Black Lives Don’t Count

My best friend in the world is an African-American woman who teaches at a city college in Chicago, and when I asked her what she thought of the verdict in the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson, charging that he used an unlawful amount of lethal force against Michael Brown, a boy who stole cigars from a convenience store, she said with some bitterness, “Black lives don’t count.” She later called back, and tempered her response, still not negating what she had previously said, but acknowledging that we need to find a peaceable way to protest injustice.

The fury driving minority communities seems to be the recognition that they are not seen as fully human, deserving of the recognition afforded any white citizen in the community. Shortly after the verdict, President Obama spoke to our citizens, saying, “We are a nation built on the rule of law, so we need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make.”

Indeed, we have come a long way since the 1960’s, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have miles to go still, seeking equality for all in terms of how we are treated. St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch, in his lengthy statement, never once mentioned that Michael Brown was unarmed, and his whole presentation style came across as belligerent, self-serving, and inflammatory. While any decision of this kind doesn’t justify a violent response, it’s pretty clear that people who are not so privileged as to be born white are frustrated with their second-class citizenship status.

The jury of nine whites and three blacks met on twenty-five occasions over the period of three months, but it seems to me that the system is still fundamentally broken. Watching the tear gas canisters spread through the crowds made me feel that I was in a different time or even in a different country. I don’t know how many people reading this remember the black and white images from the sixties of black men and women being sprayed with firehouses or having German Shepard dogs sicced on them, but suffice it to say that things got out of control, and fast. There were 61 arrests in Ferguson for burglary and trespassing, and again, I in no way condone that response, but I understand the feeling that we are simply not all equal under the law.

Officer Darren Wilson made an impulsive decision in the flurry of the moment, and no doubt, given the public outcry, he probably regrets the degree of force he used. He will have to live with his decision to take a life over a couple of stolen cigars, but I personally believe in the Maya Angelou dictum: “We do the best we can, and when we know better, we do better.”

Let’s hope that Michael Brown’s death wasn’t completely in vain because I fear it was.

Trust Issues

I was walking my Akita and Beagle this afternoon, and a slightly rusted blue van with a harried, somewhat disheveled woman pulled up next to me. She said she was lost, and asked if she could use my phone?

Something made me hesitate. She hadn’t asked for directions, just the phone, and she seemed quite rushed and frenzied, and something just didn’t feel right so I lied after automatically reaching into my pocket and said instead that I didn’t have my phone on me. She sped off in the same manner in which she had come up on me from behind.

I felt bad, but I’ve learned it’s important to trust your gut instinct. Still, I hate that we live in a world where we can’t even hand over our phone to a stranger. I live in what is a pretty safe subdivision in the western suburbs of Chicago, and I think the crime rate is fairly low in comparison to other areas, but we’ve had a lot of construction, and re-roofing of houses lately following a storm earlier this year, and there have been a lot of strangers here, there, and everywhere.

I have no proof that she wanted to steal my cell phone, just the gut feeling that “something wasn’t right in the state of Denmark.” This, however, is not the same world in which I was raised. Where I grew up, we rode big wheels, then later bicycles, up and down our streets without fear of strangers, and I believed in the basic goodness of my fellow citizen, yet something has changed in the intervening years.

While on many fronts regarding civil liberties we have made great progress as a nation, we have, as individuals, become more isolationistic. Gated communities have become even more gated to outsiders, and I’m not certain I have an answer to this fear of strangers. Facebook may have brought us closer in some ways to those we’ve never met, but our one-on-one interactions have remained hesitant and untrusting. I’m the first to admit it. I have trust issues.

Spooked

I’m not sure why people are still sometimes afraid of that which is different. My friend Rosie and I recently toured Ireland, and the trip was, for the most part, a great success, but one incident stands out in my mind and continues to haunt me.

Rosie and I ate an amazing dinner at the Market House restaurant which is adjacent to the Abbey Hotel in Donegal, but the restaurant told us that to use the restroom we would have to head over to the lobby of the hotel. I myself have the bladder of a squirrel, and had already made two trips to the restroom during our extended, leisurely dinner on one of the longest days of the year, but after I paid for our meal on what happened to be Rosie’s birthday, she excused herself, and I followed her over to the hotel.

There was some kind of emergency medical technician arriving on the scene, and the hotel clerk looked at me and said, quite distinctly, that the Abbey Hotel was having a “spook” alert. I’m quite certain I did not hear her wrong, and I stood in silent shock, first hand witness to true Irish racism. Rosie is African-American, and I am white, but I’d never before been confronted with true hatred based on one’s skin color. I have, while in the midst of a gay neighborhood, been called a fag by a passing car, but most of the time, I live out my days without directly confronting prejudice. I think part of the reason the quite recent police shooting of African-American youth Michael Brown stirs up so much controversy and strong reaction is that living with prejudice is a reality for a certain subset of our citizens.

During the first five days of our trip, people kind of assumed that Rosie and I were an interracial couple, and we were greeted on the west coast with a kind of curiosity–we definitely stuck out in the very heterogenous white population–but no one said anything, and we were treated courteously. That changed in Donegal, a small fishing town, and I staggered out of the hotel like a drunk, even though I don’t drink. I’m left reminded of the Robert Frost poem, that we have “miles to go before we sleep.”