Good Morning, White America

Dateline--May 31, 2020 (USA)

Good Morning, White America.
How'd you sleep while our cities were burning and tensions boiling over?

Oh, you thought I meant last night?

How about the last 401 years?

I'm talking to you Karen Van Winkle. Are you awake now? Did it really have to come to this?

You thought it was "all better" once we afforded a few civil rights to our neighbors of color. You told them, in essence, to "Calm Down!" when they protested by taking a knee. Your white, American sensibilities got all riled when they wouldn't stand for the anthem. Well now your cities are burning, both literally and figuratively. And you're going to sit there, in your Anglo-Christian self-righteous indignation, and call them "thugs" and "savages" for burning it down?

Where ya been, Karen?

This didn't start with George Floyd in May 2020. It started in 1619 when your white ancestors brought African slaves to this continent. It's been going on ever since. Maybe these images will remind you of our long history of brutality towards blacks. OUR COLLECTIVE KNEE ON THEIR NECK.

In the 52 years that I've been alive, I have seen with my own eyes the stain of slavery on American society. It was mere months before I was born that we took out Martin Luther King, Jr., because we didn't care to hear his message of freedom.

And over that half century, we've taken out countless numbers of black men who we didn't care to hear. Well, their blood is crying out to be heard.

How long did you expect them to remain silent, peaceful, "in their place," white America? Racial tension was already at a boiling point, with black America dying at a significantly higher rate from COVID-19. And while we were all home, watching from our living room, more racial injustice played out in living color across our devices. What did you expect them to do, Karen, just take it? More abuse, more death by cop, more senseless killing, more white outrage over their method of protest while ignoring their message?

They are starting fires because you weren't listening. They are rioting in the streets because in four centuries not that much has changed. They are demanding justice because we pretended like all footing was made equal in the 1960's.

For 52 years, I've watched you turn a blind eye to their plight. Generations of poverty, oppression and marginalization didn't affect you, white America, so you went about your "Leave It To Beaver" lives in your white suburbs, pretending like all was good across this great country of ours.

Then our nation was forced to deal with our ugly scars. A once-in-a-lifetime pandemic hit and forced us to shut down for about 8 weeks. Karen Van Winkle got restless. Her hair grew out in all it's natural glory. We saw her roots. She demanded her freedom. She likened the lockdown to slavery and oppression. White America was finally getting a taste of it's own medicine--limits on liberty, joblessness and in some cases, hopelessness. How do you think it's felt for so many of our neighbors to be black in America? That's been their existence for generations, dating back to 1619.

You were inconvenienced for 6-8 weeks, unable to get your hair done, have Girls Night Out and attend Celine Dion concerts. That's not even in the ballpark of centuries of oppression and marginalization, Karen! Get over your pasty white self.

Your city is on fire. Are you paying attention, yet?

It is burning because you failed to give proper attention, proper respect and human dignity to your neighbors of color. It is burning because from 1619 on, you didn't see them as fully equal, fully human or fully American. It is burning because white people started this violence, not the "thugs" and "savages" looting your precious Target.

White America doesn't understand this at all. They don't understand that this has been a violent struggle since the beginning. Instead of crosses burning, police vehicles and businesses are burning. Why? Because you started this mess, Karen!

Do you think the African slaves boarded ships because your ancestors told them to? No they were bought and sold and herded like cattle. The white men took what they wanted violently and made them their property.

Fast forward about 340 years and you have the civil rights marches of the 1960's. White America didn't understand why black America couldn't just be happy "in their place." And when these peaceful protests fanned out across the South, we released the dogs, the hoses and the police brutality. WE were the aggressors, Karen, the purveyors of violence! Not them.

Fast forward another 50 years and you have black athletes taking a knee in silent protest. Even that, you met with vocal outrage and faux patriotism. White America still wasn't listening. They drowned out the message with attacks on the protestors, turning their backs and a blind eye toward what was still going on right under their white noses.

You know, if you ignore it, it might just go away, right?

We've been ignoring it for the 52 years I've been a natural-born American citizen. And now our cities are burning.

We reached a boiling point. The death of George Floyd, an American murdered on the streets of Minneapolis, was a catalyst, a tipping point. Blame the pandemic, blame the jobless numbers, the deafness and ineptitude of our leaders in the face of crisis, but the tone deafness of white America towards 400 years of racial injustice and inequality is the real culprit.

We've had our collective white knee on the neck of African-Americans this whole time. You think 8 minutes is a long time (and I grieve with you Floyd family), try 401 years!

It's time to wake up and to own this culpability, white America. You've remained silent and willfully ignorant for too long. Your silence has spoken much louder than your words.

Stop pinning the blame on protestors, rioters, your neighbors...take your own knee off their neck and STOP THE VIOLENCE!

Have a great day!

Black Lives Matter. Period.

#blacklivesmatter

It's sad that we have to have a campaign with the above hashtag. But it's sadder, still, that we see black lives snuffed out on a semi-regular basis on social and other media. The recently released footage of the Castillo murder by Minnesota cops comes to mind. Traffic stops of gun-carrying white people don't go down like that!

I fear that some of the backlash to the Black Lives Matter campaign is rooted in ignorance. I also fear the the younger generation, and I'm talking here about GenY'ers and those after them, are unaware of what the world was like in the decades before they were born...in the years I grew up. So let me set the stage for you...

I grew up in the 1970's. Born in 1968, I grew up on Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood and Captain Kangaroo. I'm part of the generation that grew up watching a lot of pre-cable TV. In those days, you didn't see a lot of black people or black families portrayed on television, or in mainstream media in general. There was no black Marlboro man. In fact, unless you read an ethnic publication, like Ebony magazine, you basically saw NO PEOPLE OF COLOR in any advertising, print or electronic, whatsoever! The first shows featuring black characters that I remember are Sanford and Sons and Fat Albert, both of which came on TV in 1972. Both shows were largely centered around junkyards. No implied message there!






Back then, we had 3-4 channels to choose from, so getting even ONE show with an all-black cast, tackling the issues of urban life, was a big deal. We didn't have shows like Blackish, channels like Black Entertainment Television (BET), or game show/talk show hosts like Steve Harvey. When I was very little, we had two shows! After that, Good Times, the Jeffersons and others became popular, but they were an anomaly. In all of TV History, prior to the 70's, you were hardpressed to find major characters who were anything but white.

Consider that. As a kid growing up 40 years ago, I still didn't see as many blacks represented in the media as I saw all around me in Indianapolis. And worse still, the swim club closest to my childhood home restricted access to non-Jewish whites only! My parents refused to join or to let us go there with our friends. Even then, I understood why.

A decade removed from the victories of the civil rights movement and there still wasn't much equality in America. I was shaken from my white superiority by the Roots miniseries that aired on ABC when I was 8. I'm glad my mom let me watch it. It made me look at my neighborhood friend, Gerald, through different eyes.

I share all that because I fear that teens, twenty and even thirty-somethings today don't realize that the world was still very segregated just 30-40 years ago. In fact, I was bussed to a different school across town in 8th grade as part of Indianapolis Public School's desegregation efforts. That was 1981-82! Things didn't magically get better with the civil rights movement in the 1960's. It's been an ongoing fight. It's taken decades just to get where we are today.

I had a well-meaning friend on Facebook give me his .02:

"The problem that i have with that slogan is that i should be able to say all lives matter, but i can't. I have been verbally attacked for saying it. Why? As long as society and people keep saying "white this" and "black that" we will never be free of racism. Both sides have it... but, there shouldn't be sides. My 5 year old daughter doesn't see skin color. She sees people. So, why are we as adults perpetuating the segregation?  It's time to be humans or earthlings.  Btw, i totally get what you're saying. I'm not saying that black lives don't matter, but please try to see what I'm saying as well. All lives should matter, except for terrorists. They should be destroyed"

The manifold problem with this "white people logic" begins with it's foundation. It wasn't blacks who created the divide amongst humanity. By and large, it was white people. It began with the premise that races OTHER THAN white were somehow inferior. In the case of Africans, they were classified subhuman. The African slave was classified chattel. They were no different than livestock and often treated WORSE! So white people created the US v. THEM culture between themselves and everyone of a "lesser race" (blacks were often referred to as "mud race"). This culture has been so prevalent, even in the last century, that the American public got a rude awakening with the civil unrest of the 1960's.

That's the culture into which a great percentage of today's African-American was born. They were welcomed into a world of inequality onto an unlevel playing field that was stacked against them. And just because the field is a bit more level today, it didn't make their lives any easier in the last fifty years. They had to overcome obstacles. They faced cruelty and injustice that many in the fairer race can't even comprehend. So when they say "black lives matter," it is rooted in the deep, dark history of civilization where their lives really DIDN'T matter to white people.

The phrase itself doesn't imply anything other than what it says, "Black lives matter." Period. End of statement.

What it DOESN'T say?
"Black lives matter more."
"White lives matter less."
"Cops matter even less."

It's simply a fight for equality...a fight that began ions ago and continues today. Why it puts those of other races on the defensive is beyond me.

But it does prove that white privilege still exists. It is so ingrained in us, that we feel slighted by the exclusion from the motto "black lives matter." Why we feel the need to argue, "What about us?" Well, white friends, our lives have ALWAYS mattered! We didn't have to fight for equality. We didn't have to suffer attack dogs, gestapo police tactics, terrorists (like the KKK and irate Southerners) and a government bent on keeping us marginalized just to maintain our civil rights. No, those have never been threatened or in question, not in any way. So why do we feel threatened by the fight for black equality?

I'll save my comments on "color blindness" for a different post, but the above statements pretty well sum up my feelings about non-blacks who have a problem with #blacklivesmatter.

You may wonder why this issue resonates so much with me. I'm not just some do-gooder white dude looking for a cause. I'm not suffering from white guilt. I simply want my daughter, my niece and my nephew, who are all or part African-American, to grow up in a world that seems 100 YEARS AHEAD of the society in which I grew up. We need to see RAPID progress where civil rights are concerned, not just racial equality, but sexual, gender and in every other way! I care because I love my kid and her cousins, dearly. I want a better world for them. And ever since I was a little kid, racism has made my blood boil.

Thank you for reading my blog post.