I Lost Sympathy

“I lost sympathy for him when the mother and a gang banger got on top of a car and…
Hey, he stole, he was caught on tape roughing a store clerk, and he was a thug.

All of the above are and other statements are symbolic of what is wrong with our country.  They represent years of Jim Crowe discrimination and today a legal system that incarcerates millions in a prejudiced system that would rather jail than reform, would rather repress than educate  would  rather run than turn and deal with centuries of oppression that America has  barely addressed.

 We all are running from ourselves.  We sit in our locked community, holding tight to our guns, waiting…

This  is the America of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the forced busing of 1968, that lasted about 10 seconds.

The America of the War on Poverty that lasted two years!  Hundreds of years of oppression and we fixed it in two years??

 We desegregated our schools by segregating them!

We all know what happened.  Whites ran.  Whites left inner cities for the suburbs.  African Americans and other people of color were left in the inner cities to rot. People still laugh at Detroit’s failures, not realizing that those failures are our failures.

California, a liberal state, has one of the most segregated school systems in the country.  And this is a liberal state, one that some rural counties want to abandon because “they” live there.

The truth is we all have been running from “them” all of our lives.  When we shop for houses they must be in a “nice neighborhood”.  When we shop for schools, we make sure “they” are not in the majority.

Only the lesser live “there”.

And, because we are obsessed with “law and order” we pass law after law multiplying prison sentences for minor crimes, and for drug addictions, so we can “them” in jail forever.

If you care, read “A New Jim Crowe”…that book tells it all!

The United Nations just condemned the United States for two problems:  1. an incarceration rate that leads the world.  2.  A kill rate for police that leads the world.

But what the hell, it’s just the United Nations, what do they know.  We shouldn’t be in it anyway, right, just like we stayed out of the League of Nations and helped Hitler with his madness by doing so.

I spent 35 years in education and this is reality:  Charter Schools were started to get away from “them”, to find “better schools” away from ‘bad elements’.

The “Waiting for Superman” B.S.  purports to show the horrors of segregated education, then incredibly  offers segregated private schools as a remedy.  So we just RUN AWAY again.

Many voters want to end our public schools.

We no longer serve our country either.  The Armed Forces that you were forced to join because of the “peace time” draft forced many of us to spend time close to and under the supervision by people of color.  Less than one percent of us now get that experience.

Always the “them” are people of color…always.  And sure enough the children of color are relegated to the mean streets, where some (not the majority) adopt violence and gang behavior to fit in, to survive.

Sure some of them are punks….Sure they are gangsters.  Sure they are violent.  And they are human beings, children really, who often, have to join to survive, have to behave like animals because the mean streets demand it.

 And it will take a lot of work and money to fix this broken system that kills children everyday by its negligence.

I will never forget the many times African American children told me, after they trusted me, “Mr. Beale I have to get out of here or I will be dead before I am 25”.

 And many of them were.

And we sit back in our safe houses and wring our hands.  And we say, he was a bully he got what he deserved when a child is gunned down for stealing a cigar and pushing a clerk in a corner market.

If it was a white kid everything would be different and you all know it.

The tragedy is that liberal and conservative fail on this one.  We have failed for hundreds of years.  We will not face our past and learn by it.  We refuse to judge people by their character, but judge them by the color of their skin!

Every day we forget what Martin Luther King taught us…every damn day!

We watch “them” play professional sports at an incredible high level and root like hell for “them”.  But, we won’t live next door to “them”.

 We tolerate team names like Redskins and Braves, blithely ignoring centuries of repression and genocide in our own history.  We point to racist African Americans who point at Native Americans and Koreans as inferior.  We feel better if “they” discriminate also, as if that is somehow proving anything except the weaknesses of human behavior.

And many say, “Not me”, I’m not racist.  THEY are.  Not me.  You are just being politically correct by speaking out…”they lost me when they showed their anger”.

Jesus Christ, remember him?   The kid was shot over a half dozen times and was unarmed!   Sure he was pissed off.  Sure he ran!  He was shot!

 And it happens every damn day, by police, citizens, jerks; et al., and we still arm people to the teeth.

Ever wonder in one of the most racist cultures on the planet, why we allow widespread use of fire arms?  Every wonder just a little bit?  What does mass ownership of guns support?   Mass violence and oppression!

Ok, here’s a little story for you.  When I went to Stanford (which was almost lily white in those days), I joined a fraternity that allowed Jews, Latinos, and African Americans into it.  Now in the 60s, there weren’t a lot of “them” in the school but the fraternity was kicked out by the national office, which was housed on Alabama.

And my first roommate was a black guy, who happened to be captain of the football team that I also toiled for.   He was a star, I wasn’t.

My junior year I was going to start, and during the summer one of “them” transferred in and took by spot.  I had to compete against “them”.  And when we were on the field, my whiteness gave me no advantage whatsoever.  It was a meritocracy for sure.

 Meanwhile my roommate graduated and when to UCLA Med School and became a doctor. He then spent several years in Africa tending to the sick.

He was one of the biggest African Americans I have ever known, incredibly strong and fast, and one of the greatest human beings I have ever known.  I know this because we talked for hours about each other, our girlfriends, our fears, our feelings, we became friends.  We grew to really know each other.  The skin color disappeared.

And it changed me.  Living with people of color changes you.

But  I am still racist to a point.  I also get that creepy feeling when in a group of people who are of color pass me on the, I put my hand on my wallet….I am wary.  I still feel fear.

But I also touch “them” every chance I get.  When I see a beautiful child of color, with their parents’   permission of course,  I get close as I can and touch them like I would a white child.  I purposefully break down the space barrier.  I slap the waiters on the back, I shake their hands.  

I do this because I spent at least five years of my career in “ghetto” environments.  I walked as a minority in a sea of colored faces.  I dealt with gang bangers, lots of kids on probation, child abuse, and yes racial violence.  I realized quickly “they” are just people like “us” and I go out of my way to show it.

The vast majority of the educational establishment then as now,  practiced  systematic repression of people of color.

It was sometimes subtle, sometimes graphic like when I witnessed our white Principal give “locker to locker” counseling to a seventh grader, throwing him from locker bank to locker bank until the kid was nearly unconscious.  And that Principal, white of course, later served on the California School Board in Sacramento!

White kids went to college, black kids went to jail.

And my great-great  grandfather was hung by confederate soldiers just before the Civil War broke out because he was a Cherokee married to a white woman.

And that makes all the difference in the world.  It makes a difference when your family has a lynching in its legacy.  It matters when your grandfather was born on an Indian Reservation.

One day we will have to stop running from ourselves.  One day we will have to realize that Love is First.  One of these days we will tell the Police to stop shooting people of color just because they are “mean” or “gangsters”.  One of these days we will stop shooting ourselves to “fix” a problem.  ‘\

Violence begets violence!!

One of these days we well all mourn and be appalled when any child, regardless of color, and regardless of circumstance is gunned down by anybody.

The Police see this every day.  They are on the firing line.  It isn’t Officer Wilson who we should be so concerned it is the “mean streets” claim victims all the time, like the five year old who just yesterday was killed with a shot in the head fired in a mistaken drive by shooting by a bunch of African American gangsters.  The girl was African American.

The Police are on the front line of crime and violence that is America.  And  black on black crime versus white on white crime is about the same.  We kill rape and rob from our own “kind” more often than not. We live in one of the most violent societies on the planet, so don’t so quickly condemn a public servant for acting in an  environment of madness!

We condone a gun ownership society and a violence entertainment industry that teaches that problems in  human relationships can be solved with a gun.  Everyday, every day I see on T.V. or at the movies, the lesson that justice emanates from the barrel of a gun.

And what has it got us; a society that the United Nations no less has condemned.   A culture that allows “Redskins” as a team mascot for our nation’s capital’s    football team?

That really says it all.  Washington D.C., which was once a slave trading center, STILL has REDSKINS as its football team’s mascot!  And an African American Heisman Trophy winner starts as its quarterback.

Jesus H. Christ!

Finally, when Stanford changed its mascot from Indian to Cardinal (actually changed it back), many of my fellow alums and friends STILL go off on that “political correctness”.

And as I imagine my great-great grandfather swinging from that rope.