One Year Later

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore –

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over –

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

(Langston Hughes)

On August 9 the nation will remember the one year anniversary of the shooting death of Michael Brown by Officer Darrin Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. When the event occurred I was vacationing with my wife in Maine, and the shooting did not make the evening news. Yet within a day, the nation and the world began to learn of a stirring taking place in Ferguson in a way that shook Black people to their painful soulful core, and led to an eruption that has continued to smolder. There were peaceful marches, overshadowed (in the media) by angry looting, and police dressed in combat gear reinforced by the National Guard. From the politicians and police there was a call for order and but from the communities of color around the country there was a call for justice. Officer Wilson was not charged, but that cry was not silenced and the call for justice continued to grow. 

Pretty soon, we were hearing other names like Tamir Rice (Cleveland), Eric Garner (NYC), Brandon Tate Brown (Philadelphia) and Freddie Gray (Baltimore). And there was Charleston and the Black churches burned in its aftermath. Just this past month Sandra Bland (Texas) and Samuel Debose (Cincinnati) were added to that list. There were a few retaliatory reactions such as the murder of NYC police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, and tensions between members of the Black communities and police departments in communities across the nation grew tense to the brink of breaking. And the movement that has come to be called “Black Lives Matter” emerged and continues to grow.

For many White folks this eruption of anger and frustration came as a surprise. We  Whites hadn’t been paying attention. We had seen glimpses like the riots after Rodney King’s beating and the marches after the death of Trayvon Martin, but then things slipped out of our view and we got lulled back to sleep. We thought that Michael Brown’s shooting was somehow unique, out of the ordinary, and a deviation from a racially peaceful norm, even though it was all too normal for Black and Latino men in this country. We didn’t understand the reactions of anger, frustration, despair and even hate, but that was  normal too in communities of color. Back in the ’90’s Cornel West had written of nihilism in many poor communities of color. In the 1980’s Peggy McIntosh had written about the “invisible knapsack” of White male privilege. If given a chance to tell their story, almost every person of color I have known personally has shared a story of being stopped, frisked, and harassed just for “driving while Black.” No this wasn’t new. What was new was that the anger got coordinated and organized, and reached what Malcolm Gladwell calls the “tipping point.”

I wrote recently of my sense that we are in a Kairos moment, a coming together of folks and forces that portend a shift in the tectonic plates of history. When these kinds of seismic shifts take place, it is unpredictable, frightening and chaotic. As I look back over the year since Michael Brown’s tragic death, I don’t recall a year of such social dynamism, since I was young person watching the Civil Rights and anti-war movement unfold in the 1960’s. People look back to the '60's with a nostalgic longing for the passion and the fervor, but we have forgotten how divisive, strident and unsettling life was then too. Just like now, folks in the '60’s didn’t know where would end up but they knew things needed to change; so too now.

One year from the events in Ferguson, we are no closer to really engaging the issue of institutional racism in our criminal justice system and our society in general. A lot of important leaders from the President on down have said some significant things, but the patterns of violence, degradation and exclusion have not changed. Far too many Whites deny they have any role or responsibility for addressing the deep cancer of racism built into our culture and societal structures. Others think it either useless or hopeless.  However, the Pew Research Center recently reported that there has been a significant spike in the last five years of Americans (43% to 59%) who think there is a significant problem with racism in this country. While among Whites that percentage is only 44%, it is much higher (17%) than only five years ago. Perhaps we Whites are slowly starting to wake up that America’s original sin cannot be ignored. Whether we get on board or not, the movement for change has begun.

I close by inviting you to listen to another Langston Hughes poem, “The Kids Who Die,” recited by Danny Glover and set with images from past and present. Written in 1938 in the height of Jim Crow, this poem has a haunting relevance. May we hear and not turn away. May we walk in Mike Brown’s memory, people of all races, ethnicities and creeds with our “hands up” toward that dream that has been deferred far, far too long.

Reflections on My Day in Court

Yesterday (Oct 10) I had jury duty. Ninety of us were placed in a jury pool from which 12 jurors and four alternates would be chosen for a criminal trial. The case involved the murder of a young Black man by another Black man in the small city of Chester, PA. The defendant, who looked to be in his early twenties, was nicely dressed as he sat silently with his White lawyer and the two White lawyers across from the D.A’s office, and the White judge and his clerks behind him. There we sat in the courtroom, ninety potential jurors facing the defendant, lawyers and judge.  As I looked around at the ninety of us, overwhelmingly White (maybe 8 of the 90 were not white), mostly middle aged or older, I concluded that there was no way this man could get to be tried by “a jury of his peers.”

As is customary in these proceedings, the judge asked us a series of questions designed to determine whether or not we had any preconceived notions or biases that would prevent us from being “objective” jurors. If we answered “yes” to a question, we were to stand while our juror number could be recorded. I stood when the question was asked if anyone had ever been arrested and charged with a crime. (I had been arrested in 2009 for a civil disobedience action against a gun shop). I also stood when the question was asked whether the fact that the defendant was Black would influence my ability to follow the judge’s instructions about the law in this case.

Later, along with many others I was asked to come back into a room with the judge and lawyers to explain my answers; this was not unique as approximately 80 of the 90 jurors were called back for some purpose. However, it seemed unfair that the defendant was not allowed to be in that back room and have the opportunity to question a juror if he wanted to, and at least hear their responses. When my turn came, I explained to the judge that I had been arrested in protesting straw purchasing to prevent situations like what occurred in this case, and that I “could see both sides of this issue” having also worked with youth at an early period of life.

When asked about my bias because the defendant was Black, I explained that I did not think a young Black man could get a fair trial in this system. The judge was obviously upset by this statement and insisted that he worked hard to avoid bias in his court. I responded by saying that I believed he had good intentions, but mentioning Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow,  I replied that I saw the system as broken and did not think that this man could not be fairly tried in such a system. The judge dismissed me abruptly.

Had I the opportunity to say more, I would have expressed my concern about the circumstances in education and law enforcement that contributes to young men on the street, who are unemployable, live according to a “code of the street” characterized by violence. I would have gone on to say that if the man was convicted and sent into the prison system (in which he had already been held for a year), and served his time, he would be disenfranchised upon returning to the community. Moreover, his time in prison, if it educated and trained him at all, most likely would enhance his criminal skills and not prepare him for productive citizenship. I also would have suggested that in addition to the perpetrator that the straw purchaser, the gun shop and the gun manufacturer who made it possible for an illegal gun to be used in this crime should also be on trial. Moreover, I would have raised a concern as to whether an all-white jury (which I strongly assumed would be the final jury) given the way Whites (like the judge and I) had been socialized could see that young man as much more than a thug and a threat.
Needless to say, I was dismissed from the jury pool shortly after that.

As I feared, the final jury was not representative of the overall pool or the young defendant, being comprised of eleven White Women and one White man with four alternates one of whom was an older Black man.

As I left the courthouse I was torn about my experience and the answers I had given. Had I answered the questions differently, was there a chance that I might be on the jury? Were there the individuals on the jury with views similar to mine, despite the limitations of our White socialization? However, on the other hand, I wondered, could I participate in a process and a system I know to be fatally flawed and inherently biased?

 I don’t think people who kill others should be allowed to go free, but I don’t think the system we have is designed to do any more than to remove perpetrators from the general public and dehumanize them in the process of doing so. Recently, some friends whose son was gunned down by another young man, went to trial and the perpetrator was convicted. Yet in the aftermath the couple was torn, wanting “justice” for their son, but feeling that sending the young man to jail was neither a relief to them or a solution to the larger problems facing young Black men. I left the courthouse with the same sort of confusion and ambivalence.

While situations like Trayvon Martin’s and Michael Brown’s deaths get a great deal of media play, there are thousands of low income, largely people of color, predominately male, defendants standing trial every day. The criminal justice is successful in “putting them away” but is anything being accomplished? The evidence clearly suggests not; yet how we change the system remains a conundrum and a burden I feel, especially after my day in court.


[Images from Google Images]

From Ferguson to Philly to Williamsport

Over the past week or so I have been holding four seemingly unrelated events together in my mind because in a strange way they seem to capture the essence of racial politics in our country today: the ongoing conflict and grief in Ferguson, MO over the shooting of an unarmed African-American boy Michael Brown by a  local white police officer; the shooting of a seventeen year old African American boy  by another African American young man as the former was coming out of a concert for peace on Wednesday, August 13 in Philadelphia; the ongoing financial crisis facing the Philadelphia public schools due to the Pennsylvania State Legislature cold-hearted unwillingness to give the schools  the funding they need; and finally the Taney Dragons Little League team from Philadelphia who are currently playing in the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA.

In  Ferguson, the more information that comes out, the more it appears that the death of Michael Brown was a case of a policeman venting his racial hatred at an innocent young man. Not that Brown was without fault; he can be seen on video tape from a store where he brazenly took something without paying. Yet when confronted by the police he was unarmed and the autopsy indicates he was killed execution style. Were this an isolated incident, the reaction might seem out of proportion, but the rage and anguish in the black community of Ferguson and across the country speaks to legacy of slavery, lynching and racial violence that continues to afflict and murder young black men in this nation.

Yet as my friend Gwen Ragsdale, curator of the Lest WeForget Slavery Holocaust Museum, an institution dedicated to telling the story of African slavery and its continuing effects on communities today, has always told the groups I have brought to the museum, “While the white man for centuries committed violence against us, now we are doing to ourselves.” That is why the shooting at the peace conference is so horrific. Not only is there tragic irony in the event, but it demonstrates yet again how poverty, racism and violence mixed together create a volatile mix that leads young black men killing each other in so many communities across the nation. The legacy of racial hatred seen in Ferguson has now been internalized such that statistically speaking I as a white man am safer in many black communities than black and Latino men who live there.

Yet the ongoing financial crisis facing the Philadelphia Public schools illustrates how this legacy of racism is not only seen in horrific acts such as mentioned in Ferguson and Philly, but is also seen in laws and policies of a government that promises fairness and equality for all and yet in reality practices equity for some and injustice for others. Were the children and grandchildren of the legislators assigned to the Philadelphia public schools, in one week sufficient funding and more would be provided. Yet hiding behind the veil of seeking a “balanced budget” that balances itself on the backs of the poor to serve the needs of the corporate elites and the wealthy, these legislators allow the city schools to languish with insufficient funds. This is institutional racism in action, a legacy that goes back to the era of Jim Crow, redlining and educational segregation. Moreover, the inadequacy of the educational system contributes to a 50% dropout rate, many of whom end up involved in street violence as was seen at the peace conference. The “school-to-prison-pipeline” is alive and well, and not coincidentally in Pennsylvania, the prisons get financial increases while the schools get little more than crumbs.

It is a pretty bleak picture, but that is why I need to bring into focus the Taney Dragons, a team from Philadelphia playing in Williamsport at the Little League World Series. The Dragons are a multi-racial, cross-city collection of kids who love baseball, play it well and in so doing have captured the heart of the city and to a degree a nation.  When I watch the Dragons, I think therein lies our hope. The hope is in the fact that despite the violence on their streets and the stress in their school system, these kids have come together to play some high quality baseball. More than that, they embody what a truly equitable, democratic, multiracial, multicultural society should be. According to Little League rules, every player on a team must play and have at least one at bat in every game; and at least in the Dragons case, all seem to have contributed to the team’s success. While the media has focused on Mone Davis, a thirteen year old girl with a 70+ mph fastball, what has impressed me is how well these kids play together. And Mone herself, when she is asked a question, always refers back to the team, and not herself as an individual.

I am saddened and sickened by the events in Ferguson, I grieve the young men of color who see their lives only ending either in death or prison, I am outraged at the intransigence of the Pennsylvania legislators who will not release the funds to assure Philadelphia school children have a quality education; but I revel in the hope provided by the Taney Dragons. Just like the beloved community that Dr. King often spoke of, the Dragons remind me of what it is we struggle and pray for – a world free of hatred, racism, violence and injustice – a world where all contribute and all are equally part of the team we call society.