(A note to readers: A black friend of mine told me that it was Ok for me to use the term "Black". I also use some unsavory epithets in recounting anecdotes.)
Bear with my analogy for a moment. I always defended my love of sports as being 'a metaphor for the human experience.' Live athletic competition could distill life lessons about the value of competition, perseverance, and hard luck. And apparently, it can also relate to an over-educated sports fan lessons from the ongoing civil rights struggle.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=vicksatlanta
How was it, in my 30 years of life, did it take an espn.com article that used the Michael Vick plea bargain to clearly explain the roots of judicial mistrust in the black community?
I was hardly sheltered. I grew up with liberal parents in a mixed race community. I went to private school where we read Native Son, The Color Purple, and How to Kill a Mockingbird. One of my best friends in middle school was black, as was my doctor. I was hardly underexposed to the broader community.
However, I had obviously never picked up on some key pieces of information. Through my 12 years of Catholic school education, no nun, priest, or brother would tell us how the leading civil rights leaders of the 1960's were routinely harrassed and wiretapped by government agencies. Instead, during my senior year in high school, the administration brought in the choir from and all-black inner city school. We sat in the gym, white students from a private school, and watched blacks sing and dance for us. Even at the time I felt there was something wrong with this.
Grade school was equally disheartening. We learned about the African-American civic pioneers of our city. Apparently Garret Morgan invented the traffic light. George Washington Carver invented peanut butter, but he wasn't from Cleveland. We definitely didn't learn how Christians had used specific old testament passages to reconcile racism.
In Kintergarden, we had safety day. We were too young to learn about black history I guess. That day, we took a trip the muncipal fire and police stations. We got to tour the fire house and sit in a police car and turn on the siren. Later the policeman would tell us to wave when we saw a cop, and to stop when the police said stop. "We only want to stop and talk to you." He said. As an impressionable 6-year old, those lessons would stick.
Had I grown up black, I probably wouldn't stop.
The Dallas Innocence project has freed nearly a dozen black inmates who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned in the 1980's to early 90's. The project is revealing a troubling tend of wrongful convictions over a narrow period. It is quickly becoming clear to all, save for the Dallas County Prosecutor's office, that the DA was willing to railroad the most convenient black suspect the police provided. DNA evidence is exonerating suspects with similar stories nationwide.
As the espn.com article pointed out, the trial was not about Vick's alleged offenses. It was about the outpouring of vitriol and death threats against Vick himself. It was about the polarization in public response and subsequent assumption of guilt on racial lines. Once again, black community leaders must have thought, a man is facing a lynch mob without his due process. Lost in the public spectacle was the symbolic picture: that once again in the deep South, in a city where leading black figures had been targeted and systematically undercut, a black man had been judged. The black community wasn't supporting dogfighting; they simply didn't trust the system that had already robbed their civil rights so many times before.
My father in law and I once had a conversation about racism. He is friends with a famous black author who gives speeches around the country about owning your own racism. "Everyone," Terry said, "is a little racist. It doesn't mean that you are necessarilly a bad person. You just have to own your own racism before it owns you."
I didn't really buy it at the time. I did more than just say the right things, I acted on them, for the most part. But I never really took the time for empathy. What got me started? The King of Pop.
Fine, he was likely a child molestor. The jokes existed for years. But he was a black celebrity who was convicted long before by the court of public opinon. Same with OJ. And Vick. Public support for the acquittal (of the previous two) suddenly seemed less like an exercise in justice, but a rare victory. For once, a leading black figure beat a bum rap. I remember the divisions over the OJ verdict. At the time I thought of it only as tribalism and the retreat of people to identify with their own groups. I didn't see it as a referendum, however belated, on a the criminal justice system.
My racism? I need to own up to failing to empathize. I remember driving on M-203 after a trip to the city beach. The same redneck is always there in his lawn chair, expounding on gems, like "niggers don't like the cold, that's why you don't see them here" (I am pretty sure that he is the same guy who has never been south of the Portage Lake lift bridge, is 66, has a paper route, and lives with his parents - seriously). On the ride home, I was explaining to my wife that although he was a bigot in every sense of the word, it was easy to understand how living a sheltered life in the Upper Peninsula could lead someone to those same conclusions.
I wasn't accepting his language or racism by any means. I just stepped inside the world he grew up in, looked around at place (100% white), time (segregation era), and environment (racist backwater), and realized that those factors could turn anyone into a misinformed bigot.
Never had I applied the same courtesy to understanding why blacks I knew were defending OJ, MJ, and Vick.
None of this is particularly earth shattering - walk a mile in another man's shoes kind of stuff. But I don't understand why it would take someone as smart as me so long to realize. Obviously, I am still maturing. Even my Grandma got it right before I did. Nana, may she rest in peace, was the youngest daughter of a bootlegger who grew up in the West Virginie hills. She still used the more colorful term, as in, "Noah, who is that colored friend of yours?" She wasn't that bad, hardly even a low-level racist, until the last year of her stay in the nursing home. The nursing home was run by the Cleveland Catholic Diocese, and had just obtained a rental priest from Nigeria to cover its domestic shortage. He was the first black man my Grandma had ever personally met. For her it was simple: if God and the Church is OK with a black priest, then everyone else needs to be too.
For my Grandma, the conversation had to be in terms of religous enlightenment. For me, it was sports. Her empathy derived from sharing a common faith with her priest, the first black man she knew. Mine involved following the public spectacle surrounding an electrifying former Hokie, whose singular athleticism put Virginia Tech on the map. Both may seem equally weird to the respective nonbelievers, but they framed the debate in a context we were each familiar with.
Never underestimate the healing power of sports.
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