In My Lifetime

In What Direction?

Everyone I knew was white like me. Mostly Catholic. Had a lawn. A driveway. A family car. I’d never been to a big city or seen the ocean. I’d seen people of color on tv. When we drove through a park in a much larger town, my parents didn’t stop for our picnic. From the back seat I saw my first Black people — sitting on picnic tables or gathered in groups, children on the swings and slides. I had the strange sensation in my body that they were too unfamiliar to be safe. And their color was the reason. I could feel the telepathy between my parents in the front seat. My dad kept driving in search of another park.

When I was in fifth grade we moved to another town in northeastern Illinois that had one section where Black people resided. It was by the Kishwaukee River. The locals called it N — town. My parents didn’t comment on black people. I never heard them use the N word though my father said “coon” a couple of times. My mother was kinder and race seemed less of an issue for her. After all she loved Nat King Cole and enjoyed seeing my little sister watch Julia on tv.

California Democrat Congresswoman Linda Sanchez said that before coming to work on Wednesday, January 6 to certify the Electoral College vote, she told her husband Tuesday night where her last will and testament was located. This was during an interview with Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC who followed up by asking Sanchez if she had had this sense of danger, why wasn’t security adequate at the Capitol? Sanchez, in response to Wallace’s question about how she had this foreboding, said that the nature of all the incendiary rhetoric of white militia members gave her a heads up. In other words, words matter.

There was a town close by where no Black families could buy a house. I don’t know how I knew this but I did. Starting public high school was my first close contact with Black people although I had almost no interactions with them. I had a job at a drive-in restaurant by the Black neighborhood and my bosses hired a rare Black teenager from time to time. One of them, Willie, was a cook who ran the grill. There was a white lady named Pearl who came frequently for lunch. She was friends with Linda, one of my bosses. If Willie was working the grill, Linda, who didn’t usually do the cooking, got up from her stool at the counter and not so discreetly put the meat patty on the grill and fixed Pearl’s sandwich. I don’t know what Willie thought or if he even noticed that Pearl would not eat a lunch fixed by a Black person.

I went to college in Southern Illinois which, though I didn’t realize it until I visited that part of the state, was the South. Locals spoke with Southern accents and were not happy with the influx of Black students from Chicago and Saint Louis. Three of my friends were looking for a place to rent. After several failed attempts, it became obvious that it was difficult to find a landlord as one of them was mixed. I studied literature and went on to pursue a Master of Arts in English. I never had a Black professor and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the only race-related book I studied. The reading list was nearly one-hundred percent white male writers. In retrospect, I realize how narrow my literary education was and how steeped in what they like to call the “canon,” that holy grail of superior literature or “the list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality.” For as long as one could remember white scholars were the compilers of this exclusive list.

Another pressing matter is how police and national guard are used to control protest crowds. Joy Reid of MSNBC said this about a Capitol riot, “If this was a BLM protest in D.C., there would be people shackled, arrested, or dead.” She also shared that when she was reporting on Black Lives Matter protests for the network, she was afraid of the cops, not the protestors. The whole issue of how white people and Black people relate to cops is a historic one. This, of course, is generalizing but for a valid point. Reid editorialized by stating, “White Americans are never afraid of the cops even when they are committing insurrection.” Images of Capitol police posing for selfies with white rioters have been circulating on social media and the news.

I gave up academia to look for a job to put to use my Illinois teaching certificate. I taught middle school at various districts for many years and then, twelve years in, I took a position at a high school in a suburb just west of Chicago. Friends thought I was crazy, but I wanted to teach high school. It was a scary looking facility appearing more like a prison than a school. The community was nearly completely Black with a growing Hispanic population which caused conflict. Gangs, drugs, and violence were prevalent in both the suburb and the school. I had taught poor white kids, Jewish students, white Catholic students but had little exposure to Black people or culture other than living in Evanston, an integrated suburb.

I remember how scared I was pulling into the gated parking lot for teachers on my first day. I had never worked anywhere with so much security. It was one of the most important features of the school as an institution and became one of the most personal concerns of mine as well — when and where did I feel secure in the building? When did my own classroom feel unsafe? Different administrators had different policies on whether teachers could lock their doors. One superintendent insisted we could not lock our doors as she openly expressed her opinion that teachers, who were overwhelmingly white, were locking doors to late students in order to deny them their education.

When moderator Chris Wallace at a Presidential debate gave Trump an opportunity to denounce white supremacism, one of his now oft-quoted remarks was, “Proud Boys, Stand Bank and Stand By.” The subtleties of the First Amendment continue to be open to many interpretations. What constitutes a verifiable threat? Along with this are the legal and judicial realms that navigate how likely it is that any charges can lead to conviction. It’s highly doubtful that Trump’s words at his pre-riot rally were enough in and of themselves to incite an insurrection. His four years had already opened the Pandora’s box of right-wing extremists and white militias. When he said, as evidenced by the transcript of the pre-riot rally, “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” the word “fight” is open to interpretation.

I was brought up to truly believe the police motto, “to protect and serve.” Children like me were taught to view a policeman as someone to turn to for help, a benevolent helping hand. Our Dick and Jane books, instruction by our teachers, and attitudes of our own parents reinforced this feeling of safety provided by the police. Of course, I am referring to white children. The historic relationship between Black people and police is very different. The conversations Black parents have with their children, particularly black males, about how to interact with police is strikingly different. We now have all heard the phrase that a black person, especially a young man, was pulled over in his car for “driving while black,” a phrase that dates back at least to 1990 when the New York Times used the acronym D.W.B.

In this high school where I taught, education was a by-product of negotiating school lockdowns due to gang activity and shootings in the community. When doors were left unlocked it was not unusual for an individual to enter your room and just grab a student from his or her seat and start hitting them. Cameras were all over the building but didn’t capture what when on in classrooms. Without belaboring the point, during my eighteen years there almost everything was about race. Mostly, the white teachers, if they had any racist tendencies, kept such opinions to themselves. We were always on edge and I felt for the majority of really great students whose education was so frequently interrupted by a minority of their peers who were driven to conflict and violence.

I was hired because of my Master’s degree in English as they needed someone to teach a survey of British literature course to seniors for dual credit with a community college. Here I was revisiting the canon once again. I did what I could to bring in anything that would help my students relate to the material they were studying, much of which they struggled to read which made it even less interesting. The one addition they allowed me to make was the novel Things Fall Apart which took an African perspective to colonialization, but, even then, I had to teach it alongside Heart of Darkness from the established canon.

The oath of office new senators swear to uphold each odd-numbered year in January begins, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” How do you do that when you are sheltering in place from domestic terrorists? White supremacists, brought out in the open by Trump and his supporters, are emboldened enough to attempt insurrection. Despite all warnings, a woefully inadequate security response greeted them. Police and troops would have been evident everywhere if these had been Black protestors, as evidenced by the police and military presence at Black Lives Matter rallies. Many whites, as evidenced by the pride they display with their confederate flags believe, “The South shall rise again!” a slogan popularized by Jefferson Davis. It dates back to after the Civil War and includes the idea that the Southerners are the real patriots in this land, and they are going to rise up and take this country back.

What does this all mean to me? Each American needs to ask this question. Both compassion for others and determination to become involved in a positive way with society begins at home. White Americans are being faced with a plethora of challenges surrounding race and culpability. It is time for whites to try to understand and empathize with the marginalized and those continually oppressed, sometimes violently. How far back does a white American’s responsibility for racial oppression, injustices, and brutality go? If someone in our family owned slaves several generations back, what does that mean to us now? Are we responsible for our fathers’ sins? That doesn’t seem fair. We all have our own upbringings, family histories, and inherited belief systems to face.

Now we try to keep track of all the Blacks shot by police, but it is difficult to do. Trayvon Martin focused the nation’s attention on the violence toward Black individuals, mostly young Black males. Trump happened and half the country was in shock. Rather than civil rights for people of color marching forward, we regressed. In the aftermath of a police shooting this spring, I went to pick up a prescription at my drive-through. The glass and the counter were destroyed. I noticed the parking lot was empty except for one police vehicle. A man was standing by the store telling people that it was closed and encouraging us to go to our homes and stay put as rioting was going on at several malls in the area. This began an era of stores preemptively boarding up and making Chicago look like a war zone. It has been referred to as ChIraq which is really not fair, but unrest continues amid a society that has gone haywire, the pandemic exacerbating all social ills.

Today the best conversation is the one I have with myself about being a better person — these days — a better citizen. What does it take to be that? Recently the high school where I’d taught honored the death of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther Party Chairman killed by Chicago police, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death. He had graduated from this school three years before his fatal shooting which occurred in 1969. Students studied his life and the times in which he grew up and competed in three areas: oratory, essay writing, and art. While I thought this was such a good opportunity for learning, I also thought the Black Panthers were not without sin.

A year previous to Hampton’s assassination were the King riots which were burning down the West and South sides of Chicago. This high school was near to the West side and still had connections to Hampton and the Panthers. Violence occurred within the building and the National Guard were called in. It wasn’t long before they cancelled classes until things calmed down.

At the same time Americans were bitterly divided about the Vietnam War; this country was volatile, angry, and violent. Like today our rhetoric was ugly, our listening skills almost non-existent, our tone strident. Our decibel level that of a shout, a scream. The police have remained a subject of scrutiny especially since the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrations were found to be “police riots.” A large percentage of Americans supported the raid on Hampton’s residence, yet today most of the media refer to it as an assassination. I remember this as the subject of the most heated argument I ever heard between my political- science-major brother and my father.

Months ago, Trump supporters and white supremacists, assuming they are not always the same thing, rallied in D.C. and counter protestors joined in. Several people were stabbed and Black Lives Matter signs were torn down, and one burned, from historic Black churches bordering, ironically, Black Lives Matter Plaza. How did we get from the Black Panthers and other organizations driving for racial equality and alleviation of the crushing effects of poverty to “The Proud Boys” and white supremacists openly advocating hate, intolerance, and violence? Despite some promise in a new more progressive (what wouldn’t be?) administration, the genie is out of the bottle. Our conflicts over race never went away, they were just less out in the open.

And how far have I as an individual come? Almost seven decades old, and I’ve never been inside a non-white person’s home. I admit I’m not an activist. I mostly, like many, feel helpless to address this nation’s crushing problems around race. I don’t know how much certain measures will address or change attitudes among races — efforts such as renaming schools, streets, libraries, and expressways after African Americans, efforts such as tearing down monuments to Confederate leaders or once-iconic figures such as Christopher Columbus. I fear most of this is symbolic (although that may not be a bad thing either). What needs to be addressed are the hateful attitudes in people. As long as parents and adults expose children to such hate, there will be another generation of racists in the making.

A torrent of bad news awaits us each day. Many Black Americans face what must seem insurmountable odds in the areas of healthcare, employment, food insecurity, life expectancy, access to higher education, and career advancement among others. I live only blocks from the still-largely-burned-out West side of Chicago. We’re in a new century and it has only minimally recovered from those riots. Meanwhile, the first individual sentenced in the Capitol attacks was given lengthy probation and will spend no time in prison. Does our own democracy’s “woke” system allow citizens to get away with murder? I think of the quiet aura of Thoreau and wonder in these times who would be still enough to listen to his wise words: “What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”