June 7, 2020
THE ARGUMENT THAT THERE'S NEVER BEEN LESS RACISM FAILS TO RECKON WITH DONALD (self-reference alert):
American Racism: We've Got So Very Far to Go: And the journey must continue step-by-step. (David French, 6/07/20, The Dispatch)
I freely confess that to some extent where I stood on American racial issues was dictated by where I sat my entire life. I always deplored racism--those values were instilled in me from birth--but I was also someone who recoiled at words like "systemic racism." I looked at the strides we'd made since slavery and Jim Crow and said, "Look how far we've come." I was less apt to say, "and look how much farther we have to go."Then, where I sit changed, dramatically. I just didn't know it at the time. I went from being the father of two white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed kids to the father of three kids--one of them a beautiful little girl from Ethiopia. When Naomi arrived, our experiences changed. Strange incidents started to happen.There was the white woman who demanded that Naomi--the only black girl in our neighborhood pool--point out her parents, in spite of the fact that she was clearly wearing the colored bracelet showing she was permitted to swim.There was the time a police officer approached her at a department store and questioned her about who she was with and what she was shopping for. That never happened to my oldest daughter.There was the classmate who told Naomi that she couldn't come to our house for a play date because, "My dad says it's dangerous to go black people's neighborhoods."I could go on, and--sure--some of the incidents could have a benign explanation, but as they multiplied, and it was clear that Naomi's experience was clearly different from her siblings, it became increasingly implausible that all the explanations were benign.Then the Trump campaign happened, the alt-right rallied to his banner, and our lives truly changed.
The Brothers Judd grew up in East Orange, NJ, which the Father Judd chose for his Baptist ministry precisely because it was a city with a large, even predominant, black population (54% in the 1970 Census). And the demographics of the city had settled down, mostly because a city ordinance required all public employees to live in town. But at some point after the Newark riots it was rescinded, prompting the flight of white cops, firemen, etc. and taking many more white residents with them (it was just 4% white by the 2010 Census).
When the church reached the point where there were going to be black deacons, it was closed instead. The Father Judd was so disillusioned he abandoned the ministry altogether. Our parents divorced, but the Mother Judd raised us in the old parish house (you can still see the stained glass window upstairs), across the street from Clifford Scott High School and around the corner from Upsala College, a neighborhood that wasn't too bad. She taught at Benjamin Franklin Elementary School (now the Whitney Houston School of Performing Arts) , so even as the demographics shifted and there were ever fewer white kids, we had some protection on the playground. Heck, I was the only white kid in the East Orange Gospel Ensemble and often the only one in the churches in Newark we'd go perform at, unless the Grandparents Judd were in town. I don't know what your grade school was like, but at ours we sat in the auditorium and watched heroin withdrawal films if it rained for recess. You might have had Patrols? Where kids act as crossing guards? The older students headed to the High School would push us into the street if we tried stopping them. And one of the playground games (a macadam playground at that) was "Get Whitey," especially unenjoyable for the slowest child in America. I was friendly with a girl named Michelle in my 4th grade class, but after that Summer her name had changed to Xena Mohammed and she didn't have much truck with white devils. We had bomb scares at school that were at least blamed on the Black Liberation Army.
She hung on as long as she could, but for 8th grade I would have been sent to the new Middle School that had been built to house grades 7-9, twin buildings where I would have been one of the vanishingly few white kids. That first year a kid brought a shotgun to school to kill the principal and there was a sexual assault in the tunnel that connected the two buildings, as East Orange trended towards its eventual title as one of the most dangerous cities in America for its size. So she scraped together enough money to move us one town over, to West Orange.
It too was divided in its own way. Essentially, the Catholics lived "down the hill," towards East Orange, the Jews lived "up the hill," towards upper-middle-class Livingston, and "the valley" housed the few Protestants and the leftovers from up and down the hill. Livingston realtors, of course, red-lined, and would show black customers houses that were actually in West Orange.
At any rate, the Other Brother is as smart as a whip and was several grades ahead in Math even in East Orange, which still had excellent schools. But when he transferred to the elementary school in West Orange they put him at grade level. The Mother Judd went in to talk to them and when they took out his file his race was marked as black. They were willing to acknowledge that he was white, but insisted that being advanced "there" would not be the same as "here." Suffice it to say, in short order he was going across the street to the Junior High for math classes because he was so far ahead of the grade school class.
We were extremely fortunate. We grew up with no delusions about race in America. We experienced white racism towards blacks, black racism towards whites, lighter-skinned black racism towards darker-skinned, Catholic Jew-Hatred, Jewish anti-Christian sentiment, the whole magilla. But we also grew up knowing and being friends with whites, blacks, Jews, Catholics, Protestants--not many Hispanics back then, that had to wait until Caddy Camp--and seeing that they were all a whole lot more alike than some of them would care to admit, while kids of equal talent, intellect and virtue got to excel or fail as much because of what they were as of who they were. While sometimes difficult, it was, on the whole, an invaluable education.
But here's the thing; for most of our lives, despite all those endemic tensions, American leaders and people have seemed to be making a good faith effort to improve racial and sectarian relations. the path has never been straight and the pace has seldom been quick, but there has been a seeming societal recognition that all these old bigotries are, to put it bluntly, just ignorant and, worse, immoral. They are literally unChristian.
Which has made it all the more painful to see our Republican Party embrace, nevermind tolerate, a racist like Donald Trump and his identitarian politics. His every utterance and act is a denial of everything that conservatism represents, yet many former conservatives and Christians defend him and even cheer him on. But we're four years into the debacle and we've kind of adjusted to this tragic reality. What's depressing in this particular moment is to hear conservative opponents of Donald argue that the protesters are ignoring the vast improvements in race relations that have been achieved over the past 60 years. It's not that this improvement isn't real, but the argument requires you to ignore Donald, who you've essentially broken with your party and movement to oppose. It requires you to pretend that all the Nativists and Proud Boys and Integralists and Boogalooists and Incels and anti-semites and Islamophobes and so on and so forth who he's unleashed and given voice to do not exist. It requires saying that you support the cause but not the tactics, because it's the wrong way to go about things, even as the protests are finally producing tangible results. It requires that you ignore the whole backlash against the American ideal that "All Men are Created equal." It requires you to pretend that when you say, "Sure, police violence against blacks is awful, but..." that you are not offering a rebuttal, just as surely as any Trumpist. It requires that you pretend that when armed white men converged on state houses without masks to defy public health measures it is the same as peaceful masked and distanced protests against violence and racism. It smacks, if not of racial reasoning itself, of an attempt to assuage the psychic dissonance caused by opposing so many of your old allies on the right by taking their side at least tangentially.
It is not good enough.
MORE:
Washington protesters express optimism after week on edge: The demonstrators who flooded Washington on Saturday reshaped the mood of a city that has been on edge (STEVEN SLOAN, June 7, 2020, AP)
"This is us walking across the Pettus Bridge," said Kendyll Myles, a 33-year-old project manager, referring to site of the iconic 1965 civil rights march in Selma, Alabama. "This is that type of awakening that our country needed."The scene on Saturday was starkly different from earlier this week when law enforcement moved aggressively to push back protesters from a park in front of the White House. Within minutes, President Donald Trump walked across the park to appear before cameras at a church where he held up a Bible, but didn't offer any prayers. The episode has been widely criticized.As demonstrations are expected to spill into another week, there are questions about whether the scope of the protests can become something more durable.Unlike the major Washington protests of the past, Saturday's events weren't strongly organized. In some cases, they were mini-marches that began in residential neighborhoods before converging on 16th Street, one of the major roads leading to the White House, where Trump spent the day without any public appearances.Many protestors carried signs urging participants to vote with the passion they brought to the streets. The Rev. Al Sharpton has said he's organizing a March on Washington for late August that would energize voters heading into the fall presidential campaign.There were signs of cultural change. Those who led demonstrators in chants were almost exclusively people of color.Several white people who were approached for an interview demurred, saying that white people do enough talking and that this was a moment for their black and brown counterparts to have the spotlight and set the agenda.That's one reason some black protestors said they thought this moment was different from previous demonstrations against police brutality. The fact that large numbers of white people would march alongside them fueled some hope that change might happen."You can finally see it, the different races out here," said Carl Sirls, a 26-year-old airline worker. "It's not just black people. It's not just white people. It's everyone."
Posted by Orrin Judd at June 7, 2020 7:49 AM