Its late and I’m too tired to proof read this for now. I’ll try to get to it after my men’s church meeting tomorrow morning.
Black white relations in America are infinitely better than they were when I was sent out to the playground in second grade as the black children were ushered into Loman Hill Elementary school in Topeka Kansas in 1958. But for anyone to be satisfied with a situation in which a third of the males in any particular population demographic find themselves in jail is absurd. Such satisfaction is as silly as thinking that the election of a half white President should put the past to bed.
Its probably easier for me with a 65 year time span to put things in perspective but lets get real. Dozens of black young men have been killed in instances of too aggressive policing in recent years and there have been protests and a few broken windows. When I was in high school we had the “Long hot summer.” Its been a long time since black Americans burned down their slumlord’s neighborhoods.
But our Preamble to the Declaration of Independence is still a work in progress. A couple weeks ago I took my young black friend Tim out for lunch. It popped in my head to ask him how many times since he moved to Duluth ten years ago he’d been asked by white friends to rub his hair. Tim surprised at the question gave me a bemused grin. Its been about 80 times. At least pregnant women only show for a few months of their lives for strangers to ask them to pat their tummies. How can African Americans not feel like Aliens in their own land? A few white Americans have had the similar experience of visiting the rural regions of China where locals have never seen a European and reach out to touch their blonde hair. But these visits end not the residency of black-Americans in their own land.
That point was made in Jana Hollingsworth’s story about the young black men at our Woodland Hills School. They are wary of police. My 65 year perspective included four years in college in the early 1970’s where a law enforcement degree was being pioneered. That was the beginning of college degrees becoming a pathway to the police. In short order America’s “men in blue” were no longer to be drawn from a pool of high school graduates. These would be police with some sophistication and a touch of the liberal arts about them.
I caught grief from “my buddy” several times for over generalizing about Duluth police falling into a national police habit of over scrutinizing blacks. In fact I regularly have caught grief for him and yet I’m unapologetic for it. Statistics make my confidence that this is routine pretty hard to undermine. And yet I acknowledged that our recently departed police Chief Gordon Ramsay was positively brilliant in his new home, Wichita, Kansas, when he turned a Black Lives Matter protest into a community barbecue.
Tomorrow I’d like to describe my weekend playing to the cameras. I will mention that one scene we shot during which extras dressed as prosperous 1920 white diners staring at black customers wasn’t something out of old timey days. One of our black cast members from the Twin Cities told us that when he got to Duluth for the shoot he went into one of the haunts of a lot of older Duluth residents for dinner and was greeted with what he took to be a host of suspicious stares.
Donald Trump is happy to scare us all by pointing to Minnesota’s Somali kids who are trying to enlist in a jihad. But honestly, the number of people injured in America from discombobulated Muslims pales compared to the 30,000 opioid deaths that take place in our country every year. Remaining paranoid about people of color is a lot less helpful to them or to the larger population than seeing to it that we treat each other with kindness and respect. It sure would help if we could just bridge our infamous learning gap here in Duluth for a start.
