American Racist
I just heard on the news that there was a shark attack on Rockaway Beach in New York City. My daughter and granddaughters go to my ex-wife’s beach club on Atlantic Beach at this time of year for some fun in the sun and at the beach. Atlantic Beach is a beautiful stretch of Long Island sandbar that happens to look right across the inlet to Rockaway Beach. Naturally, I couldn’t help myself and despite knowing that shark attacks are very rare and that there is probably more danger in their drive from Brooklyn to Atlantic Beach than there is in going into the water at Atlantic Beach, I still called my daughter and told her to be careful when they went to the beach this week. Sometimes things just scare us and that’s all there is to it. And since Jaws, 48 years ago, I have been pretty fearful of sharks, as illogical as that is. And sometimes there are things that should scare us that we ignore and pretend don’t exist. We may all have our sharks and monsters under the bed, there are other dangers that lurk in the corners of America that should keep us all up at night much more. The monster that should worry us most is our own American racist.
Shark attacks don’t happen every year. Racist rhetoric doesn’t come to the surface all the time either. But sharks are likely in the waters off of almost every beach most of the time. So too, racists lurk beneath the waters of America and have since this country began. We are all a little bit intolerant of those who are unlike us, so I’m not entirely sure where one should draw the line in declaring the existence of racism. I suppose it is like the view in Christianity and other religions that declares that we are all sinners. I suppose that is why the canons of the religion have made a point of distinguishing between mortal and venial sins. “Mortal sins are grave offenses that sever our friendship with God and, consequently, cause a loss of sanctifying grace.” That quote comes right out of Google, so it must be true. So let us say that one is either a racist (of the venial variety) or a Racist (a likely mortal sin). As run-of-the-mill racists, we might be unaware of the harm of our actions. Take, for example, the high school student who years ago was in a play that involved donning blackface in a minstrel show. That person might have a problem running for public office because of that history, but they may indeed be a very good person who embraces diversity today and wouldn’t dream of doing anything to offend a black person. That, I suggest is forgivable racism that is vindicated by everyday actions and goodness that make the point that no fundamental bias or harm was intended. It may still be wrong, and perhaps even more wrong in today’s more sensitive environment, but I think most of us would agree that it is a forgivable transgression. But Racism is like pornography as described by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964, “I know it when I see it.” And I sadly see it all over the place and every day in America (not to absolve the rest of the world, but just to focus my commentary).
Like many liberal-minded Americans, I am often accused of reading into things and overthinking things. While it is not hard to see why that criticism comes up, especially for someone like me prone to spewing out everything that is on his mind in daily blog stories, I still think that thinking hard about what we do and what goes on around us is an important part of good citizenship. Maybe I should have been a high school civics teacher…but then that would make me criminally liable in states like Florida. Merriam-Webster tell us that there are two definitions of citizenship and I feel this may be at the root of the issue. They are:
1. Possession of the rights and privileges of a citizen, and
2. The quality of a person’s response to membership in a community.
It is the sense of sanctity towards the first of these definitions and the failure to realize or accept the importance of the second definition that concerns me the most. I might ask Merriam-Webster to modify the second to say “…response to membership and other members…” To me, the rights and privileges of being an American are only earned and sanctified in our collective ability to take responsibility for ourselves and others in the community in how we deal with the rights and privileges of ALL of our citizens.
Let’s take a non-racial issue like abortion. The fundamental argument is between upholding the rights and privileges of the mother, presumably a citizen and thus a member of our community, versus the rights and privileges of an unborn child, who may or may not rise or grow to becoming a citizen and member of our community. That means that inside each woman are up to 2 million future citizens and inside each man over his productive life are many, many millions more potential future citizens in the form of the spermatozoa he carries at any time. The abortion debate revolves around who’s rights and privileges should govern. While I don’t think we as citizens have the right to be immunized against any actions we take against non-citizens, including any as-yet-unborn babies, I do feel we have an obligation to one another to make our best efforts to protect the rights and privileges of and give the benefit of the doubt to current and existing citizens. That means that women and their doctors should be presumed innocent of any attempts to deprive future potential citizens of their rights and privileges. I am sure there are facts that may weigh against such presumption of innocence, but they should not be prescribed in laws established by some control-focused authoritarian politician who does so “under the banner of heaven”. The Mormons showed us how well that approach to righteousness works and even they eventually came around to more modern and reasonable thinking to some extent.
But racism runs even deeper than abortion in the American psyche. The country seems divided into those who see different as bad and those who see different as good. What tends to go hand in hand with that is that those who were not raised like us are all too often considered less than us and therefore under suspicion. Except that those of us who have been privileged enough to be raised in some degree of wealth will always have been raised differently and if we allow that to define us, we are doomed to being racist, or worse yet, Racist. None of us like encountering stupid and uninformed people, but it is important that we understand the basis of that lack of wisdom and whether it is correctable or even relevant (that is what Ron De Santis likes to call being Woke). And many of our citizens are far less informed than we wish they were, since their one vote is no different than our one vote…or at least under democratic principles, it should not be (that is what I would call the American spirit of democracy).
And what do the people who are most afraid of different do? To start with, they forget that these other citizens that are different than them also have rights and privileges that they must uphold as well. They buy guns and use gun culture to defend their rights and privileges as citizens (even against other citizens or worse yet, their very government) and then say that they only do so because those different than them are out to get them and that the government cannot and will not defend them because the government lets all these citizens vote whether they are like-minded with them or not. And they deem that as stupid and unjust. They then become the worst case definition of American citizenship. They become American Racists.