Obama and America’s Race Problem

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said last evening that the race problem in America has gotten worse since Barack Obama became president. He is echoing what many have said.

Even though I have some issues with some of what has and has not been done by our president as concerns race, I find myself wondering what people thought his being president was supposed to do. Right after he was elected, people, some who pride themselves on being really intelligent, gushed out that his election meant there was no more racism in this nation. America was “post racial,” they said.

There was a collective sigh of relief. Finally, people seemed to think, we could forget that racism is as much a part of America’s legacy as is its Constitution.

It hit me that America wants racism to just go away without being dealt with. So, I am guessing that when Mr. Obama was elected people thought we didn’t have to talk about “it” anymore. It was over. Americans, black and white, had crossed the Great Racial Divide, and all was well.

Except …it wasn’t. Racism is a disease, a disease which has never been openly dealt with. White people have been on the defense, proclaiming that they “are not racist” and daring anyone to make their truth any less than that. Black people have for the most part just wanted to fit in and be accepted, their race notwithstanding. Neither scenario has helped this nation come face to face with its sordid racist legacy.

I wonder what Christie and others thought was going to happen once Obama became president. The New Jersey governor said that Obama “gave us hope.” True, but as concerns racism, what was the expectation? That all of the pain and misery caused by racism would just fall into the sea? Did Christie and others think that those who grew up thinking and believing that black people were stupid and bad and inferior would somehow just …change their minds? Did they not anticipate that many people, including, it seems, the Congress, would be consumed by their racism and be driven by their resentment that a black man was in the White House? Did he and others not understand that for many people, Obama’s election was a slap in the face of what they believed America was called to be? That, for them, America was supposed to be a “white man’s country.” Obama’s election for many was almost a mortal sin. They wanted nothing but to see him fail. The Congress, Conservative talk radio, and other American institutions …seethed. They openly respected him. Members of Congress plotted to make him a one-term president. They hated that Obama was out of line, being the head of this nation.

Black people thought that things for them would vastly improve under Obama’s presidency; he was, after all, a black man. He would, of course, have their backs. But Mr. Obama was only the president. His movement as president was sharply controlled by the Congress, in spite of the fact that he managed to get the Affordable Care Act passed. The Congress was not going to tolerate him giving black people special treatment. He couldn’t even make the comment, after Trayvon Martin’s tragic murder, that “if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” How innocent a statement is that, and how true? Yet, he was attacked for being “racist” for expressing an honest evaluation of what it means to be black in America.

So, Gov. Christie and others, just how was Obama supposed to handle this issue of racism? Could it be that you think race matters are worse because Obama’s very presence in the White House rubbed the racist nerves of this country in the wrong way, making them come face to face with their prejudices and preconceptions about black people? With a white leader, those nerves are kept at bay, but a black man was just too much for those carrying racist ideologies to handle? Could that be the case? Obama has been pretty silent on the actions of rogue police officers that have resulted in the deaths of way too many black people during his administration, and yet Christie and others say he hasn’t had the backs of the police. Seriously? Much of the black community has been frustrated because he hasn’t said enough about what is going on …and yet, Christie and others think he has supported the black community at the expense of police officers? Something is wrong with Christie’s analysis.

I wish Christie and others would be specific. What would you have had Mr. Obama do? It’s not really sufficient for you to say that under his presidency race relations are worse. Why do you feel that way? Can you be more specific?

My guess is that they cannot. I think that America’s racist underbelly just has not been able to stand that a black man was the Commander in Chief of America. America is supposed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave…white people.

A candid observation …

I wish someone would explain to me what his presidency would have looked like had

A Kid Pees on the Floor

I keep thinking …that in this country, black and white people grow up so differently.

I remember when I was in elementary school. The black kids were quiet, withdrawn, eager, it seemed, just to stay out of trouble. Our teachers were white. We had better not “embarrass” our parents, many of us were told.

But the white kids …were so free! They talked out loud. They talked to each other. They talked with the teacher, and the teacher, to them. I remember sitting and noticing it, and being perplexed.

Even as students, young students at that, we knew to “stay in our place.” Once, I had to go to the bathroom. Really badly. I raised my hand. My white teacher ignored me. I had seen other kids – white kids – get up if their hands-up had been ignored, and they had not suffered from the wrath of an angry teacher. But I wasn’t white, and I wasn’t about to “get in trouble.”

I kept my hand up. The teacher saw it. Mrs. Kofender was her name. Mrs. Kofender looked at me and ignored me. She began a math lesson, getting up from her desk where she had been sitting. When she began to talk, I called out, waving my hand feverishly, “Miss Kofender! Miss Kofender!”

Her face turned red and she glared at me and screamed, “If YOU DON’T WAIT…” I was mortified. Not just because she had yelled at me for nothing …but because by now I had lost the capacity and ability to hold my urine.

I was in the fourth grade.

I peed.

It went on my seat, on the floor, on my socks. In my shoes. I was soaked in urine and my own embarrassment.

The other children giggled. Some laughed out loud. I tried not to cry, but the tears rolled down my face.

“Miss Kofender” looked at me, disgusted. She walked toward my desk and muttered,”you may go to the bathroom,” as she knelt with paper towels, cleaning up the evidence of my disgrace. As the other kids giggled, she admonished them to be quiet, not on account of me but on account of the fact that she “was not having any fun.”

It was too late. Going to the bathroom now would not make a difference. I sat in her classroom for the rest of the afternoon, wet, smelling, miserable …and demoralized. When the last bell of the day rang, I waited until everyone else left the room so that I wouldn’t have to walk past anyone, stinking.

The only two people left in the room were me and “Miss Kofender.”

I did not look at her. When all of the kids were gone, I left. She said “good-bye, Susan.” I said nothing.

In fact, I never said anything else in her class. I never raised my hand to answer a question, although I always knew the answers. I never said hi to her, or bye. I had to erase her presence from my spirit.

Except she was never erased. Here it is, 60 years later, and I can still feel the pain of that day.

But I can also recall that the white kids never seemed to suffer from that kind of …reluctance …to speak up and speak out and demand to be heard.

Black kids too often are socialized and trained – or at least they were in my days as a kid – to be quiet and be as inconspicuous as possible.

Black and white kids still grow up differently, though. The intrusion of materialism has changed some of the spirit-input of black kids, but for the most part, black kids still seem to peek around the corners and curtains of life, rather than from the center.

Black kids still have to “be careful.” White people still regard black kids as threats, or …whatever else they think.

They love black kids when they are still in utero, but as soon as they come out, they are aliens. Treated as aliens. Ignored like aliens. Given the worst of everything.

Yet, black kids rise from the ashes. Not enough, to be sure, but it is a miracle that any rise at all. Every time I see a commercial with kids on vacations with parents, I think about the fact that so many black kids never leave their neighborhoods, their blocks …So many have never been to a baseball game, or gone to a beach or even been to “the next town over.”

We grow up so differently.

A candid observation …

The Reality of Two Gods, One Black, One White

I have long been troubled by the way white and black people interpret the same Bible. There is one Bible, one God, one Jesus …and yet white and black people interpret that book in entirely different ways.

Charles Marsh writes, in his book God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights,: “Of the images coming in the civil rights movement, none seems more replete with contradiction than that of white mainline Protestantism. In most cases, the Southern white Protestant adheres to an evangelical belief, the heart of which is the confession of a “personal Lord and Savior,” who has atoned for the sins of humanity. Yet in most cases, the confession remains disconnected from race relations …” (p. 6) He further writes that “in the final analysis, concern for black suffering has nothing to do with following Jesus.”

The Rev. C.T. Vivian, who was a fixture in the Civil Rights Movement, said outright, “You cannot be racist and be Christian!”, something which I firmly believe. But for white people, that proclamation would draw sharp criticism. Writes Marsh, “If people took seriously their identities as Christians, they had no choice but to also give up the practices of white supremacy – and not only white supremacy, but also class privilege, resentment, the concession to violence, anything that kept one from sacrificing all for the beloved community…”

White people, for the most part, seem uninterested in having, helping form, or living in …a beloved community.

The so-called “attack on Christianity” is coming primarily from white Christians who, while they hate abortion and gay rights, including gay marriage, ignore the reality of racism and white supremacy. They seem incapable of feeling even a modicum of the outrage they feel about aborted violence for the already alive black children living in abject poverty and living on the outskirts of society. They seem disinterested in the fact that already alive children suffer horribly in this nation, from bad schools to inadequate health care. They seem all too willing to blame the children for their lot in life.

And yet they call themselves Christian.

Marsh writes that “white Christian conservatives …(remain) largely indifferent to black suffering, preoccupied instead with evangelism and church growth, and with personal vices like drinking, dancing and heavy petting.” In their religious practice, God, and God’s son Jesus, is all right with their blatant disregard for the plight of people of color.

While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. relied on the presence of God for his work in the Civil Rights Movement, white supremacists called upon that same God to justify their actions. Sam Bowers, head of the Ku Klux Klan, saw as his godly mission the need to slaughter black people and those whites who worked for civil rights for black people. In his mind, those who worked for freedom and justice for black people had betrayed the Lord Jesus. He wrote and posted publicly a manifesto that said outright that “if you are a Christian, American Anglo Saxon, who can understand” the practices of trying to purge the religion and the country of black and brown people, Catholics and Jews, then “you belong in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi.” He was dedicated to ridding his beloved America of the impostors who, in his mind, were an affront to God – who, we might assume if we read the scriptures, created us all.

The issue and the problem of this “two-God dilemma” of the United States is that it creates a group of people who are as religiously fanatic in their religious and ideological beliefs as are the hated Islamic radicals. They, too, think they are on assignment from God to destroy Americans. If and when God is in the center of a fight, it is hard to stop that fight before it does irreparable harm.

Of course, having God at the center of a fight can bring about good, too. Ironically, the same zeal that fuels hatred in the name of God fuels the desire for justice and mercy …in the name of God. The results of the Civil Rights Movement is testament to that fact.

Donald Trump is feeding into the “white God” group, a group which is adamant about there being an attack on Christianity, even as they attack radical Islam. It feels like a bomb ready to detonate. The white God, they would say, is on their side, while radical Islamists would say Allah is on their side.

The question for me is and has been for some time, “Why doesn’t the one God step in and stop this foolishness? God’s silence and inaction in shutting down forces of evil and hatred have perplexed me for the longest time. The other issue is, though, that the presence in this country of there being “two Gods, one black, one white” means that racism will never end. The religious fervor which uses God to justify racism and white supremacy is not about to wane. The white God is a God of Empire; the black God is a God of liberation …and those two Gods are never going to meet in the middle and merge into one.

That being the case, I don’t exactly know how we as a nation move forward. White Christians turn a deaf ear and a hardened heart toward the masses of black people who suffer because of white supremacy, while they wage war about the plight og unborn fetuses. Black lives do not matter to them, and really, never have.

And that is a troubling reality.

A candid observation …

Before

Before Michael Brown, there were others.

Trayvon Martin, Roger Owensby. Timothy Thomas. Emmett Till. There were so many others.

The black community has been under assault by “law enforcement” for decades, and law enforcement has historically gotten away with it.

The Rev. C.T. Vivian, of whom I am writing an authorized biography, when I asked him how black people are to cope, not just with the murders of unarmed black people, but the lack of justice, and therefore of respect and dignity, said that we have to realize our strength, and realize that white people know that what we as a people suffer is brutal. (my word, “brutal,” not his.) He said, “Most white people realize that they could not live as black people do. They realize they would not be able to handle it.”

I relate to what is going on, and to what has always gone on with sanction in this nation, as a mother of a son. I have a daughter, too, but it is my son that I worry about, just because he is a black male. He does not do drugs. He does not have a criminal record. He knows “how to act” if stopped by police.

But none of that matters.

And that’s what scares me. Black people do not have to have a criminal record or be doing something wrong in order to be gunned down with abandon …by police. White officers and black officers have the same obsession with power, it looks like. They do not like to be challenged or questioned…and they know they have the upper hand. They too often shoot first and ask questions (or make up a story) later. No matter how compelling is the evidence that they are in the wrong, they get off.

That is scary.

The nation, this nation, cannot be “exceptional” so long as such barbarity within the ranks of law enforcement exists, because the actions of those who are supposed to serve and protect are causing a huge swath of parents and loved ones to suffer emotional pain that is ignored and minimized.

Black people have lived on the hope, the faith, that God will make a way …out of this madness caused by the dehumanization of them and their children. But God has been slow. Black parents stand weeping on the banks of “Red Seas,” holding out a metaphorical “rod,” waiting for the sea of injustice to part, but the parting has not happened yet, not after all these years.

The parents and loved ones of all of these unarmed black people are standing on the shore of that sea, waiting for God.

But God has been slow. It feels like God has been absent, actually.

It is horrible that police officers have been randomly killed, but here’s the difference between slain police officers and slain black people. Whomever has killed a police officer will be brought to justice. Most police officers who kill unarmed and many times, innocent black people, even if charged with a crime, will go free. There will be no justice.

That reality is the fuel of the Black Lives Matter movement. The lack of justice speaks to the core belief of this nation that black people do not matter, and never have. The lack of justice undermines the words of the United States Constitution, which black people and those concerned with justice latch onto, “All men are created equal.”

Not so. It wasn’t the case when the Constitution was drafted and it isn’t the case now.

I wonder if any of people who are so quick to blame black people for our lot in life ever stop to think about the effects of being dehumanized. I wonder if they feel it when black mothers cry, when little black kids are put in handcuffs for doing things little kids of all races have always done …because they’re little. I wonder if white mothers feel the pain of the mothers of Trayvon and Michael and Jordan and Roger and TImothy and Renisha and Sandra and Freddie and Sam…and so many. So many…

Please understand. Parents and loved ones feel the pain when black lives are taken by other black people…but the difference is that black people who kill other black people are usually brought to justice and end up in prison. It is small consolation but at least it represents justice.

The cry that some are trying to vilify and call representative of hate is a cry that is filled with anguish about being used, exploited, and then being discarded. American society uses black people (and poor people) for cheap labor, exploits the, unwilling to give them decent wages so they can take care of their families, and then discarding them when they cry out for help as their loved ones are mowed down by state-sanctioned actions of law enforcement officers.

Law enforcement doesn’t care about black lives. The education system doesn’t care about black lives (schools for black children are the worst of all schools). America doesn’t care …about black lives.

Before Michael Brown there were others, so many others…

And we live in a nation that just does not care.

A candid observation

Emmett, Trayvon and Michael

It is a notable fact that in our country, major racial strife and a subsequent movement followed the lynching of young, black men.

That is not to say that black women have not been lynched. In fact, black women’s bodies have been brutalized by whites in this country in a way nobody likes to talk about. It is a great irony that while white men were lynching black men to protect their women from “the black beast,” which they considered black men to be, they were in fact raping black women with abandon. Because white people did not consider black people to be human, what white men did to black women was discarded and considered as a right they had in doing what they wanted to their property.

That’s another piece altogether.

But in thinking about what is going on now in this nation’s Black Lives Matter movement, it is clear that it has been the brutalization, the lynching, of young black men which has periodically set the country on fire. Not only have the murders of the black men been a catalyst for social upheaval, but also the lack of justice in their murders has stoked the fires of resentment and pain carried by black people in this country.

The protest today is centered around the police killings of young black men, but in the cases of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, it has been white vigilantes who have done the killing. In both cases, the murderers were tried and acquitted of wrongdoing. Their lives did not matter; the pain of their parents and loved ones did not matter, either. Emmett Till was killed on August 28, 1955 in Money, Mississippi, yanked from his uncle’s house in Mississippi as he slept because he allegedly winked at a white woman. He was beaten beyond recognition and his body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Emmett’s murderers had a trial but were acquitted after only an hour’s deliberation by the all-white, all-male jury.

We all remember that George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin and Officer Darren Wilson was not even bound over for trial in the killing of Michael Brown.

What struck me as I thought about these three young men was that they were all lynched. No, not in the classic “rope hanging from a tree” sense, but in the sense that their killings were done by white people who believe it is their duty, almost, to rid the world of those whom they deem to be unworthy of living. While Emmett was thrown into the Tallahatchie River, Michael Brown was allowed to lie on the hot pavement of a city street while officers in Ferguson built a case around his not being “a saint.” The murderers of Till tried to hide his body; the murderers of Brown left his body exposed so that the world could see what happened to people who messed with police. Trayvon was not hidden or left lying exposed like Emmett or Michael, but his body did lie in a morgue for three days, listed as a “John Doe,” though he was killed feet from his father’s residence in a gated community in Florida. Tracy Martin, his father, had been looking for his son since the night he was killed; the morning after he didn’t come home, Martin called the police, looking for Trayvon. It was only then that he found out that his son had lain in the morgue for three days.

Three young men, one 14 years old, one 17 years old and another, 18 years old, were killed because they were black; being black made them “suspect,” and worthy of being brutalized.

None of these young men were treated …like they matter. From being stalked and “looking suspicious” as was the case with Trayvon, to engaging in a youthful flirt with a white woman in the case of Emmett, to refusing to treat a police officer, Darren Wilson, with appropriate deference, these young men lost their lives.

And too few people in the white community care about it.

If it had been my son, gunned down and then left in the street for hours, I would be furious now, just as I would be furious had my son been gunned down because he “looked suspicious.” I would be even more furious, deeply hurt, and probably inconsolable if my son’s killers were acquitted of any crime.

This nation has a plethora of mothers (and fathers) who are carrying the deepest of hurts and grief …and measured fury. The parents and loved ones of Jordan Davis, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and literally hundreds more black people …are carrying hurt, grief …and fury. Their sadness is part of the fabric of this nation; it is an ever-deepening undercurrent of America.

The presidential candidates have, so far, all but ignored the Black Lives Matter movement. The participants in the movement are being cast off as “troublemakers.” They are. There needs to be trouble when injustice keeps on happening. If there is no trouble, nobody will listen.

Mamie Till started this wave of trouble-making when she would not permit the white people who killed her son to keep his death a secret. They thought it was over when they threw him in the river, but Mamie made them look for her son. They thought it was over when they said they would bury her son in Mississippi, but Mamie refused to let them. She took her son home to Chicago and had his horribly destroyed body photographed so that the whole world would see what the white people had done to her son.

Sybrina Martin, Trayvon’s mother, and Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr, the parents of Michael, sought justice for their sons and were deeply disappointed as the justice system refused them. Not only did the lives of their sons not matter, but neither did their lives matter, apparently, as parents seeking justice.

These three young men, robbed of life, clearly did not matter to the men who shot and killed them; they are mentioned here only because their parents refused to remain silent. The parents of others robbed of life in this way …are refusing to remain silent. The young people who are marching and chanting and demanding to be heard are marching because they know their own lives are in danger. They know they do not matter much, either. They also know that the only way anyone will listen …is for them to be “troublemakers.”

I think Emmett, Trayvon and Michael …and all of the others who have been gunned down largely because they were black people in America …would like that. I think their deaths ..deserve that. Their lives, and the lives of all the others …mattered.

A candid observation …