I Don't Know Much, but I Know Why Black Lives Matter
Monday, 18 July 2016 00:00 By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Philando Castile and I share birthdays in July. This year, I celebrated mine
with friends and family. But Castile's friends and family are mourning his
death, killed by a police officer in the St. Paul, Minnesota, suburbs after
he was pulled over for a broken taillight.
He would have been 33. I am decades older -- older now, in fact, than my own
father when he died.
And I am white.
My mother was from central Texas and my father from western New York, about
115 miles southwest of the small upstate town where I grew up. Their
geographically disparate marriage was a product of the World War II
disruptions that found men and women marrying people they met from far away
instead of the boy or girl next door.
Part of my Texas grandfather's family had come there from Alabama and I'm
sure that if I dug deep enough into the genealogy, I would find Confederate
veterans and very possibly slaveholders. My mother occasionally claimed that
at least one family member had been in the KKK, but I have no idea whether
it was true or simply said to shock her damn Yankee children.
To see more stories like this, visit Moyers & Company at Truthout.
Visiting relatives in Texas as a boy in the early 1960s, I remember seeing
whites-only drinking fountains and restrooms in a local department store. I
watched the civil rights struggle of the '60s on TV and in the papers:
George Wallace standing in the door at the University of Alabama to keep two
African-American students from enrolling; three young men disappearing
during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1963; the 1965 march from Selma to
Montgomery; the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the
assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jack
and Bobby Kennedy.
Growing up in rural New York State, there was none of the overt public
segregation I'd seen in Texas. Tolerance was taught at home, church and
school. We even read Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man in English class. But for the kids in my hometown, "The Talk"
you had with your parents was about the birds and bees, not about how to
behave when stopped by a policeman.
And discrimination was there, all right. Racial stereotypes too often
flourished and crude jokes were told. The very few black families were
middle-class; many, if not most, of them were professionals at the veterans'
hospital there, successful and upwardly mobile. Even so, there were whispers
of efforts to keep African-American families from moving into certain white
neighborhoods, whispers loud enough that even a youngster like me could
hear.
I moved to Washington, DC, to go to school a year and a half after riots had
burned the city in the wake of the King assassination. The capital was
majority African-American then, but still I lived in white neighborhoods and
contact and communication were rarer than they should have been. I moved to
New York and worked as publicist on the public affairs show Black Journal
and handled press for such African-American filmmakers as Bill Miles. When I
got into television production, I worked with many men and women of color.
Friendships were formed.
None of it has been enough, for there are two things I know. First, as hard
as I might try, I can never ever understand what it is like to be black in
America, can never know what it's like to be discriminated against or abused
or pulled over and hassled, maybe even killed, just because of the color of
my skin.
Writing in The Atlantic about last week's murders of Philando Castile, Alton
Sterling and five white Dallas police officers, Ta-Nehisi Coates notes:
".Wanton discrimination is definitional to the black experience, and very
often it is law enforcement which implements that discrimination with
violence. A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under
the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions
stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable."
So I can condemn the murder of innocent black men and white police officers
but have damn little, if any, right to pass judgment on or criticize those
peaceably struggling to overcome centuries of racism, except to be
supportive and try when I can or when I'm asked to do what I can to help.
Second, I know that no matter how liberal or progressive I profess to be, no
matter how successfully, how diligently I seek to be enlightened and nuanced
in my understanding of the world and those around me, I know that there
still is a tiny, virulent nugget, a germ of prejudice that exists deep
within me -- the product of those stereotypes and awful jokes of childhood
and adolescence, and that it must always be powerfully held at bay by
reason, understanding and love.
That is why it is so frightening to see how in others that vein of hatred
has been exposed and encouraged to grow strong again by the candidacy of
Donald Trump and far too many of his supporters. Nicholas Confessore reports
in The New York Times:
"In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump's name evokes
an easily understood message of racial hostility. passions aroused and
channeled by Mr. Trump take many forms, from earnest if muddled rebellion to
deeper and more elaborate bigotry.
". [O]n the flatlands of social media, the border between Mr. Trump and
white supremacists easily blurs. He has retweeted supportive messages from
racist or nationalist Twitter accounts to his 9 million followers. In fact,
Mr. Trump's Twitter presence is tightly interwoven with hordes of mostly
anonymous accounts trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic attacks. When
Little Bird, a social media data mining company, analyzed a week of Mr.
Trump's Twitter activity, it found that almost 30 percent of the accounts
Mr. Trump retweeted in turn followed one or more of 50 popular
self-identified white nationalist accounts."
And now Trump makes the outrageous and completely unfounded claim that Black
Lives Matter and other activists held a moment of silence for Micah Johnson,
the murderer of the Dallas policemen. "The other night you had 11 cities
potentially in a blow-up stage," Trump lied to an Indiana rally on
Wednesday. "Marches all over the United States -- and tough marches. Anger.
Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac! And some people ask for a moment of
silence for him. For the killer!" Trump's demagoguery, appeal to white fear
and not-so-subtle incitement to violence at its worst.
The mind reels, the heart and soul cry out. Events of the last few days have
brought to the forefront a mix of issues both profound and perplexing, from
race in America and extremist politics to the nature of law and order, the
militarization of the police and the gun violence that kills both police and
innocent bystanders of every color and creed. What I do know is this: to
quote former President George W. Bush, of all people, when he spoke at
Tuesday's interfaith service for the slain Dallas policemen, "Too often we
judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our
best intentions, and this has strained our bonds of understanding and common
purpose."
And I think I know a big reason why Black Lives Matter: because for far too
long they have mattered too little or not at all. Amends must be made and
attention must be paid. Now.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
MICHAEL WINSHIP
Michael Winship is an Emmy Award-winning writer, and served as senior writer
of the public television series, "Moyers & Company." He is also a senior
writing fellow at the public policy and advocacy group Demos, and the
president of Writers Guild of America, East.
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By Marina Sitrin, teleSUR | Op-Ed
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I Don't Know Much, but I Know Why Black Lives Matter
Monday, 18 July 2016 00:00 By Michael Winship, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
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. Philando Castile and I share birthdays in July. This year, I
celebrated mine with friends and family. But Castile's friends and family
are mourning his death, killed by a police officer in the St. Paul,
Minnesota, suburbs after he was pulled over for a broken taillight.
. He would have been 33. I am decades older -- older now, in fact,
than my own father when he died.
And I am white.
My mother was from central Texas and my father from western New York, about
115 miles southwest of the small upstate town where I grew up. Their
geographically disparate marriage was a product of the World War II
disruptions that found men and women marrying people they met from far away
instead of the boy or girl next door.
Part of my Texas grandfather's family had come there from Alabama and I'm
sure that if I dug deep enough into the genealogy, I would find Confederate
veterans and very possibly slaveholders. My mother occasionally claimed that
at least one family member had been in the KKK, but I have no idea whether
it was true or simply said to shock her damn Yankee children.
To see more stories like this, visit Moyers & Company at Truthout.
Visiting relatives in Texas as a boy in the early 1960s, I remember seeing
whites-only drinking fountains and restrooms in a local department store. I
watched the civil rights struggle of the '60s on TV and in the papers:
George Wallace standing in the door at the University of Alabama to keep two
African-American students from enrolling; three young men disappearing
during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1963; the 1965 march from Selma to
Montgomery; the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the
assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jack
and Bobby Kennedy.
Growing up in rural New York State, there was none of the overt public
segregation I'd seen in Texas. Tolerance was taught at home, church and
school. We even read Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man in English class. But for the kids in my hometown, "The Talk"
you had with your parents was about the birds and bees, not about how to
behave when stopped by a policeman.
And discrimination was there, all right. Racial stereotypes too often
flourished and crude jokes were told. The very few black families were
middle-class; many, if not most, of them were professionals at the veterans'
hospital there, successful and upwardly mobile. Even so, there were whispers
of efforts to keep African-American families from moving into certain white
neighborhoods, whispers loud enough that even a youngster like me could
hear.
I moved to Washington, DC, to go to school a year and a half after riots had
burned the city in the wake of the King assassination. The capital was
majority African-American then, but still I lived in white neighborhoods and
contact and communication were rarer than they should have been. I moved to
New York and worked as publicist on the public affairs show Black Journal
and handled press for such African-American filmmakers as Bill Miles. When I
got into television production, I worked with many men and women of color.
Friendships were formed.
None of it has been enough, for there are two things I know. First, as hard
as I might try, I can never ever understand what it is like to be black in
America, can never know what it's like to be discriminated against or abused
or pulled over and hassled, maybe even killed, just because of the color of
my skin.
Writing in The Atlantic about last week's murders of Philando Castile, Alton
Sterling and five white Dallas police officers, Ta-Nehisi Coates notes:
".Wanton discrimination is definitional to the black experience, and very
often it is law enforcement which implements that discrimination with
violence. A community consistently subjected to violent discrimination under
the law will lose respect for it, and act beyond it. When such actions
stretch to mass murder it is horrific. But it is also predictable."
So I can condemn the murder of innocent black men and white police officers
but have damn little, if any, right to pass judgment on or criticize those
peaceably struggling to overcome centuries of racism, except to be
supportive and try when I can or when I'm asked to do what I can to help.
Second, I know that no matter how liberal or progressive I profess to be, no
matter how successfully, how diligently I seek to be enlightened and nuanced
in my understanding of the world and those around me, I know that there
still is a tiny, virulent nugget, a germ of prejudice that exists deep
within me -- the product of those stereotypes and awful jokes of childhood
and adolescence, and that it must always be powerfully held at bay by
reason, understanding and love.
That is why it is so frightening to see how in others that vein of hatred
has been exposed and encouraged to grow strong again by the candidacy of
Donald Trump and far too many of his supporters. Nicholas Confessore reports
in The New York Times:
"In countless collisions of color and creed, Donald J. Trump's name evokes
an easily understood message of racial hostility. passions aroused and
channeled by Mr. Trump take many forms, from earnest if muddled rebellion to
deeper and more elaborate bigotry.
". [O]n the flatlands of social media, the border between Mr. Trump and
white supremacists easily blurs. He has retweeted supportive messages from
racist or nationalist Twitter accounts to his 9 million followers. In fact,
Mr. Trump's Twitter presence is tightly interwoven with hordes of mostly
anonymous accounts trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic attacks. When
Little Bird, a social media data mining company, analyzed a week of Mr.
Trump's Twitter activity, it found that almost 30 percent of the accounts
Mr. Trump retweeted in turn followed one or more of 50 popular
self-identified white nationalist accounts."
And now Trump makes the outrageous and completely unfounded claim that Black
Lives Matter and other activists held a moment of silence for Micah Johnson,
the murderer of the Dallas policemen. "The other night you had 11 cities
potentially in a blow-up stage," Trump lied to an Indiana rally on
Wednesday. "Marches all over the United States -- and tough marches. Anger.
Hatred. Hatred! Started by a maniac! And some people ask for a moment of
silence for him. For the killer!" Trump's demagoguery, appeal to white fear
and not-so-subtle incitement to violence at its worst.
The mind reels, the heart and soul cry out. Events of the last few days have
brought to the forefront a mix of issues both profound and perplexing, from
race in America and extremist politics to the nature of law and order, the
militarization of the police and the gun violence that kills both police and
innocent bystanders of every color and creed. What I do know is this: to
quote former President George W. Bush, of all people, when he spoke at
Tuesday's interfaith service for the slain Dallas policemen, "Too often we
judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our
best intentions, and this has strained our bonds of understanding and common
purpose."
And I think I know a big reason why Black Lives Matter: because for far too
long they have mattered too little or not at all. Amends must be made and
attention must be paid. Now.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not
be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Michael Winship
Michael Winship is an Emmy Award-winning writer, and served as senior writer
of the public television series, "Moyers & Company." He is also a senior
writing fellow at the public policy and advocacy group Demos, and the
president of Writers Guild of America, East.
Related Stories
Black Lives Matter's Patrisse Cullors on Creating a New Economy of
Nonviolence
By Laura Flanders, Truthout | Video InterviewWhite Supremacy Is Alive and
All Too Well
By Mitchell Zimmerman, OtherWords | Op-EdBlack Lives Matter Interrupts
Business as Usual
By Marina Sitrin, teleSUR | Op-Ed
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