“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” - Martin Luther King
Last night, after five days of feeling the anxiety in our nation, I took my nightly walk around my neighborhood waving to my neighbors as they worked in their yards and played with their children. It was a surreal experience with all the videos and news of the riots and looting in cities across the nation. Most of my neighbors are African Americans with other races mixed in including Asians, whites and Hispanics. I am blessed because I feel wrapped in the presence and love of God in my neighborhood.
It has been hard week because I have communicated with two of my nieces, who I love, who sometimes spread disinformation with their Facebook posts. I suspect from their posts and comments, they are being fed information by trolls and others who inflame all our biases. They classify news sources such as the New York Times and Washington Posts as biased and without facts. At one point, one of my nieces said she realized I thought she was racist just because we held different viewpoints. She said she believed in the constitutional rights for everyone. I said ignoring African American legitimate grievances, oppression and injustices because some were rioting (especially when we don’t know yet who is instigating the violence), never solves the underlying problem that caused the anger and unrest.
My niece also believes fraud can’t be prevented and detected when voting by mail. She holds this position, without understanding all the controls that have been implemented to prevent mail voting fraud. The fact is, most Americans don’t have the time or expertise to know all the controls, and this requires faith in our institutions, both political parties, and press to set up and monitor these controls. Often, political arguments, such as turning out or suppressing the vote depending on our perception of the outcome, make us for and against something instead of evaluating the facts and the process to ensure that rights are protected for all Americans.
Right now, we are in a crisis of faith and trust because of partisanship and misinformation. It is critical that we trust other people and our institutions but verify the facts, for our society to function. For me, every American should vote, and we should make it easy. As members of our society we need to demand political, economic, and social systemic changes for all the underprivileged, especially for African Americans. The fact is working class and middle-class whites are also experiencing growing wealth inequity and this is increasing tension and resentment and the recent economic and health crisis has accelerated it. But real fundamental change will require out of the box thinking by a diverse group trying different solutions focused on long-term measurable goals. The recent success of Space X shows a partnership between private industry and the government when focused on goals that benefit us all, can accomplish amazing things successfully. We need to find a balance between our private, social, government, and corporate interests.
This leads me a discussion I had yesterday with a friend and her husband; we were talking about discrimination. Her husband said he doesn’t believe that discrimination exists anymore because he said hasn’t personally seen it lately and asked us to give a personal example. He said he believed the conflicts with blacks is really a problem with whether or not someone respects authority. My friend’s husband is a white male in his sixties. My response to him was that we all exist in a bubble of our own personal experience that determines how perceive the world. First, we must acknowledge and respect that other people have experiences different than ours, before we can make fundamental changes to the systems and attitudes underlying our society.
I told him of a recent PBS show I saw where two couples in their thirties, one white, one African American with a moderator discussed race. When asked if discrimination was still present, the white couple said no. They said they weren’t prejudiced, and they did not think it really exists now. The African American man looked at them incredulously, and said angrily, “I have been pulled over by the police seven times.” In our white “bubble,” if we get pulled over by the police, we didn’t follow the law. In the black experience it is sometimes because they don’t fit the race profile in the neighborhood they are driving in and there is an underlying suspicion on the part of the police. Unless you are a black man driving in a car every day who shares your experience with your black friends, you would not know this experience is more common amongst blacks. Your experience as a white person is very different, because you don’t live every day in a black skin.
Some whites observing the violence against George Floyd on the video or other instances of violence still assume that that the black must have resisted authority. In a time of phone cameras, more violent acts are being questioned, but it still does not capture the systemic violence and discrimination. Another recent example is that Ahmaud Arbery out jogging who was murdered by two white vigilantes in Georgia were only arrested several months later after a lawyer of the man following in a car filming the murder released the video. For blacks, this is another act of violence accepted in four hundred years of ingrained slavery, oppression, and murder in our society. We have made progress as I have experienced in my neighborhood, but we have a long way to go in our country.
At the end of all this, I am reminded how grateful I am for my neighbors, my friend and spiritual mother Ethel, and my close friends who are black. My relationships with blacks have moved me and changed me in powerful ways. My friend Ethel who passed away from cancer in 2007, showed me unconditional love and support. And she gave it to me at risk to herself and her family if she had lost her job in the process of supporting my complaint of discrimination. Ethel was the first person that truly modeled the love of God for me and shared her faith. My experience with black women who are close to me is that their love and faith in God is unmatched. I think this is due to the pain and suffering inflicted on them due to discrimination, suffering and abuse unique to black women. Instead of harboring anger, they give their grief and pain to God and in return God loves them back and they feel peace and joy. An example for us all.
My concluding thought is we need to create a society that works for all of us, because in the end all of us benefit. We reap what we sow. When we love others, we receive love back.
“Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
