I am not OK with this

VIEWPOINT

I grew up around here. I was born in 1973, just two years after the very first integrated high school graduation was held in Marion. I even spent my 4th-6th grade school years going to Phelix Elementary, what had been the “colored” school up until integration finally made its way to Crittenden County (15 years after “Brown v. Board”).

All my life, I’ve lived with, gone to school with, and worked with black people, and let me tell you, as a race, they have been through some terrible things. I mostly remember race growing up as not a big deal but as an accepted thing you might poke fun at or bring up as a stereotype. As a kid, I had friends of many different races. No, really. Just on my street there were white kids, black kids, Mexican kids, Korean kids… maybe other races I’m not even thinking about now because I didn’t really think about it back then, at least not in a way that mattered.

But looking back, I can now see the casual racism that was there. We used words without really even thinking back then that would get you “cancelled” these days. The “N-word” was just one of many racial slurs we used. And no race or nationality was exempt. I was in high school before I even knew “dago” was a offensive term. One of my best friends had the misfortune of being mixed-race. His mom was white, his father was not on the scene but was obviously black. Being mixed back then was somehow worse than being any one single ethnicity. He got all the “half-breed” and “oreo” and such and he got in a lot of fights as a result.

I remember every few years, we were given a new “acceptable” term to use for black people. “Negro” was in for a while, then “colored,” then my all-time favorite, “Afro-American.” It sounded cool. I wanted to be “Afro-American”… well, maybe not, but it was cool. That eventually morphed into “African American” and I guess now, we’re just going with “black,” which is simple and straight to the point, even if it does serve as a natural divider when used as the yin to the yang of being “white.”

I have a catalog of quality race-based jokes. We learned them from our parents and older siblings and schoolyard friends and passed them around like baseball cards. If you didn’t have a good “Polock” joke, what good were you, really. Typing this up, I’m wondering if there’s a group of people you’re allowed to make jokes about anymore. Are blond jokes still acceptable?

I said all that to say this… believe it or not, this is, right now here in 2020, is the absolute best that race relations have ever been in this country. How sad is that? You’ve go to admit, it’s pretty bad, but remember, black people first came here 400 years ago, and it started out on a pretty bad note. For 250 years, black people almost exclusively came here as slaves. We finally got around to stopping that about 150 years ago, but it did not lead to a period of great racial harmony. It would take three constitutional amendments and a handful of key Supreme Court rulings and other legislation, but “only” about 100 years later, we decided at all men were, in fact, created equal.

That was over 50 years ago. In the five decades since the Civil Rights Era, we’ve made exactly this much progress: Watts Race Riots (1965), Miami Race Riots (1980), L.A. Riots, stemming from the Rodney King verdict (1992), Cincinnati Riots (2001), Ferguson, Missouri Riots (2014), Baltimore Riots (2015), Charlotte Protests (2016)…

The frequency and intensity of these incidents is obvious. And the funny thing is (and by funny, I mean it’s not funny at all) is that when protests turn violent, folks say “Why can’t there be peaceful protests?” but when there are peaceful protests, those same folks ask, “Why do y’all think you have to protest everything?”

Rioting is wrong. Looting is wrong. Violence as a response to violence and injustice in response to injustice is not the answer. That will not result in change. That will result in arrests, injuries, property damage, possibly death and definite continued animosity.

But, something must be done. Something must change. I say this not because there is a voice, coming from some 15 percent of our population that has had enough (and yes, 400 years is enough) of being seen as “less than.”

I don’t have an easy answer. I wish I did. But I know that if something good doesn’t come from this most recent incident, something bad surely will.