Even National Politics Are Local
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Racism does not respect borders. It does not respect income levels. It has burrowed deep into the soil and, like a weed, must be yanked out by the roots.
If there is one message we should be taking from the images we are seeing on TV the last two weeks, it is that African Americans are subjected to much different treatment in the United States than whites, are viewed with suspicion, as a threat just by virtue of their skin. Brent Staples, an editorial writer for The New York Times, wrote in the mid-1980s that black men, in particular, are “ever the suspect.” They are “set apart, a fearsome entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact.”
A multiracial coalition led by young black men and women have taken to the streets in hundreds of communities across the country, including here in South Brunswick, to demand that this weed, this cancer, be excised, removed, that justice become the norm and not the exception.
Timiir Summers, the 20-year-old South Brunswick resident who organized Tuesday’s march in the township, told me the efforts — in South Brunswick and elsewhere — are about more than George Floyd, the man murdered by police in Minneapolis on May 25 that has acted as a match to the dried tinder of American racism.
“I believe that the marches for justice and (this) march is for equality … (and) not just about George Floyd’s death,” he said via email. “I believe that the current movement (has formed because) people are tired of the racist acts that are committed in our country. I believe that people are tired of seeing innocent people of color’s lives taken away due to police brutality and racist acts. After George Floyd’s death and many other deaths, like Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland, people, especially the younger generation, are ready to speak out against racism because enough is enough.”
Summers, who graduated from South Brunswick High School in 2018 and is attending Kean University, attended a march in Franklin on Sunday (May 31). He felt “uplifted by so many motivational speakers at the march,” that he “decided that I should bring all my knowledge to South Brunswick.” He worked with Ramona Baker and fellow South Brunswick graduate Melhnae Pittman, whose father Tormel Pittman is a well-known organizer against police abuse in New Brunswick. They approached the police to ensure the march would be peaceful, which it was. About 500 people participated and it went off without a hitch.
“My motivation was not only to spread the message that racism and police brutality need to stop,” he said. “My mission (in South Brunswick) was to educate my community and its youth about using your voice in standing up for what you believe.”
South Brunswick would seem an odd place for a march. Its police department has a good reputation. It is a diverse community, though African Americans are represented in smaller numbers than in many other communities. It is mostly well-off, suburban, and not beset by many of the ills on display elsewhere.
But that belies a history that is not much different than other communities. There have been achievement gaps — Grace Plater, the late activist, did much to keep this fact front and center and to address it. She used to remind me, back when I was just a young reporter, that South Brunswick was better than most communities, but not nearly as exceptional as many would like to believe.
More significantly, I think, is the need for well-off suburban communities to acknowledge that they are part of this larger system of racist privilege, that its development relied on the same kind of housing inequities and school inequities that have created the urban-suburban divide we live under. Underlying racist policies have led to segregated cities and have left those cities bereft of tax revenue, which in turn has left many of those schools in far worse shape than suburban schools.
These underlying policies are what Ibram X. Kendi is talking about in Stamped from the Beginning, policies that might on their face seem race neutral often create racial disparities because they do not acknowledge the damage already done by previous policies. We then, as a society, turn around and blame the victims of these policies. We’re seeing that now in many of the explanations of why the coronavirus is hitting the black and Latino communities harder than white communities. We say it has to do with underlying health conditions, but are less interested in looking at the underlying policies that lead to the intersection of racial and economic inequality, that have left blacks with significantly less wealth than whites, and has forced many into front-line jobs at a greater rate than whites.
This blinkered vision of race is embedded in the culture through years of news coverage, TV cop shows, the language of politicians of both parties, of sportscasters who describe black and white athletes differently, and the conversations that happen at many dinner tables, behind closed doors where a kind of casual racism and not-so-casual racism continues to fester.
Yet, when the targets of this thinking, the almost 50 million African Americans and black immigrants in the United States, and the millions more who are multiracial, who are Hispanic, who have brown skin, challenge the racial status quo, they are met with accusations that they are “playing the race card” or engaging in “identity politics.”
Michael Eric Dyson, in his introduction to Robin D’Angelo’s book White Fragility, describes this claim as a dodge. White’s pretend that our whiteness does not exist, or that the very limited and underfunded polices meant to address historical wrongs makes us the victims. It’s a sleight-of-hand argument used by falsely aggrieved whites to mask their racism.
“Their whiteness is the clearest example of the identity politics they claim is harmful to the nation,” Dyson writes, “and that their whiteness has shielded them from growing up as quickly as they might have done had they not so heavily leaned on it to make it through life”
The other day, I had to block several friends on Facebook for engaging in this kind of thinking — one accused me of only seeing blacks as victims, as downtrodden, while he doesn’t see color. I’m not immune to racist thinking and I am the first to admit it, but this was such a disingenuous remark — his colorblindness translates into faux colorblind policies that have a disproportionate impact on communities of color.
Humility is key, and we can learn a lot from younger activists like Summers. There are varying types of privileges. While race is one, so is geography — as Summers told me.
“Living in a high-income community such as South Brunswick doesn’t make me any different from anyone else,” he said, though he acknowledge that it has left him luckier than most. He said praised local police for treating everyone the same and said he has never felt discriminated against within the community.
“Just like my mother says, ‘we all bleed the same,’” he said. “Living in a community like South Brunswick actually made me want to stand up for what I believe in because of the amount of different races that live in the community. Hopefully, this March for justice has influenced people that don’t live in high income communities to stand up and make a change for their own no matter what the circumstances may be.”