A political lesson Bernie Epton's life can teach

An open letter to Paul Vallas: 

An edited version of this op-ed piece was published by the Chicago Tribune on March 12, 2023. 

I understand how you must feel right now. The possibility of being the mayor of Chicago, this massive, shiny, and troubled metropolis, is likely intoxicating. I know my father, Bernie Epton, felt that way in 1983. Forty years after his campaign against Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago, popular history characterizes him as a candidate who had an undistinguished political career until racism made him a viable candidate against a Black man. But that is not who he was in the years leading up to that election.

 

In 1950, he ran for congress in the Republican primary against Dick Vail, then a former congressman and always a red-baiting, race-baiting echo of the notorious Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy. Among Bernie’s supporters in that race were leading south side Black ministers, like Archibald Carey, Sr. and Major Taylor. Dad also received the endorsement of the Chicago Defender, perhaps the country’s most prominent Black newspaper at the time. But he lost that race.

 

In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, rioting in Chicago’s south and west sides caused extensive damage that still scars the city’s neighborhoods 55 years later. At the time, Dad was again a candidate for office. This time for an open Republican seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. During that campaign, he took the time to go to Memphis to join the memorial march for King, organized and led by the Memphis sanitation workers’ union. After the march, he returned to Chicago, resumed his campaign, and won--the beginning of 14 years of service as a Republican representative from Hyde Park. Twice during those 14 years, the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI) named him the state’s “Best Legislator.”

 

By late fall in 1982, when Bernie decided to run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Chicago, his reputation, earned over 40 years of political activism, as a supporter of open housing, an opponent of redlining, and an ally of the Black community and of anti-machine Chicago voters, was well established. But in the ’83 campaign against Harold Washington Dad became the champion of white supremacists citywide. Though the campaign was characterized by recurring racist incidents, two facts stand out.

 

First, of course, was the historic Washington victory, due largely to a strategically mobilized Black community. But the second most striking feature of the campaign was Dad’s slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late.”

 

Dad claimed, often and always, that the slogan meant that the city was teetering on bankruptcy and he was the guy to rescue it before collapsed. Some family members and lifelong political supporters took him at his word. That was the position that he maintained throughout the campaign. But everyone else in Chicago who gave a damn about such things knew the slogan for what it effectively was, a dog whistle, beckoning white voters to the ramparts. And many of those white voters would have shrugged away any concern about dog whistles. To them, it didn’t really matter what it meant; Bernie was their guy. He was the white hope.

 

Imagine what that meant. The Bernie Epton who had been a colleague of Timuel Black and Harold Washington in the creation of a Chicago-focused Henry Wallace for President Committee in 1948, who had walked in the Memphis memorial march for Martin Luther King in 1968, who continued sending his children to public schools long after many neighborhood families had fled to whiter communities, had somehow transformed 25 years later into the George Wallace of Chicago. And he had brought it on himself.

 

One legacy of his campaign would be an empowered white majority on city council that opposed every Washington reform initiative for the next four years. Chicago’s bitter power struggles would earn the city a reputation as “Beirut by the lake.” Dad’s election defeat sidelined him forever. But the divisiveness that characterized city politics for years began with the racial warfare of the ’83 campaign.

 

So, consider now, before this campaign goes any further, your “let’s take Chicago back” message. That message is landing as a dog whistle only slightly less shrill than “Epton, before it’s too late.” Stop saying that it means something else. The senders of messages don’t get to determine their meaning, which lies inescapably in what the audience hears.

 

Do what my Dad did not do; pivot to a different message. One that unites. That envisions a single city, unified in its pursuit of equity and justice. Hit that message hard, even if it costs you a victory. Because no victory is worth the price of your reputation. And no victory is worth the price Chicago would pay if a Vallas victory depended on an appeal to white supremacists.

 

I understand how you must feel right now. The possibility of being the mayor of Chicago, this massive, shiny, and troubled metropolis, is likely intoxicating. I know my father, Bernie Epton, felt that way in 1983. Forty years after his campaign against Harold Washington for mayor of Chicago, popular history characterizes him as a candidate who had an undistinguished political career until racism made him a viable candidate against a Black man. But that is not who he was in the years leading up to that election.

 

In 1950, he ran for congress in the Republican primary against Dick Vail, then a former congressman and always a red-baiting, race-baiting echo of the notorious Wisconsin senator, Joe McCarthy. Among Bernie’s supporters in that race were leading south side Black ministers, like Archibald Carey, Sr. and Major Taylor. Dad also received the endorsement of the Chicago Defender, perhaps the country’s most prominent Black newspaper at the time. But he lost that race.

 

In 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, rioting in Chicago’s south and west sides caused extensive damage that still scars the city’s neighborhoods 55 years later. At the time, Dad was again a candidate for office. This time for an open Republican seat in the Illinois House of Representatives. During that campaign, he took the time to go to Memphis to join the memorial march for King, organized and led by the Memphis sanitation workers’ union. After the march, he returned to Chicago, resumed his campaign, and won--the beginning of 14 years of service as a Republican representative from Hyde Park. Twice during those 14 years, the Independent Voters of Illinois (IVI) named him the state’s “Best Legislator.”

 

By late fall in 1982, when Bernie decided to run for the Republican nomination for mayor of Chicago, his reputation, earned over 40 years of political activism, as a supporter of open housing, an opponent of redlining, and an ally of the Black community and of anti-machine Chicago voters, was well established. But in the ’83 campaign against Harold Washington Dad became the champion of white supremacists citywide. Though the campaign was characterized by recurring racist incidents, two facts stand out.

 

First, of course, was the historic Washington victory, due largely to a strategically mobilized Black community. But the second most striking feature of the campaign was Dad’s slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late.”

 

Dad claimed, often and always, that the slogan meant that the city was teetering on bankruptcy and he was the guy to rescue it before collapsed. Some family members and lifelong political supporters took him at his word. That was the position that he maintained throughout the campaign. But everyone else in Chicago who gave a damn about such things knew the slogan for what it effectively was, a dog whistle, beckoning white voters to the ramparts. And many of those white voters would have shrugged away any concern about dog whistles. To them, it didn’t really matter what it meant; Bernie was their guy. He was the white hope.

 

Imagine what that meant. The Bernie Epton who had been a colleague of Timuel Black and Harold Washington in the creation of a Chicago-focused Henry Wallace for President Committee in 1948, who had walked in the Memphis memorial march for Martin Luther King in 1968, who continued sending his children to public schools long after many neighborhood families had fled to whiter communities, had somehow transformed 25 years later into the George Wallace of Chicago. And he had brought it on himself.

 

One legacy of his campaign would be an empowered white majority on city council that opposed every Washington reform initiative for the next four years. Chicago’s bitter power struggles would earn the city a reputation as “Beirut by the lake.” Dad’s election defeat sidelined him forever. But the divisiveness that characterized city politics for years began with the racial warfare of the ’83 campaign.

 

So, consider now, before this campaign goes any further, your “let’s take Chicago back” message. That message is landing as a dog whistle only slightly less shrill than “Epton, before it’s too late.” Stop saying that it means something else. The senders of messages don’t get to determine their meaning, which lies inescapably in what the audience hears.

 

Do what my Dad did not do; pivot to a different message. One that unites. That envisions a single city, unified in its pursuit of equity and justice. Hit that message hard, even if it costs you a victory. Because no victory is worth the price of your reputation. And no victory is worth the price Chicago would pay if a Vallas victory depended on an appeal to white supremacists.

A further thought about Natalie Moore's book

 

Written in my journal shortly after starting The South Side:

 

In the process of reading the chapter headed “separate but equal” in Natalie Moore’s The South Side, I felt the need to place her biographically in a context that made sense to me. As it turns out, she will be 44 sometime this summer, which makes her about three and a half years younger than my son Nate and a little more than two years older than my daughter Julie. This mattered, at least in part, because in reading her personal stories of growing up on the south side, I needed to understand the period of her growing up in some sort of relationship to my childhood and youth in the South Shore neighborhood some 30 years earlier.

 

Having reached that point in the book, less than halfway through, I felt a growing anger at the city’s municipal government, and at the Chicago Public School (CPS) system, for policies and decisions that drove, exacerbated, and accelerated the inequity, inequality and injustice that have so thoroughly plagued the lives of Chicagoans these past 100 years and more. Those feelings developed in reaction to Moore’s thorough historical indictment of the white supremacist political regimes of former mayor Richard J. Daley and former CPS superintendent Benjamin Willis (and the fundamentally similar political leaderships that followed).

 

Nevertheless, that anger was also accompanied by a feeling somewhat like awe at Moore’s ability to conjure far more benign descriptions of the Chatham neighborhood of her growing up and of her high school years at Morgan Park on the far south side, and her clear descriptions of the positive effects her experiences had on her life and career since. Into the bargain, I also felt a kind of shock that I could be so fundamentally unaware of the actual existence of neighborhoods in Chicago like Chatham, and schools like Morgan Park, that nurtured their own in such positive ways, not by accident, but by the deliberate design and action of African American communities that existed and persisted, and thrived despite the neglect and exploitation of a system designed to destroy whatever they built.

No Time to Waste: White folks need to come to grips with the real history of African Americans

    Two books, Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name and Natalie Moore’s The South Side, outline both the torture and the resilience of African Americans in the US in the 150 years since the collapse of reconstruction. What we know as the “Jim Crow” period in the south, should be rebranded as “the Age of Neoslavery. Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s grip on U.S. society—its intimate connection to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to millions of black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end—can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life,” Blackmon writes.

 

            For the average white American, including but not limited to those alarmed by new revelations about conventional American history’s venerated (white) icons, Blackmon’s book details the continuous subjugation and exploitation of black Americans living in the southern states from the collapse of Reconstruction to the end of World War II. The book’s lessons about our buried past that must be exhumed and examined, if we are to come to any consensus understanding of what most black Americans already know.

 

            It is a certainty that many of us who are not resistant to obvious facts might note that the end of World War II does not in any way mark the end of the oppression of African Americans. But Blackmon’s history comes to a definitive end with the series of presidential executive orders, congressional legislation and court orders that made neoslavery in all its many forms illegal.

 

The conclusion that best matches the evidence he presents is that the defeat of the Confederacy and the brief Reconstruction period that followed was not the end of slavery, but a brief interlude before a reinvented form of slavery developed and prevailed in the South for another 75 years. The book tells a detailed story of the greed, inhumanity and hypocrisy that indicts Americans of the period, both in the South and the North. That indictment remains open today, to the extent that the truth told by the book continues to face fierce resistance.

 

To propel its vividly real story, Slavery by Another Name documents the lives of numerous southern blacks who suffered under Jim Crow, were arrested on charges both minor and bogus, and sentenced to hard labor in private enterprises of all descriptions, including major industrial operations that would one day become corporate behemoths, like, say U.S. Steel. In most cases, those sentenced to such hard labor would find themselves whipped, shackled, starved, driven to escape or to madness, and resentenced after any act of resistance. Blackmon describes the lives of former slaves and their descendants who found themselves re-enslaved and often worked until, sickened, maimed and broken, they could work no more; their bodies burned in kilns and coke ovens and buried in unmarked graves.

 

Though Blackmon’s book is driven by the partially resurrected histories of numerous African American men and women in the south who labored and struggled and resisted during the period, neither the federal government nor northern commercial interests fall outside of the book’s indictment of their complicity and failures. By and large, most northern whites not directly complicit in the southern regime were either ignorant of or untroubled by the inhuman treatment of black Americans in the south.

 

Of course, most northern whites were equally indifferent to the way segregation and racism plagued the lives of African Americans living in the north. Such indifference transformed itself into something more malignant when racism and white supremacy meant that African Americans who migrated northward in the hope that they could live more viable and comfortable lives found themselves crammed into substandard housing, attending separate and unequal schools, shut out of a wide range of well-paid jobs, and brutally policed by forces that didn’t look like them and feared them.

 

Natalie Moore’s The South Side, A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, turns out to be a great read to pair with Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name. To begin with, Moore didn’t have to unearth histories buried in unmarked graves. A native Chicagoan whose grandparents arrived in the city in the first wave of the Great Migration, Moore, a reporter with public radio station WBEZ, combines both family stories of life on the south side with a precise, journalistic look at the segregation, redlining and disinvestment that have plagued the lives of African Americans in Chicago over the last 100 years.

 

I’m a native Southsider myself. I graduated from all-white O’Keefe Elementary in 1961 and graduated from nearly all-black Hyde Park High in 1965. I’ve been in and out of Chicago for all of my adult life, living in Bridgeport (a notorious anti-black Irish Catholic enclave during most of the 20^th century) from 2000 to 2007, and am back again now, living for the last four years in Bronzeville (known as the Black Metropolis from the first wave of the Great Migration until the end of World War II). I also drove a cab here in 1968 and 1969. But despite my real familiarity with parts of the south side, Moore’s book shared stories of thriving south side neighborhoods and high-quality public schools about which I had no clue because my whiteness and a relentless media preference for north-side-good-south-side-bad stories blinded me to the good things the black community could create and maintain in the face of disinvestment, segregation and white supremacy.

 

Moore’s book maintains an effective contrast as she alternates chapters about growing up in the all-black Chatham neighborhood, rich with black-owned businesses and professional services, and her graduation from the high-performing, far south side Morgan Park High School. Other chapters provide a detailed historical account of the way redlining and public policy decisions devastated so many south side neighborhoods.

 

Moore includes the histories of familiar political figures, like the first Mayor Daley, who in his early years was a member of the Hamburg Athletic Club, a major source of mob action during the 1919 race riot in Chicago, and three decades later he was the decision-maker behind building the Dan Ryan Expressway as a barrier between the South Side Black community and Bridgeport, the then all-white Irish Catholic neighborhood in which Daley was born and raised. Daley was also the driving force in building the high-rise Robert Taylor Homes on South State street, which housed the largest population and highest density of low-income Black families in the country. Daley’s appointed head of the city’s public school system, Benjamin Willis, played a key role in the era of white flight, keeping expanding Black student populations in under-funded, majority Black schools and barring them from transferring to below-capacity white schools. That Chicago remains the most-segregated city in the country is the enduring legacy of Daley’s reign.

 

Arguably, I have overstated the extent to which “buried” African American history is revealed in Slavery by Another Name or The South Side. Numerous carefully researched histories and memoirs telling the same stories have been written and published at an accelerating rate for the last 100 years. But, as any casual review of a list of banned books, especially books banned by southern states and cities, would reveal, the truth told by such books has been actively resisted over that entire period.

 

The recent controversies over the New York Times’ 1619 project and about Critical Race Theory are just two more examples of how far people will go to suppress the true history of African Americans. The good news is that a majority of Americans, both black and white, are no longer willing to wait for the truth to be heard. The Black Lives Matter movement has become a multi-racial and multi-cultural movement. The covid pandemic has taught the country a further and most emphatic lesson about the consequences of poverty, inequity and racism in health care. And climate change is beginning an almost daily course in new lessons about the price we will all pay, if inequality and white supremacy continue to divide us and throw away the human resources that will be essential in securing our collective future.

 

There’s really no time to waste. Opening our hearts to the truths that we have never been fully able to accept and understand is part of moving to aggressively fix that which is broken. Believe me, reading Slavery by Another Name and The South Side will help.

The Time Is Now: White Supremacy and Climate Change

As winter approaches, it is clear that Joe Biden will be our next president. But a remarkable number of people, led by our current president, are still arguing with the evidence and our political divisions threaten to fuel a rocky and unproductive, if not outright dangerous, transition from one administration to another. We, Americans, whoever we voted for, are almost universally suspicious of and alienated from most of the partisans who disagree with us.

 

But the truth is, we’ve been living in that divided country for quite a long time.  Arguably that estrangement began developing with the Vietnam War and Watergate, but it has additional roots in political controversies that followed. The Reagan-era and a partisanship that waged war on both the safety net and on imaginary “welfare queens” accelerated our discontents. So did Iran-Contra and US-subsidized mercenary warfare in Central America. The divide grew larger with the misogyny of both Bill Clinton and his political opponents, the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the bipartisan expansion of the carceral state, and “the end of big government.” The excesses of the Trump administration and the failure to manage the pandemic merely added new material to the top of the mountain between us.

 

With each decade since the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the divisions have gotten wider and more obvious until this moment in time when it is next to impossible to identify a political figure with the ability to bridge the chasm across which some of us stare at each other with stunned incomprehension, if not with pure loathing. Regardless of what other detail we might add to our list of divisive issues and events, the energy that powers our divisions is rooted in the racism and white supremacy, the misogyny and machismo, and the homophobia and xenophobia that have been a part of our history since the first Europeans invaded the Western hemisphere.

 

 

The struggle ahead

 

But today is the day after, in the most fundamental sense. Everything we have to say about what we think our country is, and how it became what it is now, surely matters. But it is only at dawn on the day after that we can begin to do something about making the United States what we want it to be.

 

That work should begin with ourselves as individuals, with accepting that recent events may be discouraging, that recent defeats may have blunted our faith in what we can accomplish both individually and collectively. But we must begin by recognizing that whatever it is that lies in our individual capacity to achieve, our collective mental health depends on affirming our belief in what is possible for us to achieve together.

 

We must take on the small myriad challenges directly before us. We have to rebuild our communities, our cities and our states, and we must do so while also focusing on the challenges that loom the largest. And of all the very large challenges, the ones that threaten us all and that will get far worse in the absence of unity, climate change is the most severe, the one that will track us all down, wherever we are, and teach us that the old fantasies of the good life are pipe dreams and distractions. There is no express train to ride to a better life, no flight path to safety.

 

 

The urgent work of managing climate change

 

The exact date of the beginning of the climate crisis that the world and that the United States are living with now will be a matter of historical debate for some time to come, perhaps for generations. At some future time, the when, how, and why of the crisis itself will be the basis for a whole new field of historical study.

 

Regardless, climate change is upon us full blown. The continuing effects on less-developed countries as coastlines are submerged, as once arable land turns to desert, and as tens of millions of climate refugees continue their forced migrations, will get much worse. And the politics of our time threaten to  grow even more tumultuous than they already are.

 

So far, the vast wealth of the United States and its residents has empowered many of us to ignore climate change. Polling responses make clear that as much as half the adult population have somehow been able to ignore the starkest proofs that the climate crisis is upon us. Five years ago, Republican Senator James Inhofe brought a snowball into a Senate session as a way of demonstrating his complete rejection of any evidence supporting the claim that the world is getting warmer, like, for instance, the fact that the year before, 2014, was at the time, the hottest on record. But the climate emergencies, like enormous forest fires and devastating and frequent hurricanes keep accumulating.

 

Small-scale climate migrations are already occurring. People in the hundreds of thousands who have been repeatedly displaced by coastal flooding or forest fires these past few years are finally deciding not to rebuild their homes and not to return to devastated communities. Indeed, one recent report estimated that more than one million US residents moved from environmentally unstable areas in 2018. And we know beyond any doubt that flooding, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat emergencies, and more will get more frequent, more sustained and more destructive.

 

The hundreds and thousands making decisions to leave areas where they have lived for decades, if not generations, will most often be making the cheapest and most convenient changes they can. But southern Californians moving to Arizona or Nevada will be moving from fires to frying pans, moving to areas where climate crisis in the form of droughts and heat emergencies will get much worse; those effects on ecologically fragile environments multiplied by population pressures increased by their own new arrival.

 

Northern Californians and Oregonians are also beginning their own migration, trickling further north along the Pacific Coast to places where drought, flooding and forest fires will also get worse. Perhaps, long-term, they will all end up in British Columbia, where, hopefully, a far-sighted Canadian government will move forward in the next decade or two to put in place the kind of infrastructure that will mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the Northwest.

 

Miami, FL, regarded by many climate scientists as the most endangered coastal city in the world, will be the eventual source of a significant stream of climate refugees, a stream that will be further swollen by tributaries of refugees moving north from other Florida communities. The wealthiest of those refugees may not seem like climate refugees, at all. Their wealth will allow them to move further up the coast to Georgia and the Carolinas as they wish, maintaining their high-maintenance quality of life as they go, creating new and photogenic spreads for magazines and TV shows highlighting the lives of the rich and famous.

 

But the poor and middle-income families living in threatened areas will find themselves forced to move, their property devalued, their resources exhausted by multiple emergencies. And because no one can predict the if and when and where the migrations can and should stop, it is past time for all of us to begin preparing to live lives that will be consistently more challenging than many Americans have ever been forced to live. It is time to begin recognizing that we are about to become a nation of migrants on a scale not previously reached by earlier migrations.

 

 

 

Ending white supremacy is key

 

The claim that the lives we will be living will be more difficult for many of us than our lives before the escalating climate crisis needs qualification; it is important to note that for African Americans who have always had to negotiate life in a white supremacist country, hardship and challenge will not be a new experience. That people of color and the poor will bear the burdens of global climate change sooner and more extensively than the wealthy and more securely situated is not news.

 

White supremacy, itself, is the scaffolding for all the arguments that divide working people and the poor against each other, dramatically reducing the effectiveness of their political mobilizations. This leaves our collective fate in the hands of the very people who profit from our social divisions. It is also the basis for arguing that the first step toward managing climate change should begin with a multi-racial and multi-generational movement to dismantle white supremacy.

 

It can be done, with enormous difficulty, of course, but demography may finally be on the side of such a movement. After all, Gen Z is the largest and most diverse generational cohort in US history. And though no generation is ever a cohesive whole, it seems obvious that a significant fraction of that cohort is far past fed-up with the status quo, and already mobilized in pursuit of sweeping change.

 

In her recently published book, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of the African American slave who may have been the first American to introduce the notion of vaccination as a means to controlling an epidemic.

 

“Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister and lay scientist in Boston and had come into possession of an African man named Onesimus. The enslaved African told of a procedure he had undergone back in his homeland that had protected him from [smallpox]. People in West Africa had discovered that they could fend off contagions by inoculating themselves with a specimen of fluid from an infected person. Mather was intrigued by the idea Onesimus described. He researched it, and decided to call it ‘variolation.’ It would become the precursor to immunization and ‘the Holy Grail of smallpox prevention for Western doctors and scientists,’ wrote the medical ethicist and author Harriet A. Washington.”

 

Wilkerson’s account details the outrage with which Bostonians greeted Mather’s attempts to promote inoculation as cure for the smallpox epidemic that raged in Boston in 1721. “They feared it could spread smallpox all the more,” she writes, “and they also wanted nothing to do with a practice that had come from Africa and had been suggested by an African slave.”

 

But Onesimus’ suggestion was a cure. One in seven Bostonians died from smallpox, but out of 240 people who were inoculated by a single local doctor who believed in “variolation,” only one in 40 died. The otherwise disastrous consequences of the smallpox outbreak in Boston, Wilkerson notes, was the absolute consequence of a caste system built on the notion that those at the top are inherently superior, those on the bottom are inherently inferior, and, by definition, are incapable of the intellectual brilliance necessary to advance development and solve social problems. “The investment in the established hierarchy runs sufficiently deep [in the United States],” Wilkerson concludes, “that people in the dominant caste have historically been willing to forgo conveniences to themselves to keep the fruits of citizenship within their own caste.”

 

That point ought to be among the most important arguments for dismantling white supremacy. Climate change has been creeping up on us all since the Industrial Revolution; it has been gathering mass and velocity at an accelerating rate since the middle of the last century, and it has become the most global of emergencies in the history of humankind. We cannot begin to manage that emergency in a society that throws people away from birth, that denies opportunity for human talent to develop, and that continues to foster inequalities of every description. We need to mobilize and fully employ every human talent that manifests itself in time to turn us toward a sustainable future.

 

 

A few proposals for action

 

The failure of presidential leadership over the last four years underscores the argument that the exclusive leadership of wealthy, white males is a recipe for disaster. We have waited far too long to open the way to the leadership of women and people of color. We are moving forward now in a nation that cannot depend on the leadership (or celebrity) of the newly elected president. We can hope that he will be a competent steward in a period of epic social and political transition, but the heroes of the effort to transform our world, with roots in previously excluded communities, are already stepping forward everywhere.

 

So, if the challenge is to dismantle white supremacy on the way to building an effective nationwide movement to address climate change, how do we do it? Where do we begin?

 

Building on the success of the electoral defeat of Donald Trump by a record-setting voter turnout seems like one of the more obvious places to start. Register more voters. Register millions more voters. Choose Stacey Abrams to lead the Democratic National Committee and to organize the largest and most effective voter registration effort in American history. This will accomplish two things. It will continue to build a multi-racial coalition capable of advancing an electoral and legislative attack on white supremacy. And it will acknowledge the leadership and accomplishments of an African American woman who has already directed the effort to turn Georgia, a deep-south red state, purple.

 

Here in Chicago, we need to act directly and relentlessly to confront developers and political leaders who have persuaded themselves that downtown and upscale and high-rise office and housing developments serve the interests of the city’s residents. In fact, not only do such subsidized developments fail to serve the interests of the vast majority of city residents, they fail to acknowledge the role that African American and Latinx labor has played in creating wealth in the city. Indeed, the continuing denial of educational, housing and career opportunities for people of color has forced minorities to compete for low-wage and dangerous jobs that expropriate the wealth generated by their own efforts (and exposes them disproportionately to health risks and to environmental toxins). The solution for Chicago begins with prioritizing development in the south and west sides of the city and in requiring all development projects to employ workforces that reflect the city’s actual population.

 

On an even more local level, we need to recognize that our homes and our neighborhoods are not ready to weather climate change. We should be retrofitting to make housing community-wide as energy efficient as possible. Moreover, we must advance green-energy development in the form of small-scale solar installations, green roofs, wind-powered generators, and neighborhood-based energy co-ops. Housing and building codes should be changed to guarantee that both developers and landlords play an appropriate role in improving energy efficiency.

 

While we are initiating and moving forward locally and globally, we should recognize that the two Senate runoff races in Georgia represent an opportunity to dethrone Mitch McConnell and to begin building a Senate that will not stand in the way of progressive legislation. To do so will be a sustained, multi-step effort. Long-term, it will mean electing senators who bring a more profound understanding of class and race issues to the work of legislating, but we must not neglect the immediate opportunity to elect two Democratic senators from Georgia. We have only two months—the runoff elections will be held January 5—to mobilize a Mississippi Summer-type intervention in Georgia aimed at electing Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate. Winning either seat will be a challenge, but the urgent task is to win both. It’s time for the most energetic and adventurous among us to head to Georgia for an adrenaline-fueled election campaign that must end in a critically important victory.

 

And while volunteers head to Georgia, the demands for local action, including confronting police violence and misconduct, and building up anti-violence networks in our neighborhoods remain a priority. So, too, are organizing efforts that build capacity in Chicago neighborhoods and address continuing needs like hunger, made worse by the pandemic.

 

One nonprofit in Chicago, Just Roots, began development and operation of a community farm on 45^th Street in the Bronzeville neighborhood. In just three years, the Legends South Farm has distributed 20,000 pounds of produce grown at the farm and provided 1,000 hours of education and training for community farmers. Just Roots, in partnership with St. James Catholic Church, also established a second community farm this past summer at 29^th and Wabash. This model for community self-help could be replicated many places across Chicago with support from the city; another political challenge that local activists could take on.

 

The possibilities for action, for projects that will promote the changes we desperately require, are nearly infinite. Every individual, every family, every neighborhood, every community can work up a list of the possibilities. There will be dissenters, people who will not share in the tasks ahead; some will even stand in the way. But obstacles are not enemies. We must focus relentlessly on building a movement capable of flowing over or around whatever is in the way. 

 

 

Implacable forces have been building the world to come

 

The pandemic, itself an outcome of globalization and climate change, has taught us a lesson about traditional expectations and the pace of social, environmental and existential change. We live now in a world in which it is no longer reasonable to assume that tomorrow will be essentially the same as today. That means, in general, that everything about our personal lives, our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities, needs to be carefully reexamined. If we as a country are to dismantle white supremacy, manage and mitigate climate change, and successfully adjust to a new world in which our old assumptions about life trajectories are merely baggage we will have to discard, we are going to need to reeducate, retrain and reimagine ourselves. That will be very hard work. Mistakes are inevitable. We must get started now.

Lessons in Empathy from Lovecraft Country

Racism and horror fantasy bleed into each other

In an episode of Lovecraft Country (an HBO series that blurs the line between classic horror fantasy and the reality of white supremacy in the United States), Leti, who is pregnant, travels back in time to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 1921. Once there, Leti witnesses the destruction of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” by a white mob that beat and murdered hundreds of African American residents and destroyed property worth tens of millions of dollars in what was, at the time, the country’s wealthiest Black community.

 

In one of the most striking film portrayals of empathy that I have ever seen, Leti, who is protected from harm by a magic spell, stays with the woman who will be (or already is) the great-grandmother of Leti’s baby, holding her hand as she perishes in agony in the fire set by the mob. A young African American from 1950s Chicago, Leti already knows all she needs to know about the horrors that racism and white supremacy daily visit on Black people and Black communities. She does not need the further education that bearing witness to the Tulsa Massacre provides. After all, she has already seen the brutalized body of Emmett Till laying in an open casket in a Chicago church, survived repeated confrontations with a racist police commander who is one of the leaders of a secret order, and imagined or dreamed nightmarish visions of lynchings and murderous assaults.

 

Arguably for African Americans, it is no more possible to hide from empathy than it is to hide from the deliberate and casual brutalities of life in a racist society. Black folks do not need to watch Lovecraft Country to learn lessons that they already know. But white folks need to watch Lovecraft Country and open their hearts to everything it teaches.

 

White supremacy is the original cancel culture

John Kass’ column on June 26, “One wrong ‘like’ will get you canceled by cancel culture,” suffers from both a narrow and short view of history.

Kass cites Joe McCarthy’s right-wing assault on speech and ideas. He needs one such example to balance a column that lingers over the repeated transgressions by “the new thought police” who routinely attack liberals and conservatives alike, but “praise Black Lives Matter” and “appreciate antifa.”

This is thin stuff, but it might have been strengthened if Kass had dug a little deeper into the history and roots of “cancel culture.” What, after all, would you call centuries of attacks against Native Americans, betraying treaties, uprooting them from tribal homelands, forcing them into schools run by the Interior Department and prohibiting them from speaking their tribal language? A long running episode of “cancel culture” initiated and sustained by Euro-Americans?

Or consider, perhaps, the reasons why there is a moment and a movement in which Black Lives Matter very much. Is it too much to suggest that such a movement grows in response to 400 hundred years of “cancel culture?”

One other long view might help here. In the Red Scare and the witch hunts of the ‘40s and ‘50s, in which Joe McCarthy played only a short and fleeting role, university presidents, corporate CEOs and, even, panicked union bosses, fired or denied employment to tens of thousands of people. But it would appear that Kass is quite willing to “cancel” thoughtful consideration of that history.

Toni Morrison will endure

The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.

I’m a seventy-two-year-old straight white male, born into an upper middle-class Jewish household. I dropped out of college in 1966 and spent at least the next three decades recklessly squandering some of the advantages my array of privileges created for me and discovering the multitude of ways that those same privileges nevertheless would manifest to rescue me. Would I have escaped quite as many fraught situations relatively unscathed if I had been gay or female or of color? Probably not, but it’s a certainty that I have not earned all the do-overs that life has granted me.

Regardless, over the years it has become increasingly clear to me that however impossible it might be to evade my white-skin privilege, I need to find productive ways to reckon with it, to understand it, and to use it, wherever and whenever possible, for good. Ultimately, that means to me that I should learn how to be an anti-racist, to stand forthrightly against the white supremacist culture of our country.

A variety of life experiences, including my friendships and work relationships with black folks (see most especially my tribute to Phyllis Hall, her son Perry, and the rest of her family in "The Spirit of Phyllis Hall"), the energizing effects of the moral and political courage of leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and numerous lessons learned from writers like Richard Wright (Black Boy, Native Son)Manning Marable (How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America), Bryan Stephenson (Just Mercy), bell hooks, Edward Baptist (The Half Has Never Been Told), Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns), James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Tupac Shakur, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Amari Baraka, Roxane Gay, poet Brian Gilmore, Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison and many others, have been instrumental in leading me to the conclusion that standing aside from the struggle against white supremacy would be the ultimate in privileged behavior; and, also, because our collective lives, impoverished by a society that absolutely refuses to recognize the humanity of people of color as equal in every way to that of “white” people, white supremacy injures us all. It deprives us of the full range of achievement and invention that would enhance every aspect of our lives together, and sentences us to shared fear, anxiety and misery. In such a world—in this world—anti-racism and active opposition to white supremacy is a fundamental first step in getting to a truly just society. I will go even further than that to say that I don’t believe that our country can right itself, can address other truly urgent problems, like climate change and disastrously underfunded public education, without also dismantling white supremacy.

I don’t know when I first discovered Toni Morrison, but it was probably around 1971 or 1972 when I came across a paperback copy of The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel. I have since read three or four other books by Morrison, both The Bluest Eyeand Belovedmore than once. Most recently, just before Morrison died, I’d begun rereading Belovedfor the third time, in the process coming full on the understanding, maybe for the first time, that straight, white males were not the audience that Morrison had in mind when she sat down to write. In fact, this time around I felt like a spectator —a voyeur, perhaps— watching while Morrison told a wise and important story for the benefit of all her beautiful babies, her African American readers, who would have both an instinctive grasp of the story she told, and would move on from the story with a richer understanding of the weaknesses and strengths, of the trials and burdens and transcendent beauty of black folks, in the land of white supremacy and African American dauntlessness.

I cannot say how the United States gets from where we are now, with a president whose banalities, crudities and cruelties are so deeply rooted in racism and privilege, to a place where our biggest gifts—our multiculturalism, our collective creativity, inventiveness and profound sense of community, and our fundamental human desire to do good—define a United States where equal justice prevails, but I am certain that it would help for us to read more Toni Morrison.

I submit the following quotations from Belovedfor the benefit of those who need to be enticed to pick up one of Morrison’s books and read through to the end. I further submit that Morrison’s work is certain to lead most readers to the inevitable conclusion that four centuries of travail have equipped black folks to lead the way to that place where equal justice prevails; a lesson that white folks need to learn over and over again if we are to reach the promised land.

Passages from Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

Paul D “…recognized the careful enunciation of letters by those, like himself, who could not read but had memorized the letters of their name. He was about to ask her who her people were but thought better of it. A young colored woman who was drifting was drifting from ruin. He had been in Rochester four years ago and seen five women arriving with fourteen female children. All their men—brothers, uncles, fathers, husbands, sons—had been picked off one by one by one. They had a single piece of paper directing them to a preacher on DeVore Street. The war had been over four or five years then, but nobody white or black seemed to know it. Odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the backroads and cow paths from Schenectady to Jackson. Dazed but insistent, they searched each other out for word of a cousin, an aunt, a friend who once said, ‘Call on me. Anytime you get near Chicago, just call on me.’ Some of them were running from family that could not support them, some to family; some were running from dead crops, dead kin, life threats, and took-over land. Boys younger than Buglar and Howard; configurations and blends of families of women and children, while elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men. Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy ‘talking sheets,’ they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs and counted heavily on each other. Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew.”

 Pg. 52-53

“This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he couldn’t say exactly why, considering the colored people he had run into during the last twenty years. During, before and after the War he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired, or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, patrollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn’t remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless colored woman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies.

            “Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on. Only once had it been possible for him to stay in one spot—with a woman, or a family—for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky, and of course the prison camp in Georgia.

            “From all those Negroes, Beloved was different. Her shining, her new shoes. It bothered him. Maybe it was just the fact that he didn’t bother her. Or it could be timing. She had appeared and been taken in on the very day Sethe and he had patched up their quarrel, gone out in public and had a right good time—like a family. Denver had come around, so to speak; Sethe was laughing; he had a promise of steady work, 124 was cleared from spirits. It had begun to look like a life. And damn! a water-drinking woman fell sick, got took in, healed, and hadn’t moved a peg since.

            “He wanted her out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn’t put her out of a house that wasn’t his. It was one thing to beat up a ghost, quite another to throw a helpless colored girl out in territory infected by the Klan. Desperately thirsty for black blood, without which it could not live, the dragon swam the Ohio at will.”

Pg. 66

“I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too. Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. Decided. And it came off right, like it was supposed to. We was here. Each and every one of my babies and me too. I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn’t no accident. I did that. I had help, of course, lots of that, but still it was me doing it; me saying, Go on, and Now. Me having to look out. Me using my own head. But it was more than that. It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right. I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon—there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if I wanted to. You know what I mean?”

“Paul D did not answer because she didn’t expect or want him to, but he did know what she meant. Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor the permission to enjoy it because in that place, mist, doves, sunlight, copper, dirt, moon—everything belonged to the men who had the guns. Little men, some of them, big men too, each one of whom he could snap like a twig if wanted to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns and were not even embarrassed by the knowledge that without gunshot fox would laugh at them. And these “men” who made even vixen laugh could, if you let them, stop you from hearing doves or loving moonlight. So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; layed down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother—a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what she meant; to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.”

Pg. 163

“When the women assembled outside 124, Sethe was breaking a lump of ice into chunks. She dropped the ice pick into her apron pocket to scoop the pieces into a basin of water. When the music entered the window she was wringing a cool cloth to put on Beloved’s forehead. Beloved, sweating profusely, was sprawled on the bed in the keeping room, a salt rock in her hand. Both women heard it at the same time and both lifted their heads. As the voices grew louder, Beloved sat up, licking the salt and went into the bigger room. Sethe and she exchanged glances and started toward the window. They saw Denver sitting on the steps and beyond her, where the yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces of thirty neighborhood women. Some had their eyes closed; others looked at the hot, cloudless sky. Sethe opened the door and reached for Beloved’s hand. Together they stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.

“The singing women recognized Sethe at once and surprised themselves by their absence of fear when they saw what stood next to her. The devil-child was clever, they thought. And beautiful. It had taken the shape of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun. Thunderblack and glistening, she stood on long straight legs, her belly big and tight. Vines of hair twisted all over her head. Jesus. Her smile was dazzling.

“Sethe feels her eyes burn and it may have been to keep them clear that she looks up. The sky is blue and clear. Not one touch of death in the definite green of the leaves. It is when she lowers her eyes to look again at the loving faces before her that she sees him. Guiding the mare, slowing down, his black hat wide-brimmed enough to hide his face but not his purpose. He is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best thing. She hears wings. Little hummingbirds stick needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thinks anything, it is no. No, no. Nonono. She flies. The ice pick is not in her hand, it is her hand.

“Standing alone on the porch, Beloved is smiling. But now her hand is empty. Sethe is running from her, running, and she feels the emptiness in the hand Sethe has been holding. Now she is running into the faces of the people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind. Alone. Again. Then Denver, running too. Away from here to the pile of people out there. They make a hill. A hill of black people, falling. And above them all, rising from his place with a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at her.

Pg. 261-262

Job one for white progressives: Engage other white folks about racism

A recent study exploring the effect of race-based political messages on white subjects showed that a certain subset of whites, "liberals with higher levels of racial resentment," were particularly responsive to both racially explicit and implicit attacks on government social programs. The story, headlined "Why Some White Liberals Will Probably Vote For Donald Trump," ran on the Huffington Post website earlier this month,

Reporter Arthur Delaney noted that the study's authors, sociologists Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer,
"offered a few theories about why [racially coded] welfare rhetoric would move white liberals more than conservatives. One is simply that conservatives are so familiar with welfare-bashing from Republican officeholders that they can't be swayed any further," he wrote.

"Another is that liberals may be uniquely vulnerable to this rhetoric because they are afraid to talk about racial inequality. Watts and Willer noted that 'strong norms of colorblindness in liberal political culture mean negative outcomes among black Americans as a group are rarely discussed.'"

Clearly, it would be rash to reach any number of conclusions based on a  single academic study, which itself cannot be fairly assessed without knowledge of the kind of details that a news report cannot easily include or evaluate. Still, another statement in the article provides a jumping off point for considering where white progressives should focus their activism. "...strong norms of colorblindness in liberal political culture mean [that] negative outcomes among black Americans as a group are rarely discussed," Delaney wrote, quoting Watts and Willer.

That suggests to me that white folks who consider themselves allies of African Americans have a particular responsibility to engage other whites who may have "higher levels of racial resentment" in discussions of the history, the social and cultural impact, and the continuing significance of 400 years of racism in the United States.

This is necessary for a number of reasons. In 2016, Donald Trump won 46 electoral votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that had twice previously been won by Barack Obama. Trump won those three states by less than 90,000 total votes, giving him 306 electoral votes to Hillary Clinton's 232. There are all sorts of ways to parse that outcome, including the notion that far lower 2016 turnouts of African American voters in Philadelphia, Detroit, Flint and Milwaukee compared to the two previous Obama campaigns may by themselves account for Hillary Clinton's defeat.

But the combination of white Obama voters who defected to Trump, or who voted Green or Libertarian, or who simply sat out the election because their distaste for Clinton obscured their grasp of the damage a Trump victory would, could, and did do, very likely were also enough to swing the three critical states away from Clinton. Looking ahead to the presidential election in 2020, it seems reasonable to conclude that increasing African American turnout and effectively mobilizing estranged white liberals are key to denying Trump a second-term.

In a country that is increasingly polarized and seems almost ungovernable, addressing the general white refusal to understand the full impact of slavery, of the collapse of reconstruction, of Jim Crow, night riders, lynch mobs, mass incarceration, disinvestment and 400 years of economic exploitation is a central task, now and into the future. Whatever one believes to be the most urgent policy questions facing our country, our government and ourselves, it is clear that our collective political dysfunction stands in the way of effective government action on any number of priorities, including climate change, economic inequality, public education, the right to organize, mass incarceration, abortion rights and so much else.

I would argue that racism and white privilege are the very root of that dysfunction. If that is so, and, if for that particularly critical subset of white liberals who can be moved by racist dogwhistles avoiding discussion of race issues is both bad habit and unfortunate priority, than white progressives who are willing to promote discussions of race with other white folks can play a critical role in the effort to restore functionality to our political life.

African Americans cannot play that role with whites. Nor should they. As a practical matter, African Americans already deal with white racism 24/7. They are isolated by it, defined by it, under attack by it, undermined by it and stereotyped by it. Nevertheless, productivity, inspiration and genius are part of the heritage and the contemporary experience of African Americans individually and in community. Eliminating white obstacles to the dissemination of African American social and cultural influence, and the enhanced quality of life that would follow, ought to provide further motivation for white progressives.

We know, or can guess, how much better life could be in the United States if the obstacles to full creative participation in our culture were eliminated for all. Racism alone has probably wasted more work, more talent, more genius than any other single factor. Had we found a way to continue the work of reconstruction after the Civil War, to restore stolen wealth, to create a world characterized by equal justice and equal opportunity, our current political challenges would almost certainly feel far less urgent. That is the world we could come to live in, but getting there may depend very much on the efforts of white progressives to lead in opening the discussion of racism and white supremacy within our own communities.

This will be hard and will take persistence, human kindness, and an unrelenting focus on the world still to win. But we must keep our eyes on that prize.

Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad"

Lessons in white supremacy

            Some books never stop teaching what needs to be taught. Noam Chomsky’s American Power and the New Mandarinsis one of those books. So is Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is another. And Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine is one more. I’ve read dozens of books that struck me that way and I’ve just finished another—Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. I don’t expect everyone who reads Whitehead’s wonderful novel about slavery and an actual, tangible underground railroad (complete with real engines, engineers, train stations and on-time problems) to come to the same conclusion about the book that I did, but, maybe.

Whitehead is relentlessly effective at portraying the myriad ways individual slaves and freemen struggled with slavery and white supremacism. They endure it, of course, evade it, escape it, always compromise with the pervasive reality of it, and frequently succumb to it. Only rarely do the white people they encounter show them a human face. Rarer still are the white folks who offer assistance of any sort and many of those falter at crucial moments, undone by their own privilege, weakness, fear, guilt and past histories of sordid compromise.

            Cora and Caesar and Royal and every other African American in the book must navigate a world dominated by monumental cruelty, by the abuse of slave masters and slave catchers and a collection of white folks who benefit from African American misery and who also conspire in varying degrees in the work of maintaining and prolonging that misery. As it happens, even black folks born free and living in the north must reckon with white supremacy. They lived with a continuing message of jeopardy based on skin color, and had to exercise regular caution against being snatched by rogue slave catchers operating in the north. Free, but not enfranchised, they were aware that if they were captured, judges and others with the power to intervene on their behalf were likely to stand aside, if not conspire, in their misfortune.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone even remotely familiar with the history of slavery and every other guise white supremacy has assumed in the 150 years since the Civil War—the southern counterattack on Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the criminalization of blackness, lynching and white terror attacks on black communities, segregation and discrimination, and mass incarceration and the New Jim Crow. But the lessons are there in The Underground Railroad and the seeds of the relentless and continuing oppression of African Americans are foreshadowed in the story the book tells.

The traumas associated with slavery and blackness serve to highlight the indomitable qualities of the slaves, runaways and freemen who nevertheless survived, who sought and built community, who rebuilt when those communities were decimated and who managed to find joyful relief in transient experience. The whole range of reactions that traumatized human beings display are fundamental elements in the world Whitehead has created; one in which misery, brutality and murder were the norm, and intelligence, grit, strength and endurance were frequently not enough to survive. The strong fall right next to the weak. People are brought down by the weight of experience. Often, they go mad. Sometimes, tortured beyond human endurance, they cooperate with the masters and collaborate in the awful violence.

That, too, is a story we already know and understand. But the most human thing about all of us is that nothing we claim to already understand should assure us that we know all we need to know about racism in America, especially if we are white and have the privilege of forgetting what we know, of ignoring how we have benefited from the exploitation of others, of the ways whiteness exempts us from facing up to ugly truths about ourselves and our world. What we need to know, what we may have already learned once or twice, we need to learn again, over and over, until knowing becomes like breathing, and those of us with privilege in our DNA are moved to absolute solidarity with the people who do not share that heritage.

Forty acres and a mule will only begin to repair the damage that white supremacy has perpetrated. It may be that the feeling that one has done right in moving beyond privilege is not enough, but it strikes me that a world in which equal justice is the foundation of life will be richer and more rewarding for every last one of us. Colson Whitehead’s book is a good place to begin our reeducation. We should get started. The reading list is long. So is the to-do list that comes with it.

Separately and together, we must invent joy

I'm trying to complete a post I started on July 25. Though I don't remember my original intention, the post has quickly become a mashup of thoughts about Marilynne Robinson's Lila, Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, and an estranged childhood friend who occasionally takes a swing at me via e-mail or Facebook message. Since the piece, tentatively entitled "Life crushes us all," ranges across issues of class and race and whiteness and the deepest disappointments that life can deliver, it has proven not merely difficult to bring to an integrated, well-reasoned conclusion, but has also become, into the bargain, no damn fun.

Of course, I am quite familiar with all the tactics I routinely rely on to both avoid bringing a writing project to a conclusion, and to excuse each failure to simply sit down and write. I should add, also, that in regard to the twin challenges to write and to keep writing, though familiarity does breed contempt, it does not reduce the effectiveness of those stale, old maneuvers.

In the 1990s, the decade that Marrianne McMullen and I shared major responsibility for publishing the Dayton Voice/Impact Weekly, I had the happy experience of quite often bringing writing projects, news stories, opinion pieces, et al., to a conclusion. But even then stories begun in a burst of inspiration would sometimes grind to a halt and find themselves forever abandoned. As any writer can testify, such failures are common and ought not even be remarked. After all, the opportunity to succeed once more, or even for the first time, arises with each new day, with every new story.

Sometime, in that period, I came across The Courage to Write, a book by Ralph Keyes, who lived in nearby Antioch, Ohio and was a leading figure in the Antioch Writer's Workshop. I fell instantly in love with the title, with the idea of the courage it takes to write. Surely a whole book on the subject was just the thing, and so I bought a copy; several copies, in fact, and gave some of them to people I knew who also trekked through the unmapped writer's swamp.

As it happened, the book did me no obvious good. Keyes' repeated assurance that no writer is alone in that boundless swamp did not seem to empower me, however hard he worked to document the point. But, in struggling with "Life crushes us all," I have found myself thinking about The Courage to Write. And for about four days running, I'd sit down and read a few pages from the book and find myself able to add 300, 400, even, 500 words after each reading. It was as if I had finally found the secret that works for me, that gets me sitting down, that gets me confidently picking my way through the swamp.

Alas and predictably, the moment I felt that I had discovered the right path for me, it turned out to be a mere trick, dissolving quickly into wisps of smoke. But a day or two ago, I encountered a 2013 Atlantic Magazine post of a video featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates himself talking about writing. In the video, he also uses the phrase "the courage to write."

"I think breakthroughs," Coates says, "come from putting an inordinate amount of pressure on yourself and seeing what you can take and hoping you can grow some new muscles. It's not really that mystical. It's like repeated practice over and over and over again and then suddenly you become something you had no idea you could be... I strongly believe that writing is an act of courage, almost an act of physical courage..."

Writers, Coates says, need to go back to their work repeatedly. Revise, rewrite and after awhile the idea you had in your head is 50 percent realized, then 60 percent, then 70 percent. It's never fully realized, he says, but you can get closer when you don't let up.

I am certainly writer enough to know that Coates is correct. You don't let up, you go back repeatedly and you revise and refine and every once in a while, after all that pressure focused on putting an idea into words, you achieve real clarity, a sentence, a paragraph, a whole piece to make you proud.

So, I'm going to get back to "Life crushes us all," though it might help if I came up with a new working title that was less of a club with which to whack myself, but not right this instant. In point of fact, the struggle with the piece really is not merely about the courage to write, it is also about clarifying my own thinking in a way that weaves together several related ideas that are nonetheless separate and most often considered independently of each other.

There is whiteness and the struggle, as Coates describes it, of black folks to both live with and within the havoc that white supremacy visits on a daily basis and to live and to forge independent identities beyond the reach of whiteness; there is also the injuries and insults of class as portrayed in Lila, and the special victimization of women who are further silenced and marginalized even in a time of extreme poverty when solidarity ought to be the default state of human relations; and there is also the accumulating losses and humiliations that the world has inflicted on my estranged childhood friend.

All of these are part of the collective experience of life and history in the country we live in together, and are more easily considered separately, but if we are ever to move into a world of justice, deep and shared, we need a more profound understanding of who we are separately and what we each have been through. And since it is impossible to both succinctly and comprehensively explore the variety of oppressions that afflict both our separate and collectives selves, the challenge is, to pervert a phrase from Lord of the Rings, to construct the one metaphor that will rule them all.

I haven't figured out how my draft of "Life crushes us all" gets from where it started to that happier place. But while I've been thrashing about in search for the courage to write, I've tried also to write in my journal, to sneak up on the problem(s) before me, to write around and through it. I might be getting somewhere. Yesterday, in my journal, I got to here:

"Sorrow
is for the love, the people, the things
taken from us...

"This, of course, is not enough because one cannot be forever sorrowing. In the face of the standard litany of loss that people endure, we must each rise up again after every lying down. We must proceed, not merely stoically. We must rise and proceed in spite of the beat-downs. Separately or together, we must invent and reinvent joy."