The Nature of Racism

I was speaking to my ninety-two year old father yesterday.  I could hear him flipping the pages of his local paper while we were talking about family.  Finally, after the sound of paper rustling had ended dad said what he was meaning to saying;
"Pastor Dave was in the local paper speaking about Racism a few days ago."
I was understandably apprehensive being that Pastor Dave is the minister at my fathers church, a church that is rooted in a peculiar brand of christian fundamentalism.   For a few moments after my dad stopped I had visions of Pastor Dave waving his bible in the air from the pulpit saying the kind of things my mom use to say about gay people; about me really.  After I collected myself, we went on to talk about other things, the weather there,  how Lars was doing in his post surgery recovery, my niece and her health.  We never did discuss what Pastor Dave had said in his sermon.
I got up early this morning.  Sleep has always been elusive for me, more so now that I am trying to keep an eye on Lars.  Since I was up I decided to go online and balance my checkbook and look at the local news.  One item caught my eye immediately.  The KKK has been recruiting in San Francisco.  I read the article with fascination as the regional leader described the recruiting as a response to increased calls for information, that people are scared, and that, incredulously, the "new Klan is not interested in fomenting violence, does not support it, that their efforts are only about information sharing.  That got me thinking again about Pastor Dave's sermon so searched and found his sermon on a podcast.  I have to say he is not the best public speaker I've ever heard.  In fact I found it was a bit difficult to follow his sermon.  I suppose that is why he hands out notes for the congregation to follow along with him as he preaches.  I also suspect that some of my difficulty was trepidation, that I was expecting the kind of preaching I had heard at my mom's funeral service; a mix of Sunday sermonizing about God, salvation, and the glory's of life everlasting in heaven served up with a benediction at the end.  What I heard though was a rambling quoting of scripture, one that was rooted in not only respect for authority but also of a plea against racism, that no one should be judged by the color of their skin or by their gender.  Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised.  He also talked about how he had never had a black friend until his early adulthood and how that had shaped his perceptions.  He talked about the idea of the United States being a melting pot but that now it seems more of a cauldron then anything.  He talked about the loss of black lives and of police.  That we can not discount the fact that racism is very real in our society and we have a responsibility to fight it.  All in all not a bad sermon. It got me thinking too about my experience with how systemic racism has influenced my life and my perceptions.
I grew up during a time of turmoil in the middle to late Nineteen-Sixties when race riots and protests were commonplace and where dusk to dawn curfews existed during hot summer nights.  (Why is it that no one protests during the dead of winter?  Just wondering.)  I did not grow up in the South.  I grew up in southern Wisconsin in a medium sized city on the shores of Lake Michigan.  Racism in my birth town was systemic.  My dad used to say these about how neighborhoods came to be; the Danes founded the city, when the Armenians moved in the Danes left, when the Mexicans moved in the Armenians left, when the blacks move in the Mexicans left.  There was no mixing, no shared spaces, the racial lines were distinct even when I grew up.  Our neighborhood was white, across the river from us it was black.  My junior high was mixed but not as much as my high school which was located across the river.  I had a few black friends, a few of mixed race; they were called Mulattos at that time.  My parents never said I couldn't hang out with my friends, there was just a sense of wrong to it.  The best way to explain it is like this; for a time in high school I succumbed to the hate filled presence in my home and church about being gay.  I knew I was gay for most of my childhood but for appearances I chose to act straight starting in the tenth grade.  I met and dated a hispanic girl named Rose Hernandez just after I started the tenth grade.  My parents suggested I take her to church as she was Catholic and that was just wrong in their eyes.  They didn't see her necessarily as Mexican but more as lost soul that needed converting.  So off to church we all went, me in my sunday best and Rose in a beautiful blue dress that fell just about the knees, a impeccably ironed white blouse, and knee high white leather boots.  The looks that she got when we walked in said it all.  It was one of utter revulsion, mind you no one was outwardly mean to her, they just made it clear with their frosty looks that she was not welcome, that their church was intended to be white only.  Systemic racism works that way.  It is the unspoken but clearly present things that lie just under the surface that speak volumes, the kind of things that predispose us to not be intentionally racist but to be racist non the less.
My experience with systemic racism works like this: when I hear the words drug dealer, I immediately have a visual of a young black man pop up in my mind's eye.  It is not a conscience choice on my part, it just happens. That's how being conditioned works over time.  Over and over again we are exposed to a daily diet of news reports that say young black men are drug dealers, that they are a threat to law and order. that we should always be on guard especially when we are in "their territory".  My personal baggage plays a part as well.  When I use to see a police car pass by or a policeman walk by my body would tense automatically, the hairs on the back of my neck would stand on end, and my breath would become animated coming in short bursts instead of deeper more slower ones.  For years I despised the police.  As a young gay man I was harassed by them, subjected to taunts by them, and generally disliked by them because of my sexual orientation.  My response though was outsized to my experience.  I didn't realize this until I started recovering memories of being sexually tortured in group settings by off duty police and sheriff deputies between the ages of eight and twelve.  That anger and angst fed into my adult experiences with police and in some minor ways it still does.  It took an altercation with one cop some years ago on a Sunday afternoon downtown that finally shifted my understanding.  I was coming back to work after lunch and wanted to regain access to the lot behind the building but the street was closed due to filming.  I was bristling with anger and the cop picked up on that and we nearly came to blows when he threatened to drag me out my car and taser me.  I backed off only because I needed to get back to work.  These two things among others I feel are at the root of systemic racism.  That for most of our lives were are conditioned by outward stimuli and inwardly by our personal baggage in how we respond in certain situations.  I feel that this auto conditioning is the hardest type of racism to fight too.  We recoil at our auto responses, feel shame for having them in the first place, and then try to do whatever is possible to change those internal things that make our personal and collective lives unmanageable. Outward racism, the kind that is pedaled by the KKK is easy to point at, its message is clear and unequivocal, white supremacy is the rule of the day.  However, the internal stuff of what I have talked about is much more pervasive and controlling.  I feel that it is these auto responses that the police act upon more than anything, that when a black person is stopped they too have auto responses and that nothing good can come from this.  It is appalling, however necessary it is, that black kids are being taught to be fearful of the police, that one wrong move on their part could result in their death.  Bill Maher said something profound last night while talking to Stephen Colbert.  He said that some police join the force in response to their junior or high school experiences of being less than or being on the outside, that having or gaining authority as a cop feeds that lack of self worth.  Plainly put Bill Maher said that no person should join the force in an attempt to work out their childhood angst.  I heartily agree.
I feel that we need to continue our deep and abiding personal and collective ongoing dialogue about the nature of systemic racism so that we can find ways to reconcile ourselves and our country to how these pervasive things predispose our experiences.  Until then I fear that this endless cycle of violence will just continue to take innocence lives and that family's will continue to be torn apart.