Fear And Loathing In The Extreme

I was behind a pickup truck as I turned from Huguenot Road onto Buford Road last week. The truck stopped at a traffic light and I pulled up behind it. On the back window was a large sign that read “Be Afraid” at the top. Then there was a drawing of Barack Obama in an angry pose. Below that were even bigger letters reading “Be Very Afraid.” I was impressed by the deep level of hate expressed by whoever designed and marketed that sign.

Last night the maveness called my attention to an anti-Obama ad she saw on the tube. Tonight I saw the same ad. The ad was sponsored by the ultra-conservative group, Let Freedom Ring. It was entitled “Never Find Out” and it basically painted the disaster to the world that would ensue if Barack Obama is elected president. It’s filled with some pretty outrageous and unsubstantiated claims. Or course, it is not the purpose of Let Freedom Ring to tell the truth. Rather, its purpose is obviously to scare people out of voting for Senator Obama. This, remember is the same Let Freedom Ring that thinks that George W is the greatest president ever, wants to undo Roe v. Wade, favors going back to the original intent of the Constitution, wants to limit the power of the judiciary, encourages the family as the basic building block of society (so long as the family centers on a heterosexual couple), and wants to restore prayer to our schools. Considering its agenda it is not surprising that Let Freedom Ring is afraid of Barack Obama.

Now, the maven has seen lots of election campaigns. (No, I am not old enough to remember the dirtiest of all elections—the 1800 contest between the Federalists and the Jeffersonians). And maybe my memory plays tricks with me. However, I get the feeling it is getting unusually nasty out there. I mean I remember the “mushroom cloud” ad that the Dems ran in 1964 to scare people out of voting for Barry Goldwater. It was pretty devastating. But, this year there seems to be a concerted effort by those on the right, including the Republican National Committee (whose ads are clearly the best in terms of effectiveness) and the McCain-Palin campaign, to personally attack Senator Obama and portray him as outside the spectrum of political acceptability. The supporters of McCain-Palin don’t have any real issues to talk about, so they are trying real hard to scare everybody. Their message—“electing Obama is unthinkable.”

Is there any way that we the voters can affect the level at which our political campaigns are run? How do we get candidates for public office to concentrate on the issues rather than character attacks? Well, campaigns run these fear and loathing ads because they think they work. The only way we can raise the level of the public debates in this country is to demonstrate to the candidates that we will not be fooled by their slime campaigns. We need to send a message to the Republican National Committee and to the McCain-Palin campaign, and of course to Let Freedom Ring on Election Day by voting for Barack Obama for president. And, if you happen to be one of those people who is exit-polled, tell them that you refuse to vote for a hate-monger or a candidate supported by hate-mongers.

Citizens of Virginia! On November 4 the choice is yours. Will you vote based on fear and loathing? Or will you look at the issues and vote for the man most qualified to be president? I urge you to vote for Obama because he is the real instrument of change. Voting for McCain is asking for four more years of Republic misrule.

America’s Disease

I was particularly upset to read the article in Tuesday’s Washington Post, Racist Incidents Give Some Obama Campaigners Pause. It seems that people campaigning for Senator Obama throughout our fair land have been experiencing some really nasty racist sentiment. They have been greeted with “raw racism and hostility”. They have been called racially derogatory names (I assume using the N word), and have “endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping” from people who are not happy that Senator Obama, a black man, is a leading candidate for the presidency. The article indicates that some Obama workers have heard statements like “"Hang that darky from a tree!" or "White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people." This is happening in the United States of America in the twenty-first century. It does not make me feel warm and fuzzy.

Obviously, I have neither the band width nor the time to thoroughly discuss race relations in America. (Hey, I’ve got a political campaign to run.) Nor can I discuss the other “ism” that has been demonstrated in the contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that Post commentator Marie Coco discusses in her op-ed today Misogyny I Won’t Miss. But, I would like to talk a bit about the strangeness of America’s obsession with the color of people’s skin. Actually, if it weren’t so tragic, it would almost seem comical. Here we are engaged in a struggle for national survival (let us not forget that there are people out there who want to destroy us), on a planet that is experiencing monumental climate change that will vastly change the quality of our lives, and we are concerned with the amount of melanin people have in their skin.

Discrimination based on pigmentation seems so strange. When driving in a rural area I sometimes notice that farms have cattle of different colors grazing in the same field. It gets me wondering whether the black cattle notice that the brown and white cattle look different, or do they just see each other’s “cattleness.” Hey, my dog doesn’t seem to notice that other canines are of different breeds. To her a dog is a dog. Yet for we humans skin color is of monumental importance. Right here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we kept millions of people in slavery for two and a half centuries based on the fact that their skin was darker than those of us whose ancestors came from Europe. For another hundred years our “white” majority maintained a system of separation and discrimination, again based on skin color. How strange!

The inanity of our color bias was amply demonstrated by the Star Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” televised back in 1969. The Enterprise discovers and takes on board Lokai, a political refugee from the planet Cheron. Lokai is a humanoid, but his body is half white and half black. Later, Bele, also from the planet Cheron and also half black and half white comes on board the Enterprise. He has been chasing Lokai across the galaxy for about 50,000 years. As the story develops we learn that on Cheron one group of black and white humanoids is fighting another group of black and white humanoids. When Captain Kirk makes the mistake of indicating to Bele that he and Lokai look the same to him Bele points out, "Isn't it obvious? Lokai is white on the right side. All his people are white on the right side." Eventually, the Enterprise goes to the planet Cheron to discover that all its residents have been destroyed in a war between the white-on-the-rights and the black-on-the-rights. Lokai and Bele are the only survivors of their planet. Rather than learning a lesson from the genocidal war that has destroyed their world, Lokai and Bele teleport down to Cheron to continue the battle.

Dark skin – light skin, does it really matter? Regardless of what the cattle or my dog notices, we humans do notice a person’s pigmentation when we first meet them. I know that when I encounter a person I cannot help but notice both their gender and the color of their skin. Is this something that is genetically programmed in us? I have watched this phenomenon in my four-year old granddaughter. She notices that some people have darker skins than she does. But, I’m not sure it is particularly important to her. She likes dolls and, once while shopping at Target, she informed us that she wanted a brown doll. She doesn’t seem to treat her brown doll any differently than her other dolls. So maybe pigmentation discrimination is not something we are born with. As Oscar Hammerstein pointed out so eloquently in South Pacific,

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

The United States has probably the most racially conscious society in the world. Our governments even require us to identify ourselves by our race. I’m not exactly sure why the federal or Commonwealth government has a right to know whether you and I are white or black or American Indian or Asian or Hispanic, but they are always asking. I don’t cooperate with such labeling. When I fill out a government form that asks me to pigeonhole myself, I always check the “other” box and write in the word “American.” It’s a very small step of civil disobedience but I think it’s necessary.

Well, dear reader, I don’t really know where to take this missive. Having reached my political awareness in the 1960s, I have always been inspired by the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr., that some day his children would be judged by the strength of their character not the color of their skin. Unfortunately, Dr. King’s dream remains unfulfilled. I think that there are too many people in our country who have too much invested in pigmentation consciousness to ever let it go. For some black people and some white people there must be a level of comfort in maintaining a society in which skin color really does matter. I hope that I live long enough to see Dr. King’s dream of a color-blind America fulfilled. But, I doubt it.

Shall Never the Twain Meet?

On Saturday I had a delightful time at the dedication of the newly renovated media center at Westover Hills Elementary School. It was a great party. In addition to this maven and his maveness, the Superintendent of Schools, School Board members, community partners of the school, faculty, and about 200 children and their parents were in attendance. With music, arts and crafts activities, a dance contest, pizza and lemonade everybody really enjoyed themselves.

I found myself looking at the children at one of the tables. They were beautiful. Their eyes were alive with joy, their mouths were smiling or laughing, their faces were filled with the wonder of learning. As I watched them, my mind connected with the picture I saw on the front of Section B of the TD last week. It was a picture of a group of students at Tuckahoe Elementary School watching a Richmond Opera production of Gilbert and Sullivan. The children in the picture were also beautiful. Their eyes too were alive with joy, their mouths were also smiling or laughing, their faces too were filled with the wonder of learning.

Two groups of elementary school children. Each having a great time. All of them alive with the joy and wonder of learning. Sitting in elementary schools located no more than five miles apart. Two identical groups of children . . . except that all the students in the Tuckahoe photograph had light skin, while almost all the children I saw at Westover Hills had dark skin.

The children in these two groups are not aware that the others exist. And, in all likelihood these light-skinned and dark-skinned children will not interact for at least the next ten to fifteen years, if ever. They will not have the opportunity to meet each other, to get to know each other, to play with each other, to learn with each other, to appreciate each other, and, perhaps, to love each other.

Will all of these light-skinned children at Tuckahoe and these dark-skinned children at Westover Hills eventually adopt the attitude held by their great-grandparents, grandparents and parents that the color of a person’s skin is a key factor in judging them? Will their ignorance of the other lead to these children acquiring, over time, a pigmentation prejudice?

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think children are color blind. I think they notice that some people have light skin and that others have dark skin. However, if they’re young enough, complexion just doesn’t matter. Two examples—

1- I do some tutoring at Westover Hills School. My skin is light. Most of the kids have dark skin. Do they notice the difference? I assume so. But they also notice that I am older than them, taller than them, a bit pudgy around the waist, and because I am older that I have acquired greater knowledge than they have. Do they have any notion that because of our skin colors I am better than they or they are better than me? I think not, especially my second graders.

2- My four-year old granddaughter often asks me to take her to the Westover Hills playground to play with the school children. She is the only light-skinned child there. Neither she nor the other kids seem to care. I know she recognizes complexion differences. Once in Target she asked that I buy her a “brown baby” for her doll collection. When she plays with her doll house, she has both African American and Caucasian dolls. She plays with them interchangeably, often having white dolls with black offspring and vice versa. Skin color just seems irrelevant to her.

So how do we prevent these children from catching the complexion bias that most of us adults suffer from? I suggest that we institute community building in all of our public schools. We need to schedule opportunities for our urban and suburban children to get together. Maybe, instead of a field trip to some colonial ruin, we should schedule a field trip to each other’s schools. Maybe, we can arrange for them to interact through video-conferencing. I am sure that you have an idea that might work.

If we do this, maybe we will have reached one of the dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Maybe we will achieve a society in which we are all judged by the strength of our characters, not by the color of our skins.

Still Dreaming

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963.

I have always been moved by these words. First, because Martin Luther King, Jr., was such a brilliant speaker, and when I read his words I can still hear him speaking. Second, because Dr. King’s words are so consistent with the words of Moses in Deuteronomy 16:20: “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” In the Hebrew, the repetition of the word “tzedek, tzedek” makes it clear that justice is not something we can just sit around and wait for—we must go out and seek it. To me, a nation in which we judge people without reference to their race, ethnicity, nationality or religion, would be a truly just society.

Unfortunately, last weekend we found out that even though more than forty years have passed since Dr. King’s speech, we are nowhere near having a color-blind society. As the results of the two NFL conference championship games were discussed, it was stressed that history was being made. The coaches of the two teams—Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears and Tony Dungy of the Indianapolis Colts—are both African Americans and therefore the winning coach of the Super Bowl will be African American.

There was little discussion of the brilliant seasons these two coaches had: No talk of their strategy; nothing about their ability to motivate their players; nothing about how hard it is to get their teams to the Super Bowl. No—the only thing relevant was that both coaches are African Americans.

The same day we were told that the Pittsburgh Steelers had hired Mike Tomlin to be their coach for next year. The story stressed that Tomlin will be the Steelers first African American head coach.

Sorry, Dr. King, your dream is still unfulfilled. We still judge people by the color of their skin.

Does this make sense in football? I can just imagine a 210 pound quarterback looking across the line of scrimmage at the four huge 320 pound defensive linemen who intend to break every bone in his body as soon as the ball is snapped. Then he looks at the five men on his offensive line and thinks how nice it is that his linemen are 40% Caucasian, 40% African American, and 20% Pacific Islander.

Are you kidding? All he cares about is whether those five guys are willing and able to protect his body from the oncoming horde. Any quarterback who concerns himself with the color, ethnicity, nationality or religion of his offensive linemen will probably end up on his butt in great pain.

We need to stop labeling people. We need to stop referring to each other as hyphenated Americans. We need to fulfill Dr. King’s dream and stop measuring people by the color of their skin, their ethnicity, their religion, or any other group identity. We need to recognize that Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy are great football coaches. Period!

Oh, I hope it is a wonderful Super Bowl.