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Glancing at the paper this morning over
breakfast, I noticed the headline, “Race relations arguably
worse in ‘Age of Obama'.”
That banal conclusion is based on a recent
poll suggesting that 43
percent
of Americans believe that having an African-American
president has not helped race relations, while only 34
percent
believe it has helped.
This assumes that race relations–white folks
and people of color getting along–is what we’re shooting
for. It isn’t. Racial justice is the goal.
It could be argued that race relations
declined significantly during the civil rights era when all
those white folks were foaming-at-the-mouth-angry. Never in
a thousand years would they give the Negro equal status in
America.
In fact, a common line of argument in the
late 1950s and early 1960s accused civil rights activists
and “outside agitators” of stirring up racial enmity. Before
the Freedom Rides, sit-ins, marches and mass meetings began,
it was said, white folks and black folks dwelt together in
harmony.
A superficial harmony can mask a racial
justice problem. As Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out in
his letter from the Birmingham Jail, African Americans have
little interest in improving race relations “When you have
seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even
kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity . . .”
Most African-Americans,
50
years on, still feel brutalized by law enforcement. That
isn’t the voice of anarchy you hear on the streets of
Ferguson; it’s the voice of despair.
We need police officers. Poor black
neighborhoods need them most of all. But after generations
of fear, arrogance and abuse, a simmering hostility has
evolved between poor black neighborhoods and the police
officers charged with serving and protecting them.
To be sure, the riots and looting we have
witnessed in Ferguson and elsewhere have garbled the message
of legitimate protest; but no one should be surprised by the
broken shop windows and burning buildings. We all knew it
was coming.
The ink was hardly dry on the Voting Rights
Act of 1965 when riots broke out in Watts, an inner city Los
Angeles neighborhood. In 1967, Dr. King described a
memorable encounter.
I was out in Watts
during the riots. One young man said to me… ‘We won!’ I
said, ‘What do you mean, ‘we won’? Thirty-some people
dead—all but two are Negroes. You’ve destroyed your own.
What do you mean ‘we won’?’ And he said, ‘We made them pay
attention to us.’ When people are voiceless, they will have
temper tantrums like a little child who has not been paid
attention to. And riots are massive temper tantrums from a
neglected and voiceless people.
In Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s
wife, Linda, understood the silent rage of the dispossessed
and the ignored.
Willy Loman never made
a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not
the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human
being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So
attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into
his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be
finally paid to such a person.
When people are ignored for too long, they
lash out like wounded animals in a trap. So long as terrible
things are happening in the invisible neighborhoods of
America, a modest improvement in race relations is
meaningless and misleading. We won’t have racial justice
until white America acknowledges that terrible things are
happening and, worse still, we are responsible for those
terrible things.
That’s a lot to ask, I realize. So long as
white people control the national conversation we can ignore
racial reality if we want to. Out of sight, out of mind. We
won’t change until somebody gets our attention. That’s what
the protests across the nation are all about: getting our
attention. White people don’t like it. We’re not supposed
to like it. We’re supposed to pay attention. Because, if we
don’t, nothing will change.
Rev. Alan Bean, Ph.D., is Executive Director Friends of
Justice
Used by permission
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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