Thank You For Being A Friend

A number of friends, colleagues and acquaintances have reached out to offer support, actions that speak volumes louder than your kind and generous words, so very appreciated. Every single person has been appropriate and outraged and committed, and again, it is deeply appreciated. I have been heartened by the fact that as bad as it is (and looks) out there, the greatness of this country and this world is we don't ultimately have to be defined by our physical or cultural attributes but by our actions and expressions to each other. It's actually a choice. 

Most African Americans I think are where Doc Rivers is at, "It's hard being Black in America." And interestingly enough, it's becoming clearer to everyone else in a way that doesn't seem like the last time, or the other last time, or the time before that one. (And to further drive home the point, in this three month period there are at least five national stories of prominence, and then several other run of the mill shootings and deprivation of rights that haven't caught the zeitgeist. As disgusting as the George Floyd video is, I am more disturbed by the Central Park Actress, which is unwatchable in my opinion. But that's another conversation.) 

Aggregating the communications I've received, one can summarize the state of affairs in my Inbox thusly: African Americans don't know how to get off this ride, and white Americans don't seem to know how to get on (or, to be more precise, don't know they are on the same ride we're on). From my perspective, the George Floyd tape, or Ahmaud Arbery, or the Central Park Actress are disturbing if you are a breathing human being. Your race should not and cannot determine your outrage with these acts. That is actually a good sign, Rodney King and Emmett Till did not invoke the same universal outrage we are seeing today. It means we are all, even Mitch McConnell, realizing that acts of racism must never be tolerated or ignored in America. It's not nearly enough, but it's taken 400 years to get to this point, so we should at least take solace that progress has been made, no matter how glacial. Even an NFL quarterback was browbeaten into an apology in 24 hours after what can best be described as a brain freeze. Now if we can only get Colin a job . . . 

The good wishes are well intentioned and do lighten the burden, but they don't do anything to make sure we won't be back here tomorrow or next year, or more likely, three or four years from now. For all the well-meaning and -intentioned friends who want to make a difference, who have already made the right choice, I have some ideas.  

I have an admission to make, I live a form of white privilege. With my light skin (owing to the fact there is more immediate white in my ancestral bloodline than other African Americans), I am more accepted, more integrated, allowed more access to white culture than most of my darker skinned relatives and friends. I am less threatening. There are a number of fantastic books that describe the interesting ghost life of being mixed race, I encourage you to explore and find them, but for our purposes I'll just give you a story. 

In the summer of 1985 I was introduced to the world of corporate law, and one day I found myself alone on a plane flying to Little Rock, Arkansas, sitting next to the best conversationalist I had ever met (it was my first time meeting a professional salesman). The first 45 minutes, my row mate and I had solved 3/4 of the world's problems, as well as ensuring we both would be set up with Italian villas in two years. I was really enjoying the moment when, after glancing at a newspaper, he leaned over in that conspiratorial tone only intimate friends share and says, "look at this Michael Jordan Basketball Camp, who would want to pay $400 dollars to watch a spook jump." At that moment I knew that I would get to re-live the Eddie Murphy SNL skit every day of my life. Well, maybe not anymore.

 In any event, I offer this story to say my journey is a lot closer to white people than you think. Like Homer Plessy, because of my light skin I have ostensible choices on how to endure racism in America. I have chosen to fight it.

Three years ago, left broken following an election that seemed to be the nation's rebuke for having elected a Black President, I had to take a good hard look in the mirror. I had to acknowledge that the privileged life I live was on the back of millions of descendants of Africa who have died. Some died anonymously, others needlessly and senselessly, still others to advance rights and freedoms I enjoy. The Loving decision came out almost a year after my birth. We were the original "Dreamers," who now must wait their fate at the hands of the Supreme Court. Let's all hope they are as lucky.

In my anger, righteous as it felt, I had to recognize that fundamentally, I had to do more than just identify individual perpetrators of racist acts and humiliate them (because, really, is that solving the problem?). I have to go after the structure. Racism in America is not merely police brutality, or micro and macro aggressions while you try to enjoy public services, or limitations on health care availability, educational opportunity or employment options. It's not merely the act of clutching your handbag while a Black man walks by you on the street, or defining acceptable social norms to exclude your cultural practices, your hair or fashion styles, your language. It's not merely the failure to observe the contributions to culture, or language, or discourse that deny an entire race their right to own and occupy America. Yes, all of that is bad, and should stop, but if we stop all of that, we still wouldn't be solving the root of our problems.

 Racism is our entire economic, political and legal model, built on the backs of non-salaried labor (African, indigenous and indentured, or kidnapped, colonized or contracted, whatever is easiest to digest). The indigenous population was given a bad deal, but at least got some land. Indentured servants, whether they be poor laborers or convicts, were given the right to ascend to the true rulers of this new nation, the white land owners. The fact they walked a harder path to get there needs some recognition, although not right now.  

 Now is the time to focus our gaze on African Americans, the descendants of the slave trade. We have to look, at word and deed, to what was done to the African laborer. At the dawn of the American union, African descendants of the slave trade were denied citizenship, the right to vote, the right to own land, the right to education, the right to peacefully assemble, the right to be free from rape and murder at the hands of their owners or the law. Your founding fathers were cruel slave owners, just like every other land owning white person. So was the church. And universities. 

 Even after the Civil War, after Americans fought and died on the issues of slavery, and whether this nation was going to be in it for the long haul, after the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, the laws started coming. Sometimes a law would be written that expressly denied Blacks, sometimes it would be the interpretation or enforcement. For those of you who still use the term "grandfathering" to represent a suspension of the effect of a law on certain core-existing users of the old one, do you know how that term got into our language? It was the creative thinking of certain state voting officials who developed a process to speed voting application for those whose grandfathers had voted in elections prior to the year Africans descendants won the right to vote. The 19th century corollary to our aversion to the vagaries of mail in voting. There is no tool for democracy, rhetorical or physical, that has not been used as weapon against African Americans in this country. Water, rope, gun, free protest, violent protest, educational achievement, NOTHING. 

 The paragraph above is the very poor distillation of billions of words that have been written and spoken to document their truth. My beliefs are not dependent on whether you believe the facts, these things happened, they continue to happen to this day, and the only question any of us has to answer is what are we prepared to do about it?

Ultimately, that is the real root of all of this. Why this feels like a watershed moment is one is starting to sense that more and more people who have been unintentionally or intentionally blind to this reality are starting to see. But unfortunately, what truly blocks us is we immediately move from "yep its bad" to "it's not my fault." Whether he knows it or not, that's what Drew Brees was communicating yesterday before he caught himself. I have no doubt Mr. Brees has compassion for his neighbors not based on the color of their skin but the content of their character. But because he does not approve of racist acts does not mean he has no responsibility for the mess we're in. Or put another way, why should Black people be the ones to have to suffer through this alone, we certainly didn't ask for this. I hope in his apology Mr. Brees is open to rethinking his ideas and not merely silencing them.

 A lot of people have offered some fantastic reading lists to help us all better understand where we are and where we need to go. Let me offer four pieces that have helped me on my journey and I hope will help you do the same.  

If you want to know what Black people feel like being Black in America, read any James Baldwin, but if you want to jump to the chase, read Letter from a Region in My Mind. Written in 1962, the true challenge of this piece is that it remains timeless, both backward and up through present day. I was introduced to it by my white Grandmother at the age of 11, who thought it could help me digest what I was going through (I really miss her). When this no longer resonates as a common Black experience, we can declare victory.

 If you want to understand the depth of how far racism has altered our views of Blacks and Africa more generally, read Civilization or Barbarism by Cheikh Anta Diop. It's unfortunately not a great translation (I've heard the native French that he wrote it in is much easier to read, but I don't read French, c'est la vie). However, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If you want to see the origins and effects of dehumanizing a race, read "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the origins of European Genocide by Sven Lindqvist. You will never read Joseph Conrad or see Apocalypse Now the same way again. 

Finally, if you want to better understand the linkage between our economic and political system and slavery and racism, if you want to understand what we are saying when we talk about institutional racism, consider Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams. (By the way, a shout out to The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States by Walter Johnson, which got me to this tome. It will also show you why the stain of George Floyd goes back far longer in history than you may be willing to allow yourself to understand.)

None of this is our fault, all of us were born into this. But we have a system where there are systemic winners and losers, outcomes that are deeply hard wired in everything we see and do. To shamelessly borrow from the Wachowski sisters, Racism is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

For us to make change, we have to expand our view and vision of the problem and what we are trying to solve. Even if you are not at fault, can you sleep any better knowing that anybody lives like what you are being exposed to now? I can't. That is why we kneel, and protest, and fight, so that those of us with privilege stop looking at only the parts we like, and are good to us, and make us feel safe and protected. It's moving from sympathy, to empathy, to action and ultimately resolution.

Even with all of its duplicity and ultimately failure to live up to its ideals for all people, America is truly a land of incredibly opportunity. Notwithstanding all that one must overcome, occasionally, even with its deficiencies, it will open the window just large enough for some of us to slip through. It's that promise that keeps me believing that America is definitely worth fighting for. Black folks have been doing so for 400 years. We could sure use a friend. Thank you.