thought, could have convinced her that it was a good idea to tell the world that the "Holocaust was not about race?" If that weren't bad enough, she added that one of the most heinous criminal acts in human history was a dispute between two groups of white people.

Beyond the nonsense of those statements, shouldn't she know by this late date that any public, "outside the box" comment about the Holocaust is virtual career suicide and should be avoided at all costs? 

Why would she go there and what the hell was she thinking?

That question was answered when I watched the full exchange between Goldberg and her co-hosts of The View, rather than just soundbites of the comments in question.

The topic of the conversation was the recent trend in Conservative states to ban books in schools. Much of the focus on this subject has been the red state obsession with so called "Critical Race Theory", and how teaching the not-so-pleasant parts of American history, especially those regarding the treatment of black people, is frowned upon in some circles because it supposedly makes little white children feel uncomfortable. 

Most recently a particular furor has arisen over a rural Tennessee school district banning a series of books called Maus, graphic novels about the Holocaust. According to the burghers of the McMinn County school board, the ban was unanimously approved because the books include images of nudity (despite all the characters in the book being depicted as animals), and foul language. Goldberg logically pointed out the irony of a school board being upset by animal nudity and language, but not the point of the story, millions of people sent to death camps by the Nazis. 

She then tried to make the point that not only are they banning books about race relations in the U.S., but they're banning other books as well.

Unfortunately in making her point, Goldberg blurted out that, as opposed to books such as To Kill a Mockingbird (which has also been banned in some school districts), the subject of Maus wasn't about race. When confronted by her co-hosts, rather than rephrasing her statement redirecting it back toward the banning of books, Goldberg doubled down by focusing on the Holocaust, leading the conversation down a rabbit hole nobody on Team View, least of all Goldberg expected or wanted. 

Then later in the day, Goldberg went on the Stephen Colbert Show to try to do some damage control but only dug herself deeper by saying something to the effect that race is something you can see with your own eyes. Elaborating on that theme she said she knows someone is either black or white, simply by looking at them, which is something you can't do with Jews who cannot be visually differentiated from other white people. That performance only gave fodder to the trolls over at Fox who had a field day with it, using Goldberg's comments as an illustration of the myopic vision of the Left when it comes to race. 

The following day on her show, a leader of the Anti-Defamation League appeared and explained what every fifth grader should know, that the Nazis were obsessed with race, promoting the idea that the so called "Aryan race" to which many Germans supposedly belong, was (for whatever reason) a superior race, while people of other "races" including Blacks, Slavs, Gypsies and especially Jews, were inferior. The Final Solution which resulted in the Holocaust, was the Nazis' very effective attempt to eradicate the world of these "inferior races" as a means to create one "master race". 

Therefore, at least in the eyes of the perpetrators, the Holocaust was unequivocally about race, case closed.

It was then that Whoopi Goldberg publicly learned her lesson,  ate crow, offered a dozen mea culpas, and much to her credit, apologized. 

Watching the scene in its proper context as it played out, (which is always a good idea), I now understand that Whoopi Goldberg was not trying to compare the Holocaust to the Black American Experience, nor intent on diminishing it in any way. And from everything I observed, I have no evidence to believe that Whoopi Goldberg is the least bit anti-Semetic. If Goldberg is guilty of anything, it is not choosing her words wisely. She'll have some time to think about that as she's been given a two-week time out by her bosses at ABC News. 

As offensive as her comments were to many, especially those who didn't hear them in context, she did bring up an interesting point which is this: what exactly is race? Goldberg's comment on the Colbert show reflects Justice Potter Stewart's 1964 written opinion in an obscenity case:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that. 

"I know it when I see it" is by no stretch of the imagination is a useful definition of anything, but sometimes, it's the best we can come up with. 

Whoopi Goldberg does not see Jewish people as belonging to their own race. Is she wrong and were the Nazis right?

The following is the list from the website of the U.S. Census Bureau listing the five races they officially recognize and asks Americans every ten years to identify with:

White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

Black or African American – A person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa.

American Indian or Alaska Native – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America) and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.

Asian – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.

Where do Jewish people fit on this list? I think it's fair to say that like Whoopi Goldberg, most Jews would identify themselves as "white", at least as it is defined by the Census Bureau.

But the Jewish diaspora spreads far and wide. The definition of what constitutes a Jew according to the Jewish community is anyone born to a Jewish mother, regardless of the ethnicity, race or religion of the father. Furthermore, anyone can convert into the Jewish religion, so a Jewish person can identify as any of the above races. 

We humans love to categorize things into nice, tidy packages but as we can see, when it comes to race and perhaps to a lesser extent, ethnicity, it's complicated.

 

It might be noted here that in the majority of the acts of genocide committed during the twentieth century, the perpetrators of those crimes, going by the U.S. Census Bureau standards, were of the same race as their victims*, inspiring the most Orwellian of terms to describe the mass killing of human beings: "ethnic cleansing."

The Census Bureau website then goes on to clarify their distinctions of race:

The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups.

In other words, race is a purely subjective construct, not something that has universally defined parameters. 

That statement is important because it reflects contemporary thought on the subject of race. It was once assumed by biologists, anthropologists, geneticists, as well as the general public, that people of different races had evolved significantly enough after long periods of isolation, to be empirically categorized into different subspecies of the main species, Homo sapeiens, to which all human beings belong. 

That idea has in the past 100 years or so, been categorically rejected by the scientific community.

There are no extant subspecies of Homo sapiens. The physical differences, or traits of people of different races are purely superficial, we all have in our DNA far more in common with one another (about 99.9 percent) than we have differences. We are all of the of same species, period. 

I know this comparison is going to rattle some feathers, but race is more akin to the selective breeding of domesticated animals, where generations of subjects bred in isolation from the general population leads to the predominance of certain characteristics or traits in the offspring. It takes several generations to create a breed but only a handful of generations of interbreeding with the general population to dilute or completely lose those unique traits. 

Same with humans. There is no such thing as a white, black or Asian gene any more than there is a poodle or  cocker spaniel gene.

Despite that, race remains a tremendously significant factor in our society. Why? Because we have deemed it to be so, much to the detriment of society. 

From time immemorial, humans have used race and ethnicity (another subjective construct), as an excuse to divide people, to conquer people, to enslave people, to slaughter people, and mostly to hate people, all under the discredited notion that "the others" are somehow less human than we are.  

Yet even though we know better today, this shit continues.

Given the ponderous nature of all that, it seems to me anyway, pointless to debate ticky-tack distinctions between race and ethnicity. Likewise it seems futile to get our panties all in a bunch (or knickers in a twist if you prefer), over misguided comments made by public figures. That's especially true if those comments can be turned into learning opportunities.

After all, the one and only way to change our misguided ways is through education, honest education that is, that pulls no punches, in order to give our children the chance to avoid making the same mistakes that we have made for eons. 

To educate means to challenge, and challenge is by definition, uncomfortable. Selecting curriculum based upon what we think will not make our children uncomfortable is the opposite of education; it is indoctrination. They're not only banning books in some parts of the country, they're burning books, and anyone with an accurate knowledge of history knows where that leads.

In my book, one of the most valuable lessons we can teach our children about race, is that biologically speaking at least, there is no such thing, that our differences are literally only skin deep. 

Does that mean we should all learn to ignore our differences and become a "color blind" society as some people suggest?

Hardly. 

I wrote a post on that very subject a few months ago, you can read it here.

To summarize as I did in that post, we'd be going a long way if instead of being threatened by our differences as is typical human nature going back eons, we accept our differences, then respect them, embrace them, and ultimately cherish them.

Until we can all do that, well what can I say, same shit, different day.

*The major exceptions being the two examples on the list, whose circumstances are noted as "Imperialism." Of course if we were to go back before the Twentieth Century, we'd find many more such examples of genocide by Imperialism, including the genocide of the indigenous population of the Americas.

Color Blind?

The Fox sportscaster Chris Meyers got himself in a bit of hot water after a tweet he posted on June 4, 2016, shortly after the death of Muhammad Ali. This is what he wrote:

When you saw #Ali you didn't see color you didn't see religion you saw a gentle man who was a strong fighter,a Champion you could believe in

Other remarks coming from media outlets in their obituaries of the three time heavyweight boxing champion of the world claimed that Muhammad Ali "transcended race and religion."

Those comments, harmless as they might sound to the uninitiated, were remarkable in a couple of aspects. 

First of all, Ali defined himself by and championed his black heritage more than any public figure of his time. He never made any secret of his membership in the Nation of Islam, in fact for a time he became the public face of that controversial group. Responding to the idea of a racially neutral Muhammad Ali in an article for Jezebel at the time of Ali's death, writer Kara Brown penned an article titled: "If You Don't See Blackness, You Didn't See Muhammad Ali."

When I first read Meyers' tweet five years ago, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he must have been too young to remember Ali in his prime: the cocky, immensely proud black man known in some circles as "the Louisville Lip", but only the older Ali, the most recognized person in the world, who under the influence of a devastating illness, had softened a little around the edges. 

Well it turns out Meyers is my age, and I'm old enough to remember all the way back to when Ali still went by the name Cassius Clay.

Maybe he just wasn't paying attention. 

And what on earth does it mean to "transcend race and religion"? After five years I still don't get that. Did anyone eulogizing Mickey Mantle feel the need to write that when you looked at the late ballplayer, you didn't see that he was a white guy, or that he transcended his religion, whatever that may have been?

Certainly not. 

Putting it another way, if you didn't see a black man when you saw Muhammad Ali, what would make you even think of mentioning it in the first place?

Could it be that what Meyers and the rest of the presumably white writers who penned those remarks really meant was: "Muhammad Ali may have been black and a Muslim, but despite that, we liked him anyway"?

Other than complete ignorance of the man on their part, that's the only reasonable conclusion I can make.

There in a nutshell, is the problem with the absurd idea of "color blindness" when it comes to race. 

I thought of this a couple weeks ago when I spotted an article on the web called "Colorblind is the Moral Ideal." The premise of the article is that the real racists in this country are people who make race an issue, not those who like the writer, supposedly ignore it. In the words of Dennis Prager, the author of the piece:

Colorblind means one does not believe a person’s color is in any way significant.

My first thought after I read the first sentence of the article...

There is little that reveals the immorality and dishonesty of the left more than its labeling the term "colorblind" racist. 

...was how far Prager would get into his piece before he mentioned Martin Luther King.

It took him about 250 words.

Far right wing rants are nothing if not predictable.

The far right has become enamored with Martin Luther King. I've gone on and on about the subject in this space and you can read why they love him so much here. Of course they don't totally embrace the late civil rights leader, rather cherry pick random comments here and there. Here Prager selects one line from one speech, the part about his dream of the day his children would be judged by their character rather than the color of their skin. 

Who could argue with that?

 

According to Prager, the left does by rejecting the idea of color blindness. In doing so in his opinion, they are also rejecting Martin Luther King.

 

But judging a person by his or her race is not the same as being conscious of race. I never heard Dr. King suggest that we should all strive to be color blind in regards to race. Quite the contrary, that would mean disregarding our history of slavery, genocide, racism, forced segregation, disenfranchisement, and many other shameful acts imposed upon black people and other minority groups in this country. That would mean ignoring the fact that being black in America is still today a different experience than being white.

Hmmm, you don't think ignoring all that unpleasant stuff is exactly why the ultra right promotes color blindness in the first place do you?

Then comes another predictable argument in their arsenal, comparing the left to the KKK:

The worst racists — defenders of slavery, supporters of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan, just to cite American examples — were the least colorblind people. Color is the one thing they and all racists see in people. Precisely because they defined people by their color, they justified their subjugation of black people.

The left’s insistence that color is important is one of the most racist and anti-human doctrines of our time. It was precisely when America was most racist that people’s color was deemed most important. Why would we want to return to that time?

Insisting that race is important is itself "racist, and anti-human"? I would argue the exact opposite.

On the contrary, insisting that (beyond our basic humanity) we're all the same, insisting that race plays no role in society, insisting that the black experience in this country is no different from the white experience, is living in a state of denial as big as the state of Texas.  

But hasn't so much changed in the last hundred and fifty odd years since the end of the Civil War, and even in the last fifty odd years since the Civil Rights movement led by Dr. King and others? After all, we've had a black president. 

To that last point I would respond, yes we did, and look at whom we elected in response to the presidency of Barack Obama. If I were forced to say something positive about Donald Trump's time in office, it would be that by making open racism acceptable again, he uncovered a cancer in our society that many white people, myself included, had mistakenly thought was in remission since the seventies. Of course black folks were never under that delusion.

Like any disease, the chances of eradicating it are much better when it is discovered and confronted. 

The color blind folks implore us to ignore the disease of racism.

Of course it's ludicrous to claim that anyone is really color blind. Noticing someone's color is as natural as noticing someone's gender, their age, their accent, their height, girth or lack thereof, and all sorts of other characteristics of individuals. It's embedded in our DNA and goes back to our Stone Age days and beyond when society was centered around the immediate clan. Anyone outside of that group posed a potential threat and making detailed observations of strangers contributed to the well being and indeed the survival of our our bygone ancestors.   

It's just like other subconscious responses to the outside world that were once beneficial to our ancestors. Increased heart and breathing rates during stressful situations for example, gave our bygone ancestors the extra strength and endurance to help survive things like the proverbial sabre tooth tiger attack. However, a racing heart and hyperventilation doesn't do us much good during a typical modern day stressful situation such as having to speak in front of a large group of people. Nevertheless the response lingers on within the recesses of our reptilian brain cores, the part of our brain that controls our instincts, and there's precious little we can do to stop it. 

But through training, practice and effort, we can mitigate it, and possibly even use that extra adrenaline rush to our advantage.

This reminds me of a discussion I was involved in years ago while leading in a group of Catholic students studying to receive their sacraments. The topic was the greatest virtue we as humans are capable of, forgiveness. As I was blathering on as is my style, a deacon piped up and told the students that not only we as Christians are expected to forgive all the bad things people do to us, but also to forget them. 

At that point a young priest from Kenya, one of the wisest people I've ever known, disagreed with the deacon saying that while forgiveness is well within the scope of our capabilities, it is humanly impossible to selectively erase the contents from our memory banks like we can a computer's. In other words, we can will ourselves to forgive, but not to forget.

Moreover, where is the virtue in forgiveness if we can't remember what we're forgiving?

In much the same way, we can't will ourselves to be color blind, we can will ourselves to control our reactions both outward and inward when we encounter people whom we regard as different from us.

Fear of the different is also a trait we inherited from our ancestors who lived eons ago, and lingers to this day in our primitive brains, just as appetite and sexual desire do. But our brains have evolved considerably since then, and we certainly don't have to live as hostages to those fears and impulses. 

While we may not be able to completely avoid our deep seeded fears, we can control them. Just as forgiveness helps us mitigate our inability to selectively forget, virtues such as curiosity, compassion, empathy, and perhaps above all, critical thinking, (all of which came along much later in our own evolution), help us mitigate our fears of the different.

So instead of fearing our differences, we may embrace them.

It's been known for a long time that the gene pool of any species is strengthened through diversity and weakened sometimes to the point of extinction through over homogenization. In other words, you cannot create a master race by selectively breeding from one small group of people as the Nazis liked to believe, only a defective race. In much the same way we all benefit psychologically, spiritually and intellectually from our exposure to people from many different backgrounds, cultures, experiences, beliefs and yes, even opinions.

Why on earth would anyone want to be blind to all that?

That is precisely why I value living in a diverse neighborhood of a diverse city and why my wife and I chose to raise our children here.

I probably won't be around to see it, but I have faith that one day most people of good will, will be able to look at their fellow human beings and honestly say: "I love you because of who you are", instead of in spite of who they are.

That will be the day when we will have finally put our reptilian brains back into the recesses of our minds where they belong.

CRT

Army General Mark Milley is the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last week, he and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin appeared before a congressional hearing to discuss the proposed budget for the Department of Defense. Present at the hearing were two Florida congressmen, Mike Waltz and darling of the Trump crowd, accused child molester Matt Gaetz. Both took the opportunity to question the Secretary and the highest ranking uniformed member of the military about the ultra right's latest red herring, the teaching of Critical Race Theory. 

CRT is the idea that for centuries and to this day, racism has been endemic in American society. To anyone with any sense of US History, that is a no-brainer. Nevertheless the ultra right has taken up the cause of fighting against teaching our children, and specifically for Waltz and Gaetz at the hearing, members of the military, a truthful and honest representation of American history, rather than the sugar coated Euro-centric version that generations of us (myself included) received. 

For his part, Secretary Austin, the first black Secretary of Defense, deflected the question, saying that the military is merely interested in weeding out the kind of extremism that led a handful of its members to take part in an insurrection, storming the Capitol on January 6th of this year in an attempt to overturn a free election. Here are some of his comments:

We do not teach critical race theory. We don't embrace critical race theory, and I think that's a spurious conversation... We are focused on extremist behaviors and not ideology — not people's thoughts, not people's political orientation. Behavior is what we're focused on.

Milley chose another path. He gave an impassioned two minute speech espousing the importance of education while denouncing the willful ignorance of the questioners. Here in full is his statement:

I do think it’s important for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read. The United States Military Academy is a university. It is important that we train and we understand. I want to understand white rage — and I’m white. What is it that caused thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution of the United States of America? What caused that? I want to find that out. I want to maintain an open mind. I do want to analyze it. It’s important that we understand it. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and guardians — they come from the American people. It’s important that the leaders, now and in the future, understand it. I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with having some situational understanding about the country we are here to defend? I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military — our general officers, our commissioned and non-commissioned — of being ‘woke’ or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there while calling out those who have criticized military officials as “woke” for entertaining the theory based on the idea that systemic racism exists in America. [Critical race theory] was started at Harvard Law School years ago and proposed that there were laws in the United States prior to the Civil War that led to a power differential with African Americans that were three-quarters of a human being when this country was formed. We had a Civil War and an Emancipation Proclamation to change it. We brought it up in the Civil Rights Act. It took another 100 years to change that. I do want to know. I respect your service and we’re both Green Berets, but I want to know. It matters to the discipline and cohesion of this military.

The Green Beret comment was directed at Waltz who is a decorated veteran. During Milley's comments, Gaetz, the Eddie Haskell of Congress who is more famous for showing colleagues nude photos of his sexual partners than for his non-existent military service, was shown smirking and shaking his head. He would later tweet this:

With Generals like this it’s no wonder we’ve fought considerably more wars than we’ve won.

Later that day, the talking heads at Fox, especially Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson threw, in the words of Vanity Fair, a massive "shit fit" over Milley's comments. Ingram suggested that Congress refuse to grant a penny to the Department of Defense until they agreed to renounce CRT. 

Wow and I thought the Trumplicans were supposedly appalled by so called "cancel culture". Now they want to cancel the Pentagon?  How times have changed. 

The "conservative" Carlson seemed to have a particular bee in his bonnet over Milley's mention of "white rage". That makes sense because through his years of publicly huffing and puffing over the subject of so called "reverse racism", and his insistence that white folks such as himself are the true victims of it, Carlson has become the poster child for white rage. 

Poor little snowflake.

Carlson called the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff "stupid" and a "pig" and later doubling down on his hissy fit, called Milley's thoughtful comments at the hearing, "disgusting and disgraceful". 

During his diatribe the evening of the hearing, Carlson said this: 

(Milley) didn't get that job because he's brilliant or because he's brave. Or because people who know him respect him. He is not, and they definitely don't. Milley got the job because he is obsequious. He knows who to suck up to, and he's more than happy to do it. Feed him a script and he will read it.

Geez given Carlson's remarks, you'd think that Milley was a Biden appointee. Spoiler alert: he's not.

For the record, Milley is brilliant, well at least in the common sense of the word, having received a bachelor's degree from Princeton and advanced degrees from Columbia University and the Naval War College. As for his braveness, well if you watched the hearings you may have noticed ten bars upon his right sleeve, each one representing six months of time served in combat deployment. The hardware displayed over his left breast displays a distinguished record of service to this country.  Where Carlson got the idea that Milley is not respected is anybody's guess, folks of his and Gaetz's ilk feel little need to back up what they say. 

Tucker Swanson Carlson, heir to the TV dinner fortune, has a penchant for questioning the bravery of bona fide American military heroes who don't happen share his world view. For his part, Carlson's military record is every bit as impressive as Matt Gaetz's.

That's not to say he's not brave, after all he did do this: 

Also for the record, Mark Milley was appointed to his current position by none other than Calson's BFF, Donald Trump. While dressed in military fatigues, Milley among others accompanied the exPOTUS during his infamous march to St. John's Episcopal Church across the street from the White House last year during the protests over the killing of George Floyd, for the sole purpose of staging a photo op of the Chief Executive standing in front of the slightly damaged church while holding a bible. 

Shortly after that shameful performance where police and National Guard members used force against peaceful protestors to clear the way for the exPOTUS's stunt, Milley regretted his presence at the event and publicly apologized for his symbolic role in the farce:

I should not have been there. My presence in that moment, and in that environment, created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.

Milley even considered resigning from his post after the public embarrassment.

Perhaps Carlson felt it was that affront to his Dear Leader that gave him carte blanche to go after Milley. 

What I find remarkable is that people who call themselves "traditional conservatives", people who express pride in their supposed unwavering support and respect for the military and those who serve in it, would put up with this relentless trash talk against them, especially coming from folks like Gaetz, Carlson and yes, Donald Trump, none of whom have ever come close to service of their own. 

Whatever.

The debate over Critical Race Theory is yet another farce foisted upon us by the Trumplicans. It's as ludicrous to suggest we refrain from teaching our children the truth about our past (good and bad) as it is to suggest that German schools refrain from teaching their children about Nazism.

This should be so obvious, there is really little to say about it, but I will bring up one crucial example of how the American education system has failed us, and the absolute need to teach our children honestly about race in this country. It can be summed up in three words:

Tulsa Race Massacre.

Until recently, how many of us knew about this particularly horrific event in US History? 

I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't.

If you still don't  know about it, look it up. If you don't look it up because you feel there is no need to learn about critical race theory because you believe we have overcome racism in this country, then my friend, you're part of the problem, not the solution. 

When Cultures Collide

There was a fascinating story that aired on NPR's This American Life Series last week. The piece was about an incident that took place in 1994, when a group of high school students were removed from a movie theater for behaving badly during a screening of the film Schindler's List. The incident made national news. Here is a report from the time in the New York Times.

Schindler's List in case you don't know, is a Steven Spielberg film revolving around the true story of a German industrialist who managed in a small way to circumvent Hitler's "Final Solution" by saving the lives of roughly 1,500 persons whom he claimed were under his employ in a company deemed essential to the German war effort.

Apparently the straw that broke the camel's back at the screening came during a scene in which a young woman engineer wearing a yellow arm band with a Star of David, is shot for the offense of warning the Nazis building a concentration camp that their construction techniques were faulty. The scene induced a mixture of commentary and laughter from many of the students. This led a group of movie-goers to walk out of the theater to demand the students be removed, which they were.

It's not difficult to imagine the reaction of the audience to laughing and cracking jokes during a film about the Holocaust. If we didn't know otherwise, we would assume the offenders must have been virulent racists with ties to the American Nazi Party, or any number of related hate groups.

But this was not the case, the students in question came from Castlemont High School, located in a predominantly African American and Latino neighborhood in one of the poorest communities of Oakland, California.

Public reaction to the incident was swift and relentless.

The NPR piece is told from one side, that of the students. Twenty five years later, the former students now in their early to mid forties, make no attempt to deny or obfuscate their actions, every one of them understands what they did that day was inappropriate, hurtful and disprespectful to the rest of the audience and to the greater Jewish community. There is no Roshomon effect here, the students don't paint a different picture than the "official" account. But their account is nuanced and after hearing it, to be honest, it's not difficult to understand what took place that afternoon.

For starters, they were kids. If you've ever spent time with a bunch of high school students on a field trip as I have recently, you know what I mean.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, a school outing on an official holiday, Martin Luther King Day. The field trip combined a movie which would be followed by a trip to the ice skating rink. On top of that, the movie would teach the students a valuable history lesson, one which the students admitted years later they had little if any knowledge of at the time.

According to one of the former students in the NPR piece, the problem began from the first frame of the film. For starters, it was in black and white. As someone with children of his own, I am sadly aware of the aversion the younger generation has to films shot in glorious black and white. What can I say, at least for my kids, black and white reminds them of all the dusty old cinematic classics their parents forced them to watch when they were younger. For kids who never had that experience, a film shot in black and white must seem as foreign and inaccessible as a tablet written in Hittite..

On top of that, the film opens with a Jewish prayer sung in Hebrew, a language most of the students had never heard of, let alone understood. Would the whole movie, all three hours of it, be in a strange language with no subtitles AND in black and white? Many of the kids grew antsy and some of them snuck out of the screening into theaters showing less taxing movies such as Grumpy Old Men and House Party III.

I saw Schindler's List when it came out and have no memory of the nude scenes at the beginning of the film, but they certainly made an impression on the former students, many of them at the time (at least claim) to had never before seen sex depicted on the silver screen.

It's not difficult to imagine that totally unprepared for the film they were about to experience, many in the group of students who remained in the room showing Schindler's List, became rowdy and obnoxious. Naturally the four hundred or so other patrons in the auditorium that day were not pleased. Their attempts to sush the kids were answered with volleys of popcorn thrown at them.

Then came the infamous summary execution scene about twenty minutes into the movie. If there is a scene in film that more chillingly depicts the banailty of evil, I'm not aware of it. The sociopathic commandant in charge of building a concentration camp, played by Ralph Fiennes, becomes perturbed when a young Jewish woman prisoner supervising the construction, clearly with more education than he, demands that the barracks being built be torn down and rebuilt as its foundation is insufficient. He listens to the woman, then tells his second-in-command to shoot her. The woman protests that she is just doing her job to which he replies, "so am I." The second in command gladly carries out the order despite another German pointing out that she is the foreman of construction . As the Fiennes character walks away from the scene he finishes his cup of coffee, then commands the barracks be torn down and rebuilt just as the woman suggested.

There has been much debate in the twenty five years since the screning of SL in Oakland, about the students' reaction to that scene. What is not in dispute is that it created a particular ruckus from the group. Defenders of the kids have claimed that many of them witnessed brutal violence in their lives and became desensitised to it, exemplified by their not giving the film the silent reverence it deserved. One of the students who laughed during the execution scene claimed she was responding not to the situation but to the histrionics of the actor who portrayed the woman, as she fell to the ground in what the student felt was an unrealistic manner. On the other hand. accounts of what was actually said by many of the students, seem to contradict the theory of indifference. There was a build up of chatter after the command to shoot the woman was heard. Comments such as "he's not really goonna shoot her is he?" indicated that the students were as shocked and incredulous as anybody in the house by the scene that afternoon. After the woman was shot, one student could be heard saying: "man that was cold." which produced more chuckles, and other seemingly inappropriate reactions.

Here, while it may rankle some readers, I think it's worth menntioning that at least some of the conflict between the students and the other people watching Schindler's List that afternoon stems from cutural differences, namely the differences between the way African and European American audiences react at movies. In this article from the Houston Press, its author Jessica Goldman reacts favorably to a sassy article on proper theater etiquitte on all points except one, that audiences "shut the fuck up."

STFU in the theater and the movies has been the ideal, if not always followed, for white folks for at least as long as I've been around and probably a lot longer, but not so much for black folks. Goldman draws a parallel between theater etiquitte and the way we worship at church. Here she quotes Eileen J. Morris, Artistic Director of the Ensemble Theatre of Houston:

In the African American tradition, we come from a call and respond community. That’s why church is such an important part of what we do in our community. The preacher preaches and stirs emotions that we, the people of African descent, go Amen, and want to respond.

According to Morris, it's the same with the theater and presumably by extension, the movies:

When people come to Ensemble and see that people are doing a “mmm-huh” underneath their breath or “Girl, I don’t know why you’re doing that”, or talking back or saying “Stop”, I can only say that it’s because human beings have been touched in such a way by what is happening on stage that they can’t help but emote and react. And from our culture, we react by not holding it in, we let it go.

To the white folks in the house that day most of whom are likely accustomed to maintaining silence in their houses of worship and theaters, the running commentary, especially during a serious film such as Schindler's List, must have seemed the height of disrespect. To them the comment "man that's cold" must have seemed like a cynical use of extreme understatement to belittle the tragedy of the event depicted. But to the student who uttered those words, he was simply stating the obvious.

After the brouhaha of press coverage after the incident. some Castlemont students took it upon themselves to apologize for their and their classmates' behavior. But that didn't seem to calm the storm.

Eventually the students became fed up and bitter with the way they had been publicly treated. Despite that before the incident, few of the kids made any distinction between Jewish people and other white people, the kids were now accused of being anti-semetic. Out of frustration with that accusation, some of them bought into the false theory espoused by Louis Farakkan and later picked up by David Duke of KKK fame, that Jews owned all the ships that brought slaves to this country and were as a group disproportionately involved with and profited from in the slave trade. In other words, Jews were particular enemies of black people.

A few months after the incident, Steven Spielberg made a well publicised trip to the school. His visit was greeted with protestors from the Nation of Islam who chanted "How can a Zionist Jew..." (Spielberg) "teach us about racism?"

Undaunted, Spielberg quickly gained the students' trust when he refused to blame them for their actions. Labelling it "the privelege of youth" he admitted to having been kicked out of a theater himself during a screening of Ben Hur for talking too much. But he did himself one better, returning to Castlemont, this time without the press or a cadre of school officials and politicians, to have an  informal one on one chat with the kids to talk about the Holocaust, injustice and a slew of other issues. One of the kids asked him if he ever made a film about the slave trade. He said no, but he should. Turns out a few years later he did just that. In an interview after his film Amastad was released, Spielberg told the interviewer that his inspiration for making that film came from that student's question.

So what can we learn from all of this? Well I'd say that lesson number one is that we, parents and teachers alike, need to do a better job of teaching our children history. To me its scandalous that kids no matter what neighborhood they live in can get into high school without knowing what the Holocaust was. But knowing history is not enough, we need to understand that hatred, intolerance and injustice directed at any group, is an assault upon all of humanity. Some of the students reported that people in the audience applauded when they were escorted out of the theater and were taunted by chants of "go back to Africa." by some in the crowd.

It does go both ways.

Lastly and most important, we all need to embrace the fact that we come from different perspectives and need to learn how to view the world from a perspective that is not our own. Are we any better doing that today than we were twenty five years ago?

Hardly. We've got a long way to go.

Reverse Racism?

I thought I had the perfect argument for why reverse racism is a myth. It started in all places, with a Facebook exchange about a hockey game.

Last Saturday night, the Chicago Blackhawks hosted the Washington Capitals. When a Cap player was sent to the penalty box, some Hawks' fans taunted him, not at all uncommon for partisan hockey fans.

What is a bit uncommon is that the player, forward Devante Smith-Pelly, is one of only about thirty black players in the National Hockey League, which works out to about one player per team. While serving a five minute penalty for fighting, four fans wearing Blackhawk jerseys chanted what some considered racial epithets at Smith-Pelly, that not only got them booted from the game, but banned by the Blackhawk organization for life.

And what exactly did the fans chant at Smith-Pelly?

"Basketball, basketball, basketball."

The Facebook exchange in question was between two friends, both white males of whom I think it would be fair to say are both politically conservative. One is a staunch Republican and a Trump supporter, the other is a a card carrying member of the Contrarian Party, most definitely not a supporter of the president.

The Trump supporter posted his outrage at the fans for their racist behavior, to which the Contrarian replied: "since when is 'basketball' a racist term?"

Having contrarian tendencies myself, I completely understood where that friend was coming from. In fact, I was a little surprised and heartened by the almost unanimous public outrage directed at these fans. The only ones who didn't fall in line with the popular public sentiment were the usual suspects, genuine racists, people clueless of American culture, especially its sports culture, and of course, contrarians.

My contribution to the conversation was tepid. I said that in a perfect world, yelling "basketball" at a black hockey player on the other team shouldn't be a big deal, after all, it's an obvious observation that the game of basketball, especially at the professional level. is dominated by black athletes. But our world is far from perfect, especially regarding the issue of race. Given that, unless they fell into the clueless camp which is highly unlikely, the taunters knew exactly what they were doing and how their chants would be taken. As they say, "intent is nine tenths of the law." I added that I felt the Blackhawks were perfectly justified in their response.

To that, the Trump supporter brought up the hypothetical situation of the reverse taking place at a Chicago Bulls basketball game in the same building, namely a black fan chanting "hockey, hockey, hockey" at a white player on the opposing bench. That scenario is precisely what I considered to be the perfect illustration of the myth of reverse racism. You see, I've actually witnessed black people yelling something about hockey to white basketball players. Actually I thought it was pretty funny, and for the life of me, I can't imagine any white player being seriously offended by that remark, especially if it was coming from fans of the other team. I didn't pose that question to my right wing friends but I can only imagine their response would be the same: if it's considered racist for one side, it should be racist for both. After all, fair's fair.

Unless it isn't.

I posed the question to my son the following day. He agreed with me that the hockey fans taunting the black player was definitely a racist act, while the hypothetical situation of black fans taunting a white basketball player with the word "hockey" was not. But he begged to differ on the idea that black folks can't be racists.

My children have grown up in a racially integrated neighborhood, participate on integrated sports teams and dance groups, ride on integrated public transportation. and go to integrated schools. But last summer, my son had the experience of being the only white kid in a summer program for Chicago school kids. In that program he experienced some outright hostility from some of his peers because of his race. Having experienced this, he told me that he chafed at a comment from a girl in the group who said flat out that black people, and members other minority groups, cannot be racists. 

Racism comes in all shapes and sizes. In our day, it's just about the worst accusation you can make against someone. However when pressed, I think few people can adequately define racism, to them it's a little like the word pornography was to Justice Potter Stewart who famously quipped when justifying his ruling on a 1964 obscenity case that he may not be able to adequately define what pornography is, but "I know it when I see it."

To many of us, white folks especially, my son included, the terms racism and prejudice describe precisely the same thing.

Here's the definition of the word as found in Merriam Webster:

racism:  a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

It's that belief that one race,  usually one's own, is superior to the others that makes racism different from run-of-the-mill prejudice.

So at least according to Merriam Webster, if a black person considered her race to be superior to all others, that person would be a racist right?

Well not so fast.

In an article I stumbled across from Vice Canada, the author Manisha Krishman quotes Anthony Morgan, a Toronto-based civil and human rights lawyer:

Racism is based on a couple of things—historical, systemic oppression and power, ... And as far as history goes, white people have never been persecuted for the colour of their skin—so there's no point comparing their experiences to those of black, brown, and Indigenous folks.

To that Krishman adds:

...Morgan said even if all people of colour straight up said they hate white people, it wouldn't affect a white person's ability to get a job, an education, or increase the odds that they'd get carded or charged for a crime.

Now we're getting somewhere. Of course some white folks would beg to differ, especially if they feel that the American Dream of having it better than their parents, is out of their reach. They see affirmative action and other well intentioned attempts to level the playing field between the races, as governmental interference putting them at a disadvantage because of the color of their skin.

To that issue Mr. Morgan says:

When you're so deeply invested in your privilege, and in this case white privilege, racial equality feels like oppression.

Now it's unlikely that message, coming from a civil rights lawyer up in Canada, is going to play well to say, an unemployed white coal miner in West Virginia who probably would not feel himself to be the beneficiary of "white privilege."

As I said above, racism comes in all shapes and sizes. The question often comes up, is the current President of the United States a racist? While I don't agree with his son often, I thought that Eric Trump's remark that the only color his father sees is green, was spot on. My impression has always been that the only thing Donald Trump judged people on was how much money they had. Even the lip service he gives at times to white supremacists strikes me as mere pandering to his base, rather than genuine racism. After all, Trump at least judging by his public persona, feels superior to everybody, not just black people. However his gratuitous "shit hole" comment about Africa and Haiti to select members of Congress, was the straw that broke the camel's back, at least for me. It seems to have cemented into posterity his true feelings about black people, earning him a place at the table in the pantheon of famous racists of the world, whether deserved or not.

Unfortunately, the need to feel superior to other human beings seems to be a common thread in the species Homo sapiens. It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the most virulent and open racists are people who come from the lower stratas of society. You might be a dirt poor white guy with no money, no education, no skills, no prospects, and no self-esteem, but in American society as it has existed since its beginning, at least you could feel like you were superior to black folks, no matter how accomplished they were.

That too is white privilege, picayune as it may seem. To these people, racial equality truly must be a bitter pill to swallow.

I needn't go into the tragic history of black people in the United States. With the election of Barack Obama, some folks mistakenly believed that we lived in a "post racial" America, where we no longer needed to concern ourselves with the divide between the races. The election of the current president has proven that to be quite wrong.

You may argue, why would a professional athlete at the highest level of his profession, making scads of money, be upset by the actions of a few cretins who happen to have enough money to sit in the pricey seats along the ice? Well in a day when the President of the United States himself singles out black athletes daring to publicly protest injustices in their community as being sonsofbitches who deserved to be fired, you can rest assured that no matter high or mighty you may be, there are still people not worthy of carrying your jockstrap who are more than happy to put you in your place.

As for my son who was harassed by some minority kids, I had this to say: you experienced treatment that those kids and their ancestors have experienced in this country for centuries, something that hockey player experienced just last week. The difference is, you don't live in a country that continues to argue about honoring people who actively fought to enslave your people. The president of the United States doesn't call the continent of your ancestry a shithole and have countless people agree with him. You get to go out into the world and not have to worry about being profiled, carded, suspected of crimes, wrongly arrested, and perhaps even shot and killed by the police, just because of the color of your skin. Unfortunately those kids and even that rich NHL player can't say the same thing.

It's a tough lesson to teach and to learn. Living it, as African American people do every day, is much tougher.

A Sniper in Dallas

Where have I heard those words before?

Back in college drama class, our teacher asked if anyone knew who J.D.Tippit was. Only one person raised his hand. It was my life-long obsession with the JFK assassination that enabled me to know that Tippet was the Dallas police officer who was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald (although JFK conspiracy theorists would beg do differ on that point), during the manhunt for the killer of President Kennedy.

The point of the question was to examine the nature of Classical tragedy whose subjects were inevitably the high and mighty, not your average Joe. In this case: the deaths of two people in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963 were intrinsically tied together. Both victims were shot by the same man (allegedly), both were World War II veterans roughly the same age who left behind grieving wives and small children. In the general sense, both deaths were tragic, yet one sent shockwaves around the world and has been recorded in history as a major event in American if not world history. The other decedent, while receiving some press coverage at the time of his death, has gone on to become a historical footnote. Scores of articles, books, films, plays, even an opera have been written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. As far as I know, not a single book, let alone opera has been written about J.D. Tippet. By virtue of position and his tragic end, one name to this day is known by the majority of people on the planet while the other name is known, as my classroom experience nearly forty years ago proved, by only a shrinking handful.

There is one concession to the dead policeman and his place in history, a historical marker in Dallas commemorating Tippit and his sacrifice, although it took 49 years to build it. At its unveiling in 2012, a state official said:

Officer Tippit did what hundreds of Dallas police officers do and have done every day... He did his job, and as a result he gave the ultimate sacrifice, and we as a community should never forget what happened on that day.

Sadly we'll be hearing similar words in the weeks to come, describing the five Dallas police officers who were ambushed during an otherwise peaceful demonstration, protesting the deaths of several African American men across the country in recent years, killed by police officers. The most recent of these deaths happened just this past week, one in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, the other in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

And like the deaths of Officer Tippit and President Kennedy, the deaths of officers Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Lorne Ahrens, and Michael Smith, will be intrinsically connected to the deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and dozens of other African American men who died at the hands of police in the last couple of years.

While each of those deaths is equally tragic, there is a disconnect between the deaths of the police officers and the men killed by the police. Rather than placing equal weight on every loss of life, to many individuals in this country, the narrative of these men's deaths will be colored by the political ideology of the individual.

For some, the men who were killed by the police were resisting arrest, they may not have deserved to die, but definitely played a role in their own deaths. For others, the Dallas police officers may or may not have themselves done anything wrong, but all police are in some way complicit in the abuse of their authority and the institutional racism that is a part of their profession. To some, the violence against police brutality, especially as it exists in relation to the African American community, while not acceptable, is understandable.

As has been the case in this country for a long time, national tragedies such as these, instead of bringing us together as they should, have hardened hearts and torn us even more apart. The disconnect between the African American men killed by the police in recent years and the police officers killed in Dallas last Thursday night, is a perfect metaphor for the hardening divide we are experiencing in this nation today.

It is that divide that prevents individuals from thinking clearly and forming rational opinions. It's true for both the left and the right. We've slipped back into the habit of labeling people as groups rather than recognizing them as individuals. To some, all police are corrupt, brutal and racist; to others, all black people have the potential for violence.

That is the reason why every civilian death at the hands of police is treated equally by some. As I pointed out in my post about Laquan McDonald last November, that is a mistake. As you may recall, McDonald was a Chicago teenager on a vandalism spree who was shot sixteen times by an Chicago Police Department officer. From a video of McDonald's death taken from a police car dashboard-cam, it is very evident that while the teenager was indeed resisting arrest, he posed no imminent threat to anyone, including the officers on the scene. The cop who emptied his gun into McDonald and was re-loading when his partner told him to hold his fire, has been charged with murder and is awaiting trial.

The McDonald case, along with its subsequent cover-up by the CPD and the City of Chicago to me represents nothing less than the most egregious example of governmental malfeasance and criminal behavior on the part of the police. However, in each of the other well documented cases over the past several years, many of which were also documented on video, none were so clear cut. That is not to say the killings were justified, rather from the evidence presented, the acts of the police and the victims were ambiguous, and different interpretations of their motivations and actions are possible. While every civilian death at the hands of the police is a tragedy, no two are the same, nor should they be treated as such.

It has been pointed out that African Americans and other minorities are singled out by the police and treated differently from whites. The people making these claims have a point, but the extent to which that is true is debatable and the issue has been grossly over-simplified by the press and social media over the past few years.

Of the 484 people killed by the police in this country so far this year. 238 of them were white, and 123, or 25 percent of them were black. That number is still disproportionate to the population of African Americans in this country which stands at around 13 percent. In all fairness, it must also be pointed out that violent crimes (including the murder of police officers) are committed by African Americans in numbers disproportionate to their population as well. The reasons for this are many, but it is still an indisputable fact. It is also a fact that the victims of violent crime are disproportionately black. It should surprise no one that there might be a cause and effect relationship between the crime rate in the black community and the response from police, yet a casual observer whose source of news comes from one particular point of view, might assume that police only harass and kill black people in this country, while white criminals are given a free pass. The numbers simply do not support that assumption.

That is not to say that horrendous injustices involving the police do not take place far too often in this country. On the other hand, it is simply wrong to lump all police men and women together as brutal, racist thugs who abuse their authority.

The deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling last week bring a new dynamic into the picture. Unlike many of the well publicized deaths of black individuals at the hands of law enforcement officials, these two men were armed with guns during their confrontations with the police. Castile was stopped in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul, on the pretext that his car had a broken tail light; the cops apparently thought he matched the description of a robbery suspect. In order to avoid any misunderstanding. Castile responsibly informed the officers that he had a valid conceal/carry permit and in fact had a gun in his possession. When he reached (presumably) for his drivers licence as requested by one of the officers, the other officer opened fire (again presumably) assuming Castile was reaching for his gun. Castile's girlfriend and her four year old daughter were in the car at the time of the shooting.

Alton Sterling was selling CDs outside a food store in Baton Rouge. Someone, reportedly a homeless man, approached Sterling asking for money. When the man persisted, Sterling allegedly produced his weapon, prompting the man to phone the police. When they arrived, a struggle ensued and Sterling was shot when the cops discovered his gun.

As individuals carrying weapons presumably for their own protection, both Castile and Sterling it would seem, would be poster children for the gun crowd, who advocates the arming of private citizens. But the NRA has remained uncharacteristically silent after their deaths. No cries of foul that the police violated the men's civil rights to bear arms were sounded. Now it's true that Sterling as a convicted felon, could not have legally obtained a carry permit, but all indications lead to the fact that he was carrying the weapon for his own safety. Castile as we saw was authorized to carry a gun and was well within his legal rights.

So why the silence from the NRA? Is it because as some people suggest they are a racist organization who would have cried bloody murder had Castile and Sterling been white? Or do the tragic deaths of these two individuals serve as yet another reminder that the stance that we'd all be safer if we carried a gun is ludicrous? I suppose only the NRA knows the answer to that question and they're are not talking.

Finally there was the terrible shooting in Dallas where a former soldier opened fire and killed five police officers and injured many more, including civilians, apparently in retaliation for the killings of black men across the country by law enforcement officials. Ironically, the Dallas Police Department has a relatively good record when it comes to its relationship with the sizable African American community of that city. Not to go into a psychological profile of the killer, but it seems clear to me that like so many Americans, he was swept into a frenzy because of the current obsession of the press and social media, concentrating on the misdeeds of cops toward the African American community, without putting them into context.

A video that has gone viral shows a black woman from St. Louis commenting about violent protests that took place in her city over an African American man who was shot and killed by police after he pulled a gun on them. That same evening she points out, in the suburb of Ferguson, a young black girl who was doing her homework, was killed by a stray bullet that came from a gun used in a drive-by shooting that found its way into her bedroom. Not a soul protested the little girl's death. The truth is far more black people die at the hands of other black people in this country than by police. Yet in some circles, this is irrelevant as it is apparently not an appropriate topic for discussion.

Then there are the guns. The events of last week showed time and again how ridiculous is the notion that civilians carrying guns in public is a good idea. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile lost their lives because they were carrying guns. And it took an army of well trained, heavily armed law enforcement officials, with the help of an exploding robot to bring down the Dallas sniper. Imagine if armed protesters at the demonstration had decided to do a little freelance police work on their own, no doubt dozens of innocent people would have died. Instead, the civilians at the protest, many of whom we can assume were armed (it was Texas after all), ran for their lives, which turned out to be the sensible thing to do.

The pro gun crowd constantly complains about folks on the other side who use a terrible tragedy to promote their anti-gun agenda. Well it turns out terrible tragedies involving guns are occurring at a rate of about two or three per week these days so tell me, where is the opportunity to talk openly about guns when no such tragedy occurs? They say that laws restricting guns only affect law abiding citizens, since criminals who by nature of their being criminals, aren't going to be concerned about following any law. Fair enough. But consider this: our ever increasing relaxation of laws prohibiting firearms has a direct effect on the number of weapons manufactured. No one knows for sure but most data suggests there are more guns in the United States (approximately 300 million) than there are people. It has also been estimated that there are about twice as many guns today in this country than there were fifty years ago. Criminals don't make their guns themselves, they either buy them or steal them. And the overwhelming supply of guns in this country makes them ridiculously cheap and easy to get, including weapons of mass destruction like the semi-automatic assault rifles used in the Orlando mass shooting a few weeks ago, and in Dallas last week. Those guns are capable of discharging as many rounds of ammunition per minute as the shooter is capable of pulling the trigger.

As for the idea of "good guys with guns", well as someone put it in an online comment, the Dallas sniper, a U.S. Army veteran, was once a good guy with a gun.

Let's face it, we have many serious problems in this country, and finger pointing, marching and posturing, satisfying as they may be to the people who engage in them, aren't going to do much good. These problems, just like the deaths mentioned above, are all interconnected; cherry picking one problem or another based upon our political convictions simply will not work. We can't address the abuse of police authority without also addressing black on black crime, white privilege, and racism. We can't address racism or black on black crime without addressing poverty and a lack of jobs and education in the black community. We can't address those issues without addressing issues like the rapid decline of the two parent family and the idea of personal responsibility. We can't address the issue of crime and violence without addressing all of the above AND the availability of guns. And like it or not, we can't address the issue of the availability of guns without addressing the issue of how we can control the sale, manufacture and possession of firearms without violating constitutional rights. Until we find a way to listen to the other side, work out our differences, be willing to compromise, and honestly come to terms with issues that are inconvenient for us, we can only expect more of the same.

All the catchy slogans in the world aren't going to solve any problems. Yes I get it, black lives do matter and guns don't kill people, people kill people.

It's just so much more damn complicated than that.

1550 S. Hamlin

On January 26, 1966, fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King moved into an apartment on the west side of Chicago. As a part of the "Campaign to end slums", Dr. King came here to listen and learn, working to improve the lives of the poor people of this city, both socially and economically. He also came to help integrate Chicago, working to end the housing covenants of the time that restricted black people from living wherever they pleased in the city. That apartment at 1550 S. Hamlin in the neighborhood of North Lawndale would be King's home address for almost one year.

During that year, Dr. King and his associates marched in the (at the time), all white communities of Gage Park, Cicero and Marquette Park, where a brick thrown presumably by an unappreciative resident of that community hit him square in the head. Of that experience, Dr. King said:

I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I've seen here today.

Dr. King was more measured in his feelings about this city in a radio interview on the black radio station WVON, when a listener asked him if he really felt Chicago was worse than any other city he had visited. You can listen to his response here in an excellent report filed this morning by Linda Lutton of Chicago's public radio outlet, WBEZ.

The WBEZ piece takes pains to differentiate the larger than life, carved in stone, Nobel Laureate hero whom we celebrate each year on his birthday by playing soundbites of his I Have a Dream speech, from the Martin King who lived in Lawndale in 1966. The Chicago King was no dreamer, here he was nothing short of a revolutionary bent on changing the very fabric of American Society from the ground up. In the name of ending poverty, Dr. King advocated collective bargaining not only for workers, but also for tenants and welfare recipients, a 60 percent increase in the minimum wage, and a guaranteed minimum income for all.

The Linda Lutton piece quotes King as saying in Chicago:

“If there is to be genuine equality, there must be a radical redistribution of economic and political power."

Fifty years later in a much more conservative time, it's hard to see King's ideas for the elimination of poverty gaining much steam. Clearly, Dr. King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963 proclaiming his dream is a much more palatable symbol for most Americans than the real man, shirtsleeves rolled up, working in one of the bleakest neighborhoods in the country, and advocating the kind of radical change that would make even Bernie Sanders uncomfortable.

For me the saddest part of the piece is an interview with Irene Powell, an elderly woman who still lives across the street from 1550 S. Hamlin as she did nearly a lifetime ago when Dr. King called that address home. Things haven't gotten much better since his visit fifty years ago, in fact Lutton ironically describes the time when Martin Luther King lived there as the neighborhood's "good years."

Two years after he lived on south Hamlin Street, Martin Luther King was assassinated and much of the neighborhood burned to the ground. The scars still exist today in the form of entire blocks still vacant after all these years.

It's impossible to say what might have happened had Dr. King been allowed to live a full life. As I mentioned in a previous post, his death and the urban riots that ensued, hardened the hearts of many black people who no longer saw non-violence as a viable solution to poverty and racism, and those of white people sympathetic to the cause, who fled major cities in droves out of fear for their personal safety.

Despite the fact that we live in a completely different world than the one we lived in fifty years ago, best illustrated by the man who currently resides in the White House, race continues to be a defining and polarizing issue in our country.

Perhaps the moral authority and leadership of an elderly Dr. King would have made a significant difference in the way white and black people live together in this country. Perhaps not.

Sadly, we'll never know.