When I was in seventh grade, an older schoolmate said something that has stayed with me through the nearly half-century since. “I don’t have anything against Blacks,” he declared. “But I wouldn’t want my sister to marry one.”
I forget what the context was. But I do remember being startled — I am, still — by the bald honesty of the kid’s words. And thinking, without understanding exactly what it was I had heard: There’s something wrong here.
How might the world have changed, even if in a small way, had I said that out loud?
But my 12-year-old self let it pass. And so, as I recall, did everyone else. That was a function of attending a nearly all-white school in a privileged New England community at a moment when racial unrest was mostly playing out far away — in America’s South, Detroit, Chicago.
Years later, I explored the civil rights movement that I had lived through but mostly missed. I read Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and histories of Freedom Summer and the March on Washington. I studied the three landmark bills of that time: the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act.
My reaction was, in hindsight, somewhat tragic. I judged that the heavy lifting of racial justice in this country had been done and that, with our historic wrongs corrected — first by protest, then by legislation — true equity would, inevitably, emerge over time.
And so I went instead to report as a journalist on South Africa, whose violent struggles to undo institutionalized racism echoed the American experience of decades before and which I hoped to document and, somehow, understand.
To my credit, I wasn’t the only one who missed the boat. Until 2015, about 70% of white people and 65% of black people reliably told Gallup that “relations between whites and blacks” were either “very good” or “somewhat good.” In 2009, the high-water mark for such polling, 82% of white respondents agreed that “blacks have as good a chance as whites…to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.” In 2007, just 31% of white respondents agreed that “blacks in your community [are] treated less fairly than white…in dealing with the police.”
That last turned out to be grievously wrong, of course. So did my assumption that equity —a world where race didn’t determine socioeconomic outcomes — would just, you know, happen. Since 1968, as The Washington Post recently pointed out, the wealth gap between white and black households has consistently widened in percentage terms. Black home ownership rates are dropping. The proportion of black students who graduate from universities is 25 percentage points lower than that of white students – and it hasn’t budged in 20 years.
It’s not lost on me that white-led news and other media have played a big part in perpetuating these gaps. Journalists have relentlessly cast the narrative of non-white individuals and communities in terms of their problems — often, dramatically overrepresented – rather than their assets and aspirations.
And so, we’ve arrived at this: The killing of a black man by Minneapolis police, the latest in an inexcusable series, captured in extraordinary and awful detail in a bystander’s video, has catalyzed a nationwide explosion of protest, discussion, and soul-searching unlike any most of us have witnessed.
I find it an extremely complex and difficult moment to navigate. How to make sense of it? What do I do? It has led me to question my complicity, as a white man, in sustaining historical structures and institutions that perpetuate injustice. The seventh-grade boy who said nothing is still there, sensing something is off but wanting things to be ok – on his terms.
That can’t fly anymore. As Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer and legal scholar, has written: “Only by pausing long enough to study the cycles of oppression and resistance does it become clear that simply being a good person or not wishing Black people any harm is not sufficient.”
I’m guessing that others are similarly challenged by this time. Over the coming weeks, The Monitor will provide a platform for discussion of race, Black Lives Matter, and equity. I invite you to join by sharing your story: What does this moment mean to you? How does it relate to your own experience of race? What do you think can be done?
We’ll publish some of these stories in the newspaper, online, and on Facebook. I hope that they’ll provide a foundation of interest and trust for a public forum, and then for ongoing conversation and reporting by The Monitor. I’d like to think that this painful episode can provide an opportunity to move forward.
Contact Keith Hammonds at keith@boulder-monitor.com.
