The Times They Are A Changin'

I've been coaching tennis this summer with a very diverse group of instructors. Most of them are much younger than me and are in college or just starting. A few were my tennis students long ago and have since grown up and are now teaching with me after having played high school varsity tennis.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have attended several of their grad parties. At one of these parties, in honor of my friend Ben, something crystalized for me that I had been thinking about for awhile. Ben is Chinese and has several Chinese friends who were all at the party. Two of his closest friends are Penny (also Chinese) and Sam (from India). Ben, Penny, and Sam are all tennis instructors with me this summer. Sam and I were chatting as we watched Ben and some of his friends play Foosball.

"I've never seen so many Asians standing around a Foosball table before," Sam remarked. They all laughed and I turned to look at him.

"You're Asian," I stated
"Well, I guess so...South Asian," he replied.

Later at the party, Penny told me about this web site and showed it to me on her iPhone.

High Expectations Asian Father

Her friends (also all Chinese) chimed in and said it was exactly what their fathers were like as well. I began to notice at subsequent social gatherings and during tennis lessons how Ben, Penny, and Sam were all very relaxed about race. In fact, they weren't simply relaxed...they were decidedly not PC at all. I've noticed this in school as well. Towards the end of the year, I overheard the following conversation.

"Hey, Marcus, I can hear you all the way around the corner," Tim (a white student) said, "it must be because you are black."
"Black people are loud," Marcus replied, "It's because of all that friend chicken and watermelon."

We hear stuff like this all the time and it's mostly done just to get a rise out of the staff. But after a conversation with Ben, Penny, and Sam, I think it's more than that.

"We just don't care," Sam said. "We're more open about this stuff. People are what they are."
"I actually don't like being Asian," Ben remarked, "In most photos, I look too Asian."
"I hate what Chinese culture did to my dad," Penny added, "He's an absolute asshole."

I'm sure part of this is your typical teenage apathy but I have to say I was shocked at some of what they were saying and, after some reflection, it was a pleasant surprise. Racism ends when no one cares anymore about epithets. Certainly when there is actionable hate behind them, we still have problems.

Like the gay issue, young people today are shaping a very different view of race. It's not framed in the classic PC vs. Bigot debate. It's completely different. New rules are being written every day and many people across the entire spectrum of debate on race are going to be metaphorically hit in the head with a shovel.

I don't think they are going to be able to handle it.

Polarization and Condescension

I find very little with which to disagree in Syl Jones' latest piece in the Strib. He really hit the nail squarely on the head with this one. I've been a fan of his opinion pieces for awhile but this one should be put in the hall of fame.

Major Garrett, former national correspondent for Fox News and once with CNN, has now added an additional wrinkle. Garret told MSNBC viewers that Fox thrives on polarization: "Fox actually wants to keep that polarization. ... That is an embedded part of the marketing that surrounds what happens in the news division at Fox. It's been incredibly successful."

The fact that Fox both creates and exploits polarization says a lot about today's world and those who spin it. Across America, many seem to enjoy the trauma of loose cannons firing in every direction. The folks at Fox recognized this long ago and now, when it suits them to do so, they wrap themselves in the American flag,

It's not just Fox, though. It's all of the right wing information sources especially the blogsphere. Like all bullies, they are lost without an adversary to pick on. It's how they define themselves in the world.

Of course, we know all this. So, Jones takes it a step further by bringing in the Juan Williams incident from last fall and making a most excellent point.

Williams and other black journalists have long understood that a liberal is someone who thinks he or she knows your history better than you do. A conservative doesn't know your history and doesn't care to know it.

Both sides of the political spectrum have a galling habit of trying to exploit people of color to justify their rather narrow interests.

Indeed. As many of you can probably imagine, I've experienced the liberal side of this quite a bit in the various schools I have either worked in or my children have attended. The yearly battle regarding Huck Finn is one example of this. It's white liberals, not blacks, who want to ban the book because that word makes sick.

Too bad.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest American novels ever written. Being a big fan of Loewen, I have to say that the controversy surrounding this book smacks of that avoidance of laying blame that he talks about frequently. The same white liberals that want to ban Huck Finn also fall all over themselves like idiots during Black History Month. Every year, I receive astonished looks and (very fake) loud gasps when I suggest that we do away with Black History Month and integrate its content into the course of the entire year. I do it anyway and the new social studies standards for our state will as well but something tells me BHM will be around for quite some time. It actually is worse, as Jones aptly points out...

Conservative and liberal media outlets are too busy slinging mud to pause and listen to what we know so well. Privileged interests are depriving people of the right to know the truth, to earn a living wage and to make truly informed decisions about the world in which they live.

We can see that neither side is right and that both sides are wrong.

Yep.

The Purest Depth of Loathing

Right around this time of year, I make a comment at either my children's school or my school that is a catalyst for the crook eye, stink eye, or evil eye...actually all three. Generally speaking, it's the same comment every year and it goes like this.

I hate Black History Month.

At first, people think I'm joking. Then they realize I'm not. A quick glance at my bald head and they think I might be a member of the skin heads. This usually evolves into indignant anger and outright disgust...even when I explain why I hate it. It's terribly vexing.

I hate Black History Month because every month should be Black History Month. To put it simply, our curriculum should be similar to the theme and style of Ken Burns' fantastic documentary series, Baseball. If you haven't seen it, this is how the story of our history should be told...from the point of view of all people, not just the famous ones that have been heroified being belief. One cannot look at the history of this country without looking at the role of black people in our culture.

To set aside one month as a metaphorical highlight reel is akin to asking the one black friend you have to be a spokesperson for all blacks. It's simply ridiculous. I get the reasons why we do it but, in the end, it only makes it worse. People pay attention for one month and then our ADD culture tunes out the rest of the year and it's back to the myopic view of our history and culture. It's crap and I hate it.

I catch a lot of heat for not doing more at this time of year but I just tell people,

"Come see me the other 11 months of the year."

Reflections on Today

Last fall, The Christian Science Monitor featured race as the cover story to their September 18, 2010 issue. I had planned to talk about it back then but decided to wait until Dr. King's day today. The entire article is fantastic and it's worth a long, soaking read. Central to the piece are seven lessons that we all need to heed.

Lesson 1: Recognize how far we've come

Compare the images of the early 60s to where we are now with the first black mayor elected to Philadelphia, MS. That's quite an achievement and there is no doubt that Dr. King would be amazed.

Lesson 2: Talk about race like a Southerner

From the article...

Contrast the quick national judgment of Sherrod (who was eventually offered reinstatement, but declined) with a recent experience David Hooker, a black community-builder, had visiting Oxford, Miss., another iconic civil rights town steeped in Confederate history. Mr. Hooker, who lives in Atlanta and teaches at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., stepped into the Ajax bar to order some food. A white Mississippian sitting at the bar said to no one in particular, but within Hooker's earshot, "I remember when they didn't let niggers in here."

Recounting the episode, Hooker says he replied, "That was crazy, wasn't it? I remember that, too."

Hooker adds: "He kind of looked at me, like, 'What do you mean? You're not going to be offended?' "

The two ended up having a 45-minute chat that spanned the election of Obama, the Ole Miss football team, and hopes for their kids.

This is how to handle situations like this: find common ground. Just beautiful...

Lesson 3: Leverage 'friendship potential'

Pettigrew says that the at times juvenile "he said, she said" tenor of the race debate in America can be attributed to a simple fact: Much of the rest of America has missed out on both forced and voluntary race reconciliation in the South. That process, Pettigrew says, has been driven by the growing class equality in the region, which has raised what he calls "friendship potential" in the public sphere.

This has to do more with ignorance and a decidedly condescending attitude that many white liberal northerners have about blacks in the south. We talked a great deal about this in that Beyond Diversity seminar I attended. It's dys-consciousness...I don't know what I don't know.

Lesson 4: Blacks love Southern opportunity

This lesson will certainly please the libertarians who post here.

"What's changed in the South is that people increasingly tolerate the individual," says Mr. Griffin, explaining his decision to return and invest in the town where riot police once turned back black civil rights marchers after they crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge on their way to Montgomery. "If there's prejudice today, it's more of a class thing than a racial thing."

Essentially, there are opportunities in the south that aren't available in the north because of a new found tolerance. This would go in hand with Lesson #1...recognizing how far we have come. Far, indeed, with blacks being core to many Southern businesses.

Lesson 5: Don't stereotype whites

"People think the only [ones] negatively impacted by Jim Crow's official and unofficial policies were African-Americans in the South," says Hooker. "But [prejudice] was taught by violence and coercion – deeply wounding ways of enforcing an unnatural behavior. Over time, that's as painful for the people who have had to maintain the system as it is for the people who were intentionally marginalized.

Agreed. There is an entire unrecognized group of victims here just like Hooker. It's hard to see them at times but that would come with contact, communication, and friendship.

Lesson 6: Segregation by any other name...

A group of historians – including Mr. Sokol and the University of Michigan's Matt Lassiter – are revisiting how the North and South diverged after the Civil War. One of Mr. Lassiter's findings is that Northern segregation happened largely by the same kind of government decrees that enshrined segregation in the South.

I agree completely. This would be one of Loewen's Lies. The north had just as much complicity in the south's institutionalized slavery.

Lesson 7: Keep moving forward

The hard one. I asked the leader of Beyond Diversity how I should tolerant of intolerance and her answer was, "You just have to recognize it as their truth. Say to them 'That's your truth' and I respect it.'" Easier said than done. I'd have to say that I've done a poor job of it thus far.

But articles like this give me a great deal of hope. Dr. King's legacy is on display for all to see in the year 2010.

We are going forward because of his life and his sacrifice.

Deal With It

A couple of months back, as part of continuing education, I participated in a two day seminar titled "Beyond Diversity." For the most part, I consider myself to be a racially sensitive person but I quickly found out how many things I take for granted every day. For example, see any Band Aids at Target or elsewhere that are NOT white flesh colored (other than the cute kiddie ones)? How about hair care products that are made for the type of hair that black people have? These might seem like minor things but this is our culture. For the time being, anyway, it is a white dominated culture and that's a problem. The evidence is in the numbers but I'll get to that in a moment.

If these examples don't convince you, ask someone you know that is black if, when they teach their children how to drive, if they also teach them how not to get shot by a police officer (regardless of said officer's skin color). Every parent in the seminar, who had children of driving age, taught their kids where to put their hands, how to talk to the officer, and how, because they were black, they had to be more careful than white drivers. Since I knew that the people at the seminar were probably very tuned in to race issues, I decided to ask every black person I see regularly if they had children of driving age or older and if they taught them in the same manner.

Every single one said the same thing as the folks at the seminar.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we still have racial issues in this country. More importantly we have four basic areas of denial or avoidance that are illustrated beautifully in comments on this blog nearly every day. Before I detail what they are, however, I want to make one thing very clear. There is one reason and one reason alone why I am talking about this: The Achievement Gap.

The achievement gap has long been documented between whites and blacks and is numerical evidence that our culture is still white dominated. Even today, we see the same problems we have seen for decades.

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Conversations people are unwilling to have....so true...especially here.

But how does this unwillingness that Ferguson mentions manifest itself? Through the following four areas

1. Ignorance. We see two different types here: unconsciousness (I don' t know what I don't know) and Dys-Consciousness (I don't know but I think I do). The former describes myself when I learned about the band aid colors. The latter describes someone who would say "I'm not racist. I have a Black friend." Something else to avoid here is, when discussing issues of race, don't make your black friend a spokesperson. "Well, he's black-let's ask him?" essentially says that all black people think alike because of their race.

2. Denial. This describes some of my readers. Many of you bitch that "it's all over now-why can't the blacks just get past it?" Or "we've already had this discussion." To answer the first question, because of the achievement gap and to answer the second, it's not good enough because of the achievement gap. Face the numbers. Deal with it.

Another element of denial is something else we see all the time: Blaming the Victim. There are great examples of it in comments all the time. I'm certain we will see several after this post. If Bill accuses Hank of being prejudiced or participating in discrimination, somehow (as if by magic, see: out of someone's ass) Bill is the problem, not Hank. "He brings it on himself" is the phrase we hear most commonly.

3. Redefinition. Another area in which several of my readers reside. "It's only a few people" or "It's in human nature. There's nothing I can do about it." I've said the latter myself and I was most assuredly wrong to do so. We also here people say that it's not race but behavior...which is actually prejudiced if you think about it. So, if they are black, they behave a certain way?

4. Counteratttack/Competing Victimizations. This is the area in which most of the right wing pundits reside. The obsession with the wise Latina remark by Sonia Sotomayor is a great example of this. The New Black Panther voting "story" is another. Simply mention that someone is prejudiced on any right wing blog and watch this area unfold in all its glory as well as both of these comments. You'll see them faster than flies screaming to shit.

In looking at these four stages of avoidance, it is quite clear that they all exacerbate the problem. Folks, we need to start having these conversations and not fall into any of these stages because the numbers don't lie. As long as we, as a culture, continue to fail black people, the issue of race is going to continue to come up and the wheel of perpetuity keeps on spinning like wheels in a good, old fashioned Minnesota snow storm. The word "racist" will be heard over and over again. I know many of you don't like it when it does.

So, you don't like it when the issue of race comes up and it makes your head hurt? Fine. Work on fixing the achievement gap which starts with a conversation. Face the problem and deal with it rather than being a dick about it.

After all, it's honestly in your self interest if you think about it.