Heaven Forbid We Expose Our Kids to Reality

So the latest seems to be that the political wrong wants their kids taught fairy tales and shielded from reality. Imagine – some schools and teachers are teaching what they call “critical race theory.” I would defy anyone to define it – academic language is like that and we fight endlessly about meaning and method. But never mind, whatever it is, that’s what they claim they’re attacking. In one form or another they want to make sure that their kids, and our kids, are never exposed to the idea that white people in America could have done something wrong or white cops either – wrong behavior is only for people of color but white people are by definition correct. Woopy, nothing new there.

In their churches, of course, of whatever denomination, confession is important, getting right with the Lord – in many faiths right there in front of the flock. But nations? Never? Our nation never makes a mistake, and therefore it never has to correct a mistake. It wouldn’t be hard to list the mistakes that mattered and still matter but it would be offensive to the thin skins of people who’s egos are wrapped in the color of their skin.

Of course those attacking schools and teachers are resorting to the same tactics they used against Congress on Dec. 6 – threats, intimidation, violence and murder. That too is nothing new. Years ago we had a struggle over teaching kids evolution. I don’t know how you go on in biology without understanding the process of genetic mutation. But I guess their kids didn’t need to inhabit any such sophisticated field.

Now the extreme wrong wants to whitewash – pun definitely intended – they want to whitewash the history of race relations in this country so that the white toughs never did anything wrong – when told to quit this or that, they followed the law instantly and still do. That’s a fairy tale. Dealing with racial discrimination, racial violence, racial injustice in all its forms has been a continuing struggle.

And teachers are now being harassed and threatened. I sympathize. But I also have a solution. Back in 1987 I published an article in the New York University Law Review titled In the Name of Patriotism. It’s subject was, as the subtitle read, the constitutionality, really the unconstitutionality, of “bending” history in public secondary schools. It was reprinted a couple of years later in a professional publication for history teachers. The idea was simple. I was not saying that teachers had to teach this or that. I just argued they had to be fair to both sides. Want to confront the goons from the hit squads that insist they never do anything for which they should be justly criticized? Simple – just tell the kids to report on both sides of the controversy. The kids won’t need much coaching and white supremacist parents aren’t going to like the results but whom are they going to fire for it? I don’t think their kids are going to end up with much respect for parents who cannot admit mistakes. But that’s their problem. They want to fight about it, let them get hurt in the battle – risking their kids’ disrespect.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 29, 2021.

Prejudice

Jack the Ripper and Mother Theresa are both likely to be in any large crowd in New York City and other densely populated places. Obviously, one can’t generalize. New Yorkers are neither all vicious like Jack the Ripper nor angels like Mother Theresa. Similarly you can’t generalize from either of them to people who shared their gender, color, national origin, religion or any other large group defined by biology or parentage. Their presence in New York crowds is simply a statistical probability – in any large crowd there are both wonderful and terrible people. I remember witnessing a dispute between two drivers, one of whom jumped out of his car and yelled as loudly as he could “You Iranian!” That was obviously silly, they didn’t know each other from Adam, but Iranian was the curse de jure. It was all too common but by erasing all the nuances, that kind of loose mudslinging didn’t help this country figure out how best to negotiate with Iran.

People may not know the history or want to admit it, but we all have skeletons in our racial, religious and ethnic closets. Africans and African-Americans are just as decent as every other group but some Africans are still raping, slaughtering and taking slaves in Africa. Many of us, regardless of our religious affiliations live in areas dominated by Catholics, but I’m not afraid that they’re going to enslave me because Catholic religious law, called cannon law, once described at length whom Christians could and could not enslave. Participation in the East and West African slave trade was fairly widespread among European and Middle Eastern countries as well as white Americans. My Iranian hosts when I was in the Peace Corps condemned what they believed was the continuing slave trade in Arab nations. But most of the people in all of those places are lovely and trustworthy. I’ve had my pockets picked in Spain and Chile but mostly met wonderful people in both. Prejudice doesn’t work as generalization and it doesn’t work as collective responsibility. If it did, all of us would falling through the sinkhole to hell.

Generalizing good or bad traits as characteristics of everyone of particular backgrounds is the very definition of prejudice and all of us have to fight that mentality. There has been a tendency lately for progressives in this country to join the nincompoops in making generic statements about Jews as if we are all responsible for trying to destroy the Palestinians and other crimes. Actually many of us have spoken out and fought against those evils. Generalizations don’t work with respect to Jews any more than they work with respect to Blacks. Some claim that Jews need no protection because they’re rich. Even if that were true, take note that Black success and wealth was a trigger for the massacres and burning of Black communities in Tulsa, OK, Rosewood, FL, Wilmington, NC and other places. Some sort of moral grid of who can be attacked is both stupid and dangerous.

American ideology reinforced by the three post-Civil War constitutional amendments is that we are all entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Both as law and as ideology that principle is tremendously important – no one, including those who think of themselves as progressive, gets a pass on that one.

Prejudice parts the sinkhole to hell.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 15, 2021.

The Stress of Race

There’s a moment when we first experience race. As a kid, I remember reading something about my team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, that described a player, not a star, but a good ballplayer, in a hotel room, trying to rub the black off his skin. That image was deeply disturbing. Even as a kid I understood or maybe what I read explained the deep hurt that racism inflicts.

I tried to find the story for this commentary and found a story about Charles Thomas, a Black teammate and lifelong friend of Branch Rickey when they both played for Notre Dame. It seemed different from what I remembered. My old memory may have merged with the Charles Thomas-Branch Rickey story but I suspect it was a common experience, one that made some of the first African-American fortunes in cosmetics and hair straighteners.

Risks in dealing with cops and white people are a constant fact of Black life. The Warren Court, that’s right, the Warren Court decided cops could stop and frisk people without what the constitution requires for a seizure or arrest. That meant all hell could and did break loose. Almost anything an African-American did or does can look suspicious to a cop – putting keys in one’s door, a kid running when an officer appears (actually quite a reasonable response), driving a nice car, or reaching for something in the car (even in response to a request from a cop), jogging in a white community, looking “furtive” (whatever that means) or standing together on a street corner – ambiguous actions that wouldn’t look troubling when whites do it, but combined with common prejudices become lethal suspicions. Blacks are left trying to prove discrimination, that authorities wouldn’t do that to whites. Good luck. Even when African-Americans prove discrimination, the Supreme Court says so what!

The Civil Rights Movement and the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King scared whites. Blacks were lynched for over a century, whole Black communities were burned to the ground and the people in them killed as in the notorious Tulsa massacre. Not to mention the Klan’s reign of terror on Blacks and their supporters before and during the Civil Rights Movement. But once whites were scared, everything else disappeared.

We don’t know from our own experience that African-Americans are regularly pulled over without reason. Most assume that cops have good reason to pull someone over. As a lawyer who worked in and for the Black community, I knew that was nonsense. But if you’re not there when it happens, how would you know? When a cop shoots a Black, how would a white know what happened unless someone takes a video from beginning to end? Are you going to believe a cop or an African-American? Judges will tell you that cops do not have a good reputation for honesty. And cops have told many of us in the law straight out that they violate the law and lie about it. It’s obvious when they repeatedly use stories that already passed judicial muster. They study the decisions and learn what to say. As one judge told me, we don’t know when they’re lying.

So just being Black on the street in America can be very stressful. No wonder, and how sad, that those young men were trying to rub the color off their skin, and that it became important to say that black is, in fact, beautiful.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 8, 2021.

Voting Rights Now

The Torah teaches “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Together, we can build a society in which everyone experiences wholeness, justice, and compassion. The #ForThePeopleAct and #JohnLewisVRAA will ensure every voice is heard equally and elections reflect the will of the people. @TheRAC #ForThePeopleAct #JohnLewisVRAA #PassS1Now