What if Americans really talked about racism?
Solomon Northup, a black man, was a fiddler and a carpenter in Saratoga Springs.
He had a wife, Anne, and three children, Elizabeth, Margaret and Alonzo. Together they operated a small farm in the town of Hebron in Washington County.
In 1841, Northup was kidnapped by slavers operating out of Washington DC.
He was drugged and transported to Louisiana, where he was sold in the way that livestock is sold to a series of plantation owners.
He lost twelve years of his life to America’s “peculiar” institution.
A movie is set to be released soon, telling Northup’s story — the story of a North Country man caught up in an evil system that was enshrined at the heart of the American experiment.
(Check out the trailer for the film at the bottom of this post.)
This very local tale comes at a time when more of us are being forced to confront our nation’s long, shameful embrace of racism. President Barack Obama spoke about this tension in the context of the shooting of Trayvon Martin this week.
“I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away,” Obama said.
There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.
There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me — at least before I was a senator.
There are very few African Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.
This is a conversation a lot of Americans just don’t want to have. Which is understandable. We are a proud people, convinced of the honor and wisdom of our Founding Fathers, devoted to the ideals that have been passed down to us.
But for many decades, we have resisted confronting honestly — and working to cure — the canker that remains at the heart of our republican experiment.
So let’s speak bluntly for a moment about what we did as a people and who we are today, the links that bind Solomon Northup to Trayvon Martin.
Through the first four centuries that Europeans were establishing a foothold in North America, we exterminated many of the human beings who lived here before us.
In many instances, we did so deliberately and with calculation, eliminating whole civilizations because we believed that the native Americans who occupied this continent were, at best, inconvenient and, at worst, a kind of dangerous vermin.
During this long, dark chapter, our forefathers — including the men who founded our nation — enriched themselves through the industrial ownership of other human beings.
Ours was a society that used the most evil imaginable tools in order to create a significant part of our wealth — a system of mass-kidnapping, rape, torture, eugenics, and bureacratized murder.
It’s important to confront the fact that this system wasn’t merely limited to slave-traders and plantation owners, no more than the German system in the 1930s and 1940s was limited to Nazi party officials and SS troopers.
The policies that produced slavery and genocide in America were the product of a much larger matrix of interests, from bankers to politicians to merchant traders to small farm owners.
We began the process of extracting ourselves from this dark tradition with the Civil War, but the deep system of racial hatred and violence was perpetuated through much of our modern history.
Jim Crow laws, public lynchings, KKK terror, deliberate (and successful) efforts to disenfranchise black voters, and widespread denial of access of blacks to the nation’s shared public wealth — these all continued into the mid-1960s.
Even today, many of us instinctively and reflexively view blacks as inferior, as problematic, as criminal, as lazy, as dangerous.
This prejudice colors who we are willing to hire. It colors who the police stop on the street at night. It colors who we put in prison. It colors who George Zimmerman feared and stalked and killed.
We have, of course, made great strides. The Civil Rights era produced remarkable gains. There is, at long last, a black middle class in America. Blacks take part in our political culture in robust ways. We have a black President, a black Attorney General.
What we have never had is a proper national discussion of this stain on our history and our honor. We have never reached any kind of national consensus on how to atone and how to heal.
There was never the equivalent of Germany’s Nuremberg trials, or South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process.
In much of conservative white America, there is deep ambivalence about revisiting this history.
The same community that talks with passion about preserving the traditions, values, and history of the “real” America, regards any discussion of race, any acknowledgment of shared guilt, as liberal hand-wringing.
Conservatives point to the terrible struggles within the black community — with crime, poverty, broken families and drug addiction — but want no part of connecting those horrors to our own centuries-long exploitation.
Many white liberals, meanwhile, believe that future discussions should involve class and the struggles of poor people generally — not merely focusing on black America. A rising tide lifts all boats.
I think this misses the mark. It’s not merely about money or economic progress. When an honorable people does wrong — and we, as a people, committed a long, dark atrocity — they must be honest, they must be humble, and they must atone.
It’s time for us to talk not just about Trayvon Martin, but also about Solomon Northup, and the long chain of black men and women that connect them.
It’s time to talk honestly about the privileges and wealth that white Americans — even white Americans of modest means — enjoy because of our forefathers’ complicity. It’s time to talk bluntly about our own fears, our own prejudices.
It’s time to acknowledge that much of our dislike of black America stems not from traditional racism, and a feeling of superiority.
Instead, it grows from that quiet nagging voice — the voice of our better angels — that tells us we have done a deep wrong and failed to put it right.
It’s time to to ask what would we expect of our government and from the wider community, if our people had been enslaved and cheated and humiliated in such a grievous fashion.
It is, of course, too late for us to welcome Solomon Northup home. Too late to make sure that some justice is restored to him and his wife Anne and their children. Too late to gather on his farm in Washington County and pay our humble respects.
It’s too late to save Trayvon Martin and restore to him the life and opportunity that any seventeen-year-old American boy should have.
But it’s not too late to think through ways that we might break this terrible chain that still burdens us as a people, black and white.
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The truth is you, if you’re white, have a far smaller chance of being arrested and sentenced to jail for drug possession than a black or hispanic man, even though as Brian has pointed out whites use drugs at the same rate as blacks and hispanics. And being arrested for drugs sets in motion familiarity with harder-core criminals that often circles people’s productive lives down the drain. And yes, I’d blame that on racism, just like I’d blame the fact that blacks were red-lined out of neighborhoods with good schools for decades, and that even the richest blacks are forced to go to school with the poorest in their communities, on average, something that never happens to the richest whites.
We kinda designed our system that way, if you remember our 3/5ths compromise and our own version of apartheid that still kinda exists, and things like the Central Park jogger case.
The ugly truth is that it’s a really good deal to be a white male, as the controversial Louis C.K. says here, with some curse words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg48ZZ2wYfM
Lucky me, that I get to be a white male, responsible at the same time for all of society’s problems and for paying for every half-assed attempt to solve them. All those poor “victims” of racism have put their law-abiding friends and relatives in harms way by their anti-social behavior. Not to mention that they largely prey on their own. It isn’t white males who commit the majority of crimes.
Yes, Larry, you are lucky. Glad you acknowledge it.
Actually, whites do commit the majority of crimes, if you believe the FBI arrest records:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/table-43
(Yes, blacks have a disproportionately high arrest rate; see 10:39 comment for some reasons).
You are also lucky that fraudulent use of the word “majority” isn’t a crime.
It is true that whites commit far more crimes than blacks in this country. The thing that is really hard to understand is the number of wealthy people who commit crimes of every description. And even more difficult to understand is how many wealthy people will steal money from poor and middle class people through various methods that raid pension and retirement accounts or use those accounts in ways to enrich themselves. I mean, hey, I understand the motivation of a poor person to try to meet their physical needs – not condoning it, but I understand it. But what about all the various frauds committed all the time – some legal and some not – on Wall Street, or by banks? What about owners of some of America’s most prominent businesses that hire illegal help to clean stores at night and lock them in preventing them from escaping if there were a fire or other disaster? What about white farmers, ranchers, construction company owners who hire illegal immigrants to save money thereby denying lawful work to many low income Americans? What about wealthy people who hire illegal nannies to save a few thousand dollars a year?
The list is very, very long of wealthy white people who are perfectly willing to do illegal stuff that hurts poor people. And yet they are often the most respected people in a community. Movers and shakers. But often the shaking is really just a means of getting poor people’s change to fall out of their pockets.
Doesn’t sound very different than white people who were willing to keep slaves in order to enrich themselves.
Since the discussion is continuing…….
Although pretty “liberal” on most issues, I am less inclined to be so on the Trayvon tragedy. Not that I don’t think Mr.Zimmerman deserves a majority of the blame, though more likely than not was not technically guilty of murder. I think there was some kind of confrontation that turned into a struggle, that resulted in a shooting in what Zimmerman believed was, and may have indeed may been, self-defense. But I could be wrong, and we shall probably never know.
Brian’s discussion of the many racist crimes, individual or institutional, against African Americans is correct. But, as with many of the “pro-Trayvon” arguments I have seen, it paints an incomplete and unbalanced picture of the events around the situation, and, in doing this, a false one.
Trayvon Martin was not killed because he was marching for the right to vote, or to go to school with white kids, to sit in a restaurant with whites, or sit in a theater with them, or any number of things rights blacks were routinely denied, often with the force of law, before the mid-Sixties. Nor was he killed because he whistled at a white girl, held hands with one, or dated one, as he might likely have been done a generation ago.
He was killed because he was, apparently falsely, lumped in with a group of young men who looked like him and who, as no one denies, been committing a lot crimes in that neighborhood. “Washington Post “columnist Kathleen Parker a couple of days ago mentioned one case where a young mother lay curled up and terrified in her bathroom grasping her young child in one hand, and a rusty pair of scissors in the other, as two young back men went through her house taking stuff until the arrival of the cops sent them scurrying. Her behavior, the reaction of people in the neighborhood, including Mr. Zimmerman, was not because of “racism”. I was because young men fitting a certain description were behaving in a certain way. It would likely be the same if they were mostly young white guys wearing Boston Red Sox hats. That they were not is, of course, largely because of the social and economic heritage what might be broadly called “racism”, but it is not the same.
It is not the same because Zimmerman tragically overacted against a real threat to his neighborhood and community, not because of people simply asking for legal and social equality. It is a huge difference, whatever the “root causes” may be. People have I right to vote, use public accomodations, and receive a decent eduction. People also have a right to be secure on their streets and in their homes. When this latter is compromised, and “system” fails to correct it, terrible misunderstandings and consequences are likely to ensue.
It is incorrect, and, Brian, misleading to make a direct and simple connection between race and this tragedy. It should have been, at least, something like “crime, race, and it’s consequences” To do otherwise, to substantially overlook the experiences of the victims, white and black, of these crimes, and to instead frame it in terms of civil rights, further alienates those actual and potential victims of urban crime. In does not help resolve the situation.
Trayvon Martin was an innocent victim of a mistake that, while unacceptable, is understandable. He was not Solomon Northup, nor Medger Evers.
And I don’t have any answers, either.
Hi all –
This is a tough, emotional topic. OL – I deleted one of your comments strictly because of profanity. But more broadly, everyone please keep it civil and don’t make personal attacks.
–Brian, NCPR
money is racism.
poverty is slavery.
neither have a color.
Movie looks really good, with lots of big names in it to pull in audiences. Hope so.
While it seems clear to me that racism was an important element in this story, it is the Stand Your Ground law that strikes me as utterly incredible. If two armed citizens encounter one another, and each manages to make the other fear for his life (not unreasonably) then it this law makes it legal for them to blaze away at each other? Absolutely insane! I thought we had done away with dueling two hundred years ago. Thanks, ALEC!
And what of the “collateral damage”?
Brian,
Having seen that particular phrase here before and having used it myself, I was unaware it was cause for deletion.
In general in the US African Americans get arrested more often for the same crimes as white people are committing, particularly drugs. So what happens is you are already poor, you live in a culture that does indeed include drug use, then you get busted for a pot charge, now you have a record. Now that you have a record you don’t ever pass a background check for employment and the cycle just goes on.
There ends up being a lot of young men who are simply locked out of the system. Is it their fault? Sometimes it is and African American leaders are talking about that, however I think we can make system changes that would have a huge impact.
I think the Martin trial and outcome was about race (listen to the juror), however the shooting was not about race. When you have a lot of crime in a particular area and you have a these stupid laws about using force and when we have a culture that encourages violence you get this sort of killing. If Martin had been white I think the outcome would have been different at the trail.
Believe it or not, I have heard and verified of white people being stopped for wearing a hoodie in the Adirondacks.
Maybe we need to outlaw hoodies?
The interesting thing about that on a little different level; is that profiling from a police perspective actually works.
Stopping and frisking every person who dresses like a gangsta in NYC has indeed radically reduced gun crime. If you know you are going to get frisked you don’t carry a gun, you don’t carry a gun and you are less likely to kill people. It does work, but do the ends justify the means? In general they never do.
Okay, time for some lists.
Famous black people who have been to jail:
James Brown, Chuck Berry, Wesley Snipes, Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Michael Vick, Marion Barry, Jesse Jackson Jr?, Ray Lewis, Lil Kim, Lil Wayne (note danger of being named Lil), 50 Cent, Mr Bojangles, Mike Tyson, Marion Jones, that guy from CSI…help me out here, I’m slowing down but I know there are a lot more.
Famous Wall Street criminals who have gone to jail: Martha Stewart, Bernie Madoff, hmmm, is that it?
Famous white people who should have gone to jail but didn’t: Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Wiener, Dick Cheney (sorry, I just had to do that), there have to be a lot more than that.
Don’t everybody be shy, feel free to add names.