#480: Is this, finally, our nation’s Great Awakening?

In this moment of national crisis, the popular uprising triggered by George Floyd’s killing raises the question: Is America finally ready to acknowledge and repair the systemic racism embedded in our culture? 

William Bratton is the former police commissioner in Boston, New York city, and Los Angeles.  When interviewed recently about George Floyd’s killing, he referred to slavery and racism as “America’s original sin--the scar that never heals.” My own awakening to that scar’s depth took many years, but I was fortunate to have many opportunities.

In December 1969, during my senior year at Holy Cross, all the Black students packed their bags and left campus, vowing never to return unless a group of expelled Black students received amnesty.  During a recent student sit-down protesting a campus visit by GE recruiters considered “scabs” (since GE was on strike), a disproportionate number of the protestors punished were Black.  A college administrator offered the excuse that, in a big mostly white crowd, those students were easier to spot!

In response, we white students went on strike in solidarity with the Black students.  Eventually amnesty was granted, and all the Black students returned to a campus newly awakened to their plight.

I spent the summer of 1971 as a research assistant for a doctoral thesis on “Racial Stratification in the US in the 20^th century.” My job was collecting data for the chapter on lynching.  I constructed tallies of the lynchings in each state for each year since 1900.  Such tallies were rarely published in mainstream (white) periodicals, so I spent two months digging through obscure, often defunct Black journals that printed monthly totals of lynchings.

One day a Black reference librarian confronted me.  Why, she asked, was a white boy like me searching through these Black journals?  Why wasn’t this job given to a Black student?  What was I trying to prove?

Our encounter, perhaps 20 minutes long, ended with me (1) getting access to the archives I sought and (2) realizing that the burden of proof was on me to both acknowledge my privileged state and to persuade her of my bona fides.

My research left me appalled. I learned that thousands of Blacks were lynched not only without trials but also often without being charged, and even without any crime at all being committed.  Blacks were often lynched to cover the crimes—or simply the embarrassing behavior—of whites (as when a white girl flirted with a Black who was then lynched for rape after she was, in fact, beaten by her white boyfriend).  Blacks were lynched singly and in groups.  Blacks were not just lynched by hanging: Blacks were shot, drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, buried alive, burnt at the stake, blowtorched, skinned alive. Pregnant Black girls were lynched after their babies were ripped from their wombs.

And blacks were lynched in frighteningly large numbers throughout the 20^th century, well into the 1950s— right into my own lifetime.

It became clear to me that lynching was a cultural institution aimed not at justice, nor at crime, not even at individual conflicts. Lynching was often disguised as vigilanteeism, but in reality it aimed at terror--terror to frighten the Black population into continued submission.  In short, lynching replaced slavery to keep Blacks in their place during the Jim Crow era. And I saw that, as lynching finally faded away, the states with the most lynching became the states that executed the most Blacks.

My work that summer made me aware that terror against Black people had “evolved” from one institution to another: from slavery to lynching to the death penalty to mass incarceration to police brutality.  These different forms of terror all aimed to keep Blacks in “their place.”  Whites thus aimed to maintain supreme control.

In 1972 I moved to Washington, DC for work, and barely three miles away whole city blocks still lay in ruins from the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination four years before.  My job was in a comfortably white suburb, but there was nothing comfortable about those burnt-out Black neighborhoods.

In April 1973 I flew to Chicago to scout the University of Chicago for my doctoral studies.  Riding the elevated train south from the Loop would bring me west of the campus, so I planned to catch a bus east to the school.  I soon realized I was the only white person on the train, and every station stop simply added more Black passengers.  Finally an older Black woman got up and approach.

“Do you know where you’re going, young man?” she asked.

I told her my plan to reach the campus.

“Well, it’s best if you get off this train as soon as possible.  This is not a safe train for you.”

I thanked her, thinking that I was still not fully aware just how deeply divided our culture was--and had been for generations.

That fall my wife and I move to Hyde Park, the university enclave on Chicago’s South Side. We soon learned that none of our neighbors dared to venture into the “ghetto” neighborhoods to our north, west, and south.

 The following summer my parents visited and I offered to drive them to see the house they had lived in when my father was in the navy in the 1940s.  Thirty years later, it was an all-Black neighborhood, and when we parked across the street the Black gentleman rocking on the porch was clearly frightened by this car full of white people staring at his house--and we were too frightened even to explain our presence.  We simply drove off. To this day I regret I did not talk to the man.

In 1977 we moved to Dorchester, a rapidly changing inner-city Boston neighborhood with its historic Irish and Italian population fleeing as Black families moved in.  We found our apartment by word of mouth: it  had been off the market for two years for fear of Black tenants. Our suburban relatives were often reluctant to visit our “tenement” home, but we stayed.

Our children eventually enrolled in the Raphael Hernandez Bilingual School, where they acquired a unique education as members of a white minority in a multiethnic student body.  This was, of course, fresh in the wake of Boston’s busing crisis over segregated schools, and as we persisted we witnessed most of our white neighbors moving away rather than subject their kids to Boston’s public schools.  Citywide, schools became increasingly Black as white families abandoned a school system they could no longer dominate.

We still live in Dorchester, and our once lily-white neighborhood now includes a stable mix of Black families, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Haitians, gay couples, and a remnant of the Irish and Italians.  But as late as the late 1990s, my daughter’s Holy Cross classmates were often not allowed by their parents to spend weekends at our “inner city” home.

By now our own family includes people of color on both sides: my brother’s wife is Chinese-American, and our nephew’s wife is African-American. Their wonderful bi-racial kids are now our beloved kin.

Through all this time I’ve met my share of overtly racist people, but for every person who spouted racist sentiments there have been many more who were simply blind to, or even in denial of, racism’s pervasive grip on American Life.  Perhaps they have not benefited from experiences like my own, which awakened me to the reality depicted by the evocative imagery of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.

For me, the basic truth is that slavery’s impact has never been eradicated.  And this brings me back to the notion of slavery as our Original Sin.

Most people’s worldview is shaped by their view of human nature. People who think human nature is simply good expect a world of happy human relations, and seek to blame any distress or injustice on external forces. People who see human nature as basically evil expect the worst of others, and seek to shield themselves from all threats.  But Christians have a more complex view.  For us, human nature is essentially good but factually flawed and wounded. We therefore hope for the best but expect that humans, unaided by divine grace, will typically fall into evil ways, not because of external forces alone, but because there is a moral misery within us.

This idea is usually applied to the whole human race.  But what if we apply it to a nation?  Is it possible that our national character is so rooted in our original enslavement of others that we as a people are fatally wounded and permanently incapable of goodness?

My own experience since 1969 until now has made me think so.  Yes, we have witnessed great gains since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  Since the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther king, we have seen Blacks take leading roles in movies, television, sports, business, and politics at all levels--including the presidency itself.  Mixed-race couples and families and now more widely accepted, and there are broad legal protections for Blacks in housing, folding, employment, voting, and education. 

But the Covid-19 crisis has exposed how superficial some of these gains have been.  Black Americans are harder hit by the pandemic because Black Americans still lacked the privileges white Americans enjoy in housing, health care, wealth, and education. It was Dr. King himself who believed that America’s wounded nature would require more change than mere civil rights:

The Black revolution is much more than a struggle for civil rights of the Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws--racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.  It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.

The moral ills King decried in 1968 remain deep flaws in American Life.  One might even think that their persistence, despite all the activism and progress of the past 50 years, proves that no treatment will ever heal our national scar, so deep is the wound.  We might fear that slavery and racism comprise not only our Original Sin but even our permanent moral defect.

But now the perfect storm of pandemic and police killing has unleashed fresh healing forces.  People pent up from confinement take to the streets, unmindful of the health risks, to decry the death toll that both police and pandemic have taken on Black America.  We now see both the spread of virus and the blight of brutality as symptoms of our deeper moral malady.

And now come polls suggesting that, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans are finally awakening to the historic reality of systemic racism.

So against all odds, amid all the sickness and chaos, all the failed national leadership and the heroism of frontline workers, all the patience of those staying home and the persistence of protesters marching and kneeling and even lying in our streets--amid all this rises the hope that now, at long last, we might be ready to shed our past, to rip off that ancient scar and find true healing of our deep national wound and, with God’s grace, get to our nation’s promised land where we can, finally all together, breathe freedom’s fresh air. 

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2020

#478: Our Mission: Stay Home—But Stick Together

This moment feels perilous because it is. We feel helpless to control events, and moreover we are told to remain alone. Our only power lies in staying physically distant from each other, hoping isolation protects us. But are we really alone? And are we really so isolated?

The Spanish flu hit the year my father was born, and he has been gone nearly 8 years. In our lifetime we’ve never seen anything like this moment in its global scale, sudden spread, and long duration.

Most of us now are sheltering in place. When the orders went out to self-quarantine, I was surprised by the irony. “Quarantine” comes from “quarantino,” the 14th century Venetian policy of banning ships from landing at port for 40 days (“quaranta giorni” in Italian) during the Black Plague. The number 40 may not have been arbitrary, but was probably based on the 40 days Jesus fasted in the desert—and the 40 days of Lent. The irony: we are now under quarantine during Lent 2020, so most of its ceremonies—including the Holy Thursday, Good Friday, the Easter Vigil, and Easter Sunday services—have been cancelled.

Traditionally, many Christians have practiced “giving something up” for Lent. But this year we have no choice, as the First Baptist Church’s sign tells us:

When Pope Francis preached to an eerily empty Saint Peter’s Square last week, he first described our situation in terms of spiritual distress:

For weeks now it has been evening. Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities; it has taken over our lives, filling everything with a deafening silence and a distressing void, that stops everything as it passes by; we feel it in the air, we notice in people’s gestures, their glances give them away. We find ourselves afraid and lost. 

And then he also named the spiritual challenge that accompanies a crisis like this:

We are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other. On this boat… are all of us.

Francis is right. Now, as my own self-quarantine has taken hold and focused my thinking, I've realized that many moments in my own past echo the present crisis —— and those echoes seem to all teach the same lesson: whenever a crisis triggers physical isolation, it challenges our commitment to human solidarity more than ever.

None of those past moments were as grave or massive as this one—but they all posed a similar challenge: We must all row together.

 When I was born, in December 1948, my mother left the hospital knowing she could not take me home. My older sisters had contracted scarlet fever, and the family home was quarantined — — the front of the house even bore a poster warning people to stay away. 

So instead my mother and I spent the next few weeks staying with my mother's best high school friend, who just happened to be my father's only sister. My father could visit, then return to my sisters. I'm sure my mother and my sisters still suffered terribly being isolated from each other. 

And I’m sure this upset the usual happiness of having a new baby. But the support from my wider family—my aunt, uncle, and cousins--meant that we all got through that crisis.

In May 1955 the surgery to remove my tonsils was cancelled for fear of the Polio epidemic that was spreading among children even in hospitals, and especially during the warmer months. My tonsils never came out. That summer, the same fear of Polio infection kept many children, including my sisters, from seeing the Red Sox at Fenway park. It fell to parents to guard their kids against dangerous settings, which often meant keeping them at home.

One dark afternoon in November 1965, walking home from school, I saw all the street lights and house lights suddenly go off. Reaching home, I could see the power was out everywhere. But what did “everywhere” mean? We had no other means of communication at home, so we had no clue what was happening until a neighbor visited with a transistor radio, informing us that the entire eastern seaboard was blacked out, with no word on when power might return. 

1965: Manhattan in Blackout

In Boston itself, elevators in the new Prudential Tower (The tallest building in the world outside Manhattan at that time) stopped between floors, trapping dozens of passengers in the dark with no exit and no way of knowing what had gone wrong. After the crisis, stories told of many “foxhole friendships” created over the next 24 hours.

In March 1969 I Visited the Ann Franke house in Amsterdam during my Paris school break. I was shocked by how confined this small attic apartment felt, and the painted-over windows, concealing the life within, made the sense of isolation total. This was like the family’s prison, I thought. But then I spotted a small hole scratched in the paint of the window through which I could spy the back garden. My first thought: “At least this gave some contact with the outside world.” Then a second thought: “But that outside world was also a prison, just bigger.” Ann, of course, did not survive, but her diary did, and her father did, and even she gained two years of life in hiding--all due to the courageous willingness of another family to hide and feed them. Here again, solidarity supported those facing danger.

Boston’s “Blizzard of ‘78” was a perfect storm combining the greatest 24-hour snowfall in our history with hurricane force winds and astronomical high tides. It inundated and paralyzed an entire snowbound region for weeks.

Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis promptly imposed virtual martial law, calling out National Guard trucks and jeeps to rescue stranded folks. Military Police patrolled our neighborhoods, banning all drivers but medical and other essential personnel. 

Public transit shut down except for subway tunnels. No one could get to work, schools, family, friend, or stores except on foot.  This lockdown lasted two weeks, so neighbors banded together to share food, run errands, and organize cookouts in the snow. No internet relieved our isolation, although phones worked. For two weeks the entire population sacrificed mobility and comfort so emergency workers could rescue people from flooded homes and snowbound cars. Eventually the roads were cleared, and life return to normal amid gratitude for the common effort we all made faced with nature’s overwhelming power.

On September 11, 2001, my wife and daughter were both working in downtown Boston when the news broke that two airplanes from Boston had crashed into New York’s World Trade Center. Amid general fear of the unknown, and with an FBI anti-bomb truck raiding a hotel in Copley Square, they agreed not to risk riding Boston's transit system and returned home on foot, five miles through the anxious city streets. Since more than 400 Bostonians were killed in those planes, area communities and churches joined with New Yorkers to mourn the victims and support one another. One of my client parishes lost one parishioner in each plane—thus that community faced two funerals and two families to support.

In April 19, 2013, following the Boston Marathon bombing, Governor Deval Patrick requested all citizens to “shelter in place,” making Boston a ghost town overnight, so that the escaping terrorists could not hide among the general populace. 

April 19, 2013: "Shelter in Place"

The manhunt succeeded less than 24 hours later, and people began to emerge from their homes. The solidarity of an entire region acquired the label “Boston Strong.”

Over the years, public officials have also advised at-risk individuals to stay home during hurricanes, blizzards, and heat waves -- and urged family friends and neighbors to check on their welfare. In all such cases, people survived because isolation and solidarity became partners.

Of course, the current crisis is bigger than any of those, so the solidarity we need is greater than ever before.

Now we are seeing such solidarity everywhere. Businesses offer delivery, museums and activities offer online exhibitions and concerts, neighbors talk at a distance and offer help, friends and family share face time on the internet, people make donations to hospitals, shuttered workplaces, and institutions that are fighting the crisis.

We also see solidarity’s absence: people crowding beaches, hoarding essential goods, price gouging, demanding rents. 

As the crisis grows, so does the urgent need for solidarity: social distancing isn't tolerable without spiritual unity. As Francis said, we are all in the same boat.

Put another way: When power endangers us, we need to mobilize wisdom. One thing we know: this virus has become global, so the wisdom must be global too.

There will of course be life after isolation — — but what lessons will we take? Will we live better prepared for the next time? Will we reopen our borders to trade and movement? Will we withdraw into enclaves and shut others out? 

Next: A Timely Vision for Matching Power with Wisdom

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2020