Color Me Outraged

There’s an outrageous photo circulating in Facebook of a beat-up Dodge Caravan with “If it’s not white, it’s not right – NOBAMA” prominently featured on the rear window, directly above a sticker of a Confederate flag. Is it some arrogant cowboy in Texas? A toothless redneck in the Deep South, perhaps? No, people. The license plate reads, “Wisconsin.”

Racism can still be found everywhere, apparently. I’ve never been a victim, probably because I’m in the demographic more commonly associated with the persecutors than the persecuted. Although my partner is technically a woman of color (her parents emigrated from India in 1968), I’ve only witnessed a few cold stares while out with her in public and they might have been directed at me. I’ve never heard a negative comment or witnessed anything covert while in her presence. She says, however, that she’s been overlooked and looked down upon at appliance stores and car dealerships and has been asked where she “came from” more times than she can count.

I’ve been around people of color more times than I can count, thanks in part to my progressive mother who taught me that it’s what’s inside that matters – the content of one’s character, if you will – and that you can’t judge a book by its cover. In fact, I can recall only one awkward moment with a person of color in five decades on Planet Earth: I commuted from metro Detroit to Lansing for a few weeks back in 1983 with former Detroit Lion Rudy Redmond, a black man, who took offense at my ignorant but innocent question about whether or not black people could get sunburned. (I moved to Lansing shortly thereafter.)

Nelson Mandela

I’ve worked with and for people of color, shared food, drink and beds with people of color, trusted and shared secrets with people of color, laughed and cried with people of color, and fought and made up with people of color. One friend, a black guy named Aten, protected me from harm when I had too much to drink at a jazz festival in Kalamazoo to take care of myself. (Aten is the guy who informed me that Elvis was racist and soured me on the King’s music forever.) In June of 1990, Aten and I traveled to the old Tiger Stadium on Trumbell and Michigan in Corktown to attend a sold-out rally for Nelson Mandela, who was touring the U.S. after being released from a South African prison. I was among the 49,000 people who celebrated the end of the anti-apartheid activist’s 27-year jail stint and enjoyed musical tributes by Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin and Frankie Beverly. I didn’t feel like an interloper; I felt like I was a small part of what was surely an important historical event. (Here’s a guy who truly deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded a few years later.)

Motown is my favorite music; I’ve met Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves, the late Levi Stubbs and the Four Tops, Junior Walker, Dionne Warwick and the Queen of Soul herself. I used to pray back when I believed in God for the chance to meet Marvin Gaye, Lou Rawls and Michael Jackson. My favorite live concerts were Whitney Houston’s, George Benson’s, Macy Gray’s, Patti LaBelle’s and an amazing 1988 Anita Baker/Luther Vandross show at Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena. (I liked Lil Bow Wow’s 2002 concert too but that was because I took my firstborn, Amelia.)

I share all of this not to come off as Donald “I Have a Good Relationship with ‘The Blacks’” Trump but rather to make the case that I really don’t understand racism. I don’t understand why Rosa Parks – whose hand I once shook – had to sit in the back of a bus and why police dogs and fire hoses were unleashed on black people in Birmingham, Alabama and why people of color couldn’t use the same toilets or drinking fountains as palefaces like me. I don’t get why the color of Barack Obama’s skin inspires such hatred and animosity throughout the country – not just in our remote regions and backwater towns – and why it was such a big deal when young Jacob Philadelphia of Columbia, Maryland touched the president’s hair back in 2009. (See White House photographer Pete Souza’s photo above.)

I don’t get why one in every 15 black men is incarcerated in the United States (compared to one in every 106 white guys) and why although people of color comprise just 30 percent of this country’s population, they account for 60 percent of those we’ve imprisoned. I don’t understand why non-white students get in more trouble in school than white kids or why 5.3 million Americans are denied the right to vote based on past felony convictions, which disproportionately affects men of color. (See “The 10 Most Disturbing Facts about Racial Inequality in the U.S. Criminal Justice System," March 17, 2012.)

Is it fear? If it is, that makes no sense to me. I’m afraid of cancer, nuts with guns, corrupt politicians, rich, greedy, powerful white men and something bad happening to those I love, not people who have more melanin in their skin than I do.

I’m afraid of living in a country where black men are beaten, urinated on, chained to pickup trucks and dragged on asphalt roads, conscious, for three miles until they die.

I’m afraid of living in a world where it’s okay to shoot hoodie-wearing, Skittles-carrying teenagers if they’re black.

I don’t know what I’d do if I actually encountered a vehicle plastered with blatantly racist stickers and slogans. I know I should respect the guy’s right to freedom of speech but I don’t think I could keep my big mouth shut.  It was Dr. King who said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Mandela photo courtesy Detroit News.

Source: alternet.org.