INSIDE LOOK AT RACISM
Special Correspondent: Chris Arnade
A week after Barack Obama was
elected president in 2008, I walked into my old hometown bar in central Florida
to hear, "Well if a nigger can be president, then I can have another drink. Give
me a whiskey straight up." Only one day in the town and I thought, "Damn the
south."
I had returned home to bury my father, who had spent much of the
1950s and '60s fighting for civil rights in the south. Consequently, my
childhood was defined by race. It was why our car was shot at, why threats were
made to burn our house down, why some neighbors forbid me to play on their lawn,
why I was taunted at school as a "nigger lover".
It was nothing compared to what the blacks in town had to endure. I
was just residing in the seam of something much uglier. It is also why I left as
soon as I could, exercising an option few others had. I eventually moved to New
York City to work on Wall Street.
In the next 15 years I thought less about race. It is possible to
live in the northeast as a white liberal and think little about it, to convince
yourself that most of the crude past is behind. Outward signs suggest things are
different now: I live in an integrated neighborhood, my kids have friends of all
colors, and my old office is diverse compared to what I grew up with. As many
point out, America even has a black man (technically bi-racial) as
president.
Soon after my father passed away, I started to venture beyond my Wall
Street life, to explore parts of New York that I had only previously passed
through on the way to airports. I did this with my camera, initially as a hobby.
I ended up spending three years documenting addiction in the New York's Bronx
neighborhood of Hunts Point. There I was slapped in the face by the past.
It took me a few months of slow recognition, fighting a thought I did
not want to believe: we are still a deeply racist country. The laws on the books
claim otherwise, but in Hunts Point (and similar neighborhoods across the
country), those laws seem like far away idyllic words that clash with the daily
reality: everything is stacked against those who are born black or brown.
We as a nation applaud ourselves for having moved beyond race. We
find one or two self-made blacks or Hispanics who succeeded against terrible
odds, and we elevate their stories to a higher position, and then we tell them
over and over, so we can say, "See, we really are a color blind nation."
We tell their stories so we can forget about the others, the ones who
couldn't overcome the long odds, the ones born into neighborhoods locked down by
the absurd war on drugs, the ones born with almost even odds that their fathers
will at some point be in jail, the ones born into neighborhoods that few want to
teach in, neighborhoods scarce of resources.
We tell the stories of success and say: see anyone can pull
themselves up by their bootstraps, further denigrating those who can't escape
poverty. It plays into the false and pernicious narrative that poverty is
somehow a fault of desire, a fault of intelligence, a fault of skills. No,
poverty is not a failing of the residents of Hunts Point who are just as decent
and talented as anyone else. Rather it is a failing our broader society.
It took me seeing one black teen thrown against a bodega wall by
cops, for no reason, to erase much of the image of seeing Obama elected. It took
the unsolved murder of a 15-year-old Hunts Point girl, a girl my middle
daughter's age, to make me viscerally understand how lucky my children are. It
took watching as one smart child grew from dreaming of college to dealing drugs
to viscerally understand how lucky everyone in my old office is.
The barriers between Hunts Point and the rest of New York are not as
high as they were between the white and black section of my hometown in the
1960s. People can freely pass over them. Practically, however, they are almost
insurmountable.
Gone is the overt, violent, and legal racism of my childhood. It has
been replaced by a subtler version. It's a racism that is easier to ignore,
easier to deny, and consequently, almost as
dangerous.
No comments:
Post a Comment