R.I.P. Traveller, and that Guy on your Back

I remember dating a girl in high school who lived in Franklin, Tennessee, which, having been a big Civil War battleground, was full of confederate monuments. They loomed over the town square like ghosts from the past. At the time, when I was sixteen, I didn't think of them as celebrating white supremacy, I just thought the South had a hard time accepting that times had changed. 

If you talked to people in those days, a good many of them were nostalgic for the Old South. I don't know if they still wanted slaves, but they certainly wanted a world in which people of different races knew their places. I guess that was white supremacy in a more genteel form. No burning crosses, at least not from most folks, but if you got them going after a few beers you could see the torchlight in their eyes. 

I haven't thought about those monuments much until now, when we are all thinking about them. Whatever fantasies we have about the nobility of the Southern Cause, there was nothing noble about slavery, and that is really what the Civil War was about. Nor is there anything noble about the latent longing for segregation that Civil War monuments tacitly symbolize. 

They have to go. However beautiful they may be as art, what they represent is ugly.

The Penumbra of the Eclipse

Maybe its because of Charlottesville. Or BLM. Lately the news is full of stories about discrimination. Even white folks trying to get into Harvard think they are being discriminated against. Jeff Sessions has their backs.

There was a piece in the LA Times today about the systematic housing discrimination in LA that begat Watts. It wasn’t all private deed restrictions. The federal government wouldn’t let public housing for blacks be located in certain places, and insisted that blacks not be allowed to live in complexes that were predominantly white. This was the New Deal federal government, the post WWII federal government. The housing segregation so established is now perpetuated through zoning regulations that limit housing density in white neighborhoods: no housing projects (for you know who) need apply.

Then there was the piece two days earlier in the New York Times about how uneven enforcement of our drug laws has locked up blacks at a much higher rate than whites. Blacks go to jail. Whites go to rehab. The numbers are alarming.

So I posted those two pieces on Facebook and noted that we whites need to face up to our history of racial discrimination and make amends. Apparently not everyone agrees.

One person suggested that the government can’t help those who don’t help themselves. Welfare creates dependency is the root of that argument.

Another said he didn’t think blacks wanted me telling them who should be their neighbors. They like being together. You know, like my southern ancestors used to say: “They be happy down on the place.”

My point in writing this is not that ever since slavery, ever since Jim Crow, even today, racial prejudice holds back blacks and other people of color, it’s that we whites have apparently become weary of admitting it. We’re not as bad as holocaust deniers; we admit that slavery was a thing; we even admit that discrimination lasted a long time. But we have taken to denying that it continues. And we have taken to denying that its pernicious effects linger, continuing to limit opportunity for blacks, who have almost as hard a time breaking out of some pockets of segregated poverty, in places like the south side of Chicago, for instance, as their slave ancestors did getting off the plantation.

I thought this debate was put to rest by the court cases and laws of the civil rights era. Not so, as it turns out. 

But we have come a long way since MLK died for our sins in how we invoke the majesty of the law to insure equal justice for all: our Department of Justice has gone from defending the civil rights of blacks to insisting that they not take white boys’ places at Harvard.

Collecting My Poeple

“White people, save all your heartbreak and sadness and get off your ass and collect your people. #Charlottesville.”

       —Ferguson Freedom Fighter, Kayla Reed

Kayla Reed’s tweet was quoted in a recent sermon posted online by Mike Kinman, an Episcopal minister from Pasadena, California. “We have met the white racists,” they might have said, “and they are us”; or if not us literally, then at least they are our cousins. They may not be carrying torches, but they are sympathetic, even if they have spun elaborate webs of rationalization to avoid admitting it. Rev. Kinman’s thesis was that “after all we have put people of color through in this nation’s history…as white people we must not burden them with the responsibility of dismantling these systems and defeating this evil.”

We must collect our people. Bring them around to the view that not only is white supremacy unacceptable, black people and others of color have legitimate grievances that it is the obligation of whites to redress.

I’d like to do that, collect my people. I’ve been trying, but I’m not succeeding. I’m either singularly ineffective as a persuader, or I’m up against something I don’t understand well enough to argue against. I fault my understanding rather than the views of those I am failing to reach because I can’t believe the people I debate—smart friends and family members—are heartless racists.

In their view, leftist violence is a bigger problem that violence on the right. I cite studies showing that violence on the right is three times more prevalent in recent decades that that from the left, but the response I get is BLM is a bunch of thugs.

Blacks are takers, some of my friends say. When we give them more welfare, we aren't doing them any favors, we’re merely creating dependency, stripping them of individual initiative and self-respect. No amount of data about the deplorable poverty in which many black children are raised seem to alter this view. “They just need to try harder.” Never mind that they don’t have the resources to support individual effort, resources so abundant to those born to privilege, largely white.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to tediously trot out all the arguments back and forth. What I want to explore instead, is why no amount of rational debate seems to change minds. At least not the minds I’m trying to change. As I said, it may be that I’m just not an effective debater, but I think it’s something different. I think we’ve mostly made up our minds and are now spending out time defending our positions rather than openly reconsidering their correctness.

Economic and political policy thought has become like religion. You're taught to believe a certain thing, and that’s it. You believe. It doesn’t matter if there are countervailing facts. Facts have never gotten in the way of faith.

Of course, I may have just joined my own cult. Maybe I’m as resistant to facts as I accuse my friends of being. I think I’m open-minded and curious, but I’m sure they do to. I think I’m right. They do too.

I have spirited debates over dinner with friends who are smart conservatives. I always come away thinking we have bridged the gulf between us, if only over one of the narrower tributaries. Then we have dinner again and start right back where we were. When we thought we were coming together, we were just being polite. That woks fine over dinner, less well over torches and AK 47s.

So I’m not doing a very good job of “collecting my people.” I’m giving it my all, in conversation and in writing, but I don’t think I’m making a dent.

Maybe I should try another approach. Waterboarding, perhaps. Or maybe I should just give up. 

Every time I think that, that I should just shut up, I remember one of the most powerful thoughts I’ve ever heard: MLK when he said, “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

When you think of it that way, we have no choice but to keep speaking up, all of us.