Renewable Revolution

Repetitive Motion Disorder: Black Reality and White Denial in America

by Tim Wise

I suppose there is no longer much point in debating the facts surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown. First, because Officer Darren Wilson has been cleared by a grand jury, and even the collective brilliance of a thousand bloggers pointing out the glaring inconsistencies in his version of events that August day won’t result in a different outcome. And second, because Wilson's guilt or innocence was always somewhat secondary to the larger issue: namely, the issue of this gigantic national inkblot staring us in the face, and what we see when we look at it---and more to the point, why?

Because it is a kind of racial Rorschach (is it not?) into which each of these cases---not just Brown but all the others, from Trayvon Martin to Sean Bell to Patrick Dorismond to Aswan Watson and beyond---inevitably and without fail morph. That we see such different things when we look upon them must mean something. That so much of white America cannot see the shapes made out so clearly by most of black America cannot be a mere coincidence, nor is it likely an inherent defect in our vision. Rather, it is a socially-constructed astigmatism that blinds so many to the way in which black folks often experience law enforcement.

(More below...)
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Not to overdo the medical metaphors, but as with those other cases noted above, so too in this one did a disturbing number of whites manifest something of a repetitive motion disorder---a reflex nearly as automatic as the one that leads so many police (or wanna-be police) to fire their weapons at black men in the first place. It is a reflex to rationalize the event, defend the shooter, trash the dead with blatantly racist rhetoric and imagery, and then deny that the incident or one's own response to it had anything to do with race.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending around those phony pictures claimed to be of Mike Brown posing with a gun, or the one passed off as Darren Wilson in a hospital bed with his orbital socket blown out.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how quickly those pictures were believed to be genuine by so many who distributed them on social media, even when they weren’t, and how difficult it is for some to discern the difference between one black man and another.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about how rapidly many bought the story that Wilson had been attacked and bloodied, even as video showed him calmly standing at the scene of the shooting without injury, and even as the preliminary report on the incident made no mention of any injuries to Officer Wilson, and even as Wilson apparently has a history of power-tripping belligerence towards those with whom he interacts, and a propensity to distort the details of those encounters as well. .

Reflex:  To deny that there was anything racial about Cardinals fans taunting peaceful protesters who gathered outside a playoff game to raise the issue of Brown’s death, by calling them crackheads or telling them that it was only because of whites that blacks have any freedoms at all, or that they should “get jobs” or “pull up their pants,” or go back to Africa.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial about sending money to Darren Wilson’s defense fund and then explaining one's donation by saying what a service the officer had performed by removing a “savage” like Brown from the community, or by referring to Wilson’s actions as “animal control.”

Reflex:  To deny that there was anything racial about reaction to evidence of weed in Brown’s lifeless body, as with Trayvon’s before him, even though whites use drugs at the same rate as blacks, but rarely have that fact offered up as a reason for why we might deserve to be shot by police.

Reflex: To deny that there was anything racial behind the belief that the head of the Missouri Highway Patrol, brought in to calm tensions in Ferguson, was throwing up gang signs on camera, when actually, it was a hand sign for the black fraternity of which that officer is a member; and to deny that there is anything racial about one's stunning ignorance as to the difference between those two things.

Reflex: To deny that there's anything at all racial about the way that even black victims of violence---like Brown, like Trayvon Martin, and dozens of others---are often spoken of more judgmentally than even the most horrific of white perpetrators, the latter of whom are regularly referred to as having been nice, and quiet, and smart, and hardly the type to kill a dozen people, or cut them into little pieces, or eat their flesh after storing it in the freezer for several weeks.

And most of all, the reflex to deny that there is anything racial about the lens through which we typically view law enforcement; to deny that being white has shaped our understanding of policing and their actions in places like Ferguson, even as being white has had everything to do with those matters. Racial identity shapes the way we are treated by cops, and as such, shapes the way we are likely to view them. As a general rule, nothing we do will get us shot by law enforcement: not walking around in a big box store with semi-automatic weapons (though standing in one with an air rifle gets you killed if you're black); not assaulting two officers, even in the St. Louis area, a mere five days after Mike Brown was killed; not pointing a loaded weapon at three officers and demanding that they---the police---"drop their ****ing guns;" not committing mass murder in a movie theatre before finally being taken alive; not proceeding in the wake of that event to walk around the same town in which it happened carrying a shotgun; and not killing a cop so as to spark a "revolution," and then leading others on a two month chase through the woods before being arrested with only a few scratches.

To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don't. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the twentieth century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department's killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it's a fact. And the fact that white people don't know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what's wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don't have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won't be on the test, so to speak.

We can remain ignorant to the ubiquity of police misconduct, thinking it the paranoid fever dream of irrational “race-card” playing peoples of color, just like we did after the O.J. Simpson verdict. When most of black America responded to that verdict with cathartic relief---not because they necessarily thought Simpson innocent but because they felt there were enough questions raised about police in the case to sow reasonable doubt---most white folks concluded that black America had lost its collective mind. How could they possibly believe that the LAPD would plant evidence in an attempt to frame or sweeten the case against a criminal defendant? A few years later, had we been paying attention (but of course, we were not), we would have had our answer. It was then that the scandal in the city's Ramparts division broke, implicating dozens of police in over a hundred cases of misconduct, including, in one incident, shooting a gang member at point blank range and then planting a weapon on him to make the incident appear as self-defense. So putting aside the guilt or innocence of O.J,, clearly it was not irrational for black Angelenos (and Americans) to give one the likes of Mark Fuhrman side-eye after his own racism was revealed in that case.

I think this, more than anything, is the source of our trouble when it comes to racial division in this country. The inability of white people to hear black reality---to not even know that there is one and that it differs from our own---makes it nearly impossible to move forward. But how can we expect black folks to trust law enforcement or to view it in the same heroic and selfless terms that so many of us apparently do? The law has been a weapon used against black bodies, not a shield intended to defend them, and for a very long time.

In his contribution to Jill Nelson’s 2000 anthology on police brutality, scholar Robin D.G Kelley reminds us of the bill of particulars.* As Kelley notes, in colonial Virginia, slave owners were allowed to beat, burn, and even mutilate slaves without fear of punishment; and throughout the colonial period, police not only looked the other way at the commission of brutality against black folks, but were actively engaged in the forcible suppression of slave uprisings and insurrections. Later, after abolition, law enforcement regularly and repeatedly released black prisoners into the hands of lynch mobs and stood by as their bodies were hanged from trees, burned with blowtorches, body parts amputated and given out as souvenirs. In city after city, north and south, police either stood by or actively participated in pogroms against African American communities: in Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, Akron and Birmingham, just to name a few. In one particularly egregious anti-black rampage in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, police shot blacks dead in the street as part of an **** of violence aimed at African Americans who had moved from the Deep South in search of jobs. One hundred and fifty were killed, including thirty-nine children whose skulls were crushed and whose bodies were thrown into bonfires set by white mobs. In the 1920s, it is estimated that half of all black people who were killed by whites, were killed by white police officers.

But Kelley continues: In 1943 white police in Detroit joined with others of their racial compatriots, attacking blacks who had dared to move into previously all-white public housing, killing seventeen. In the 1960s and early '70s police killed over two dozen members of the Black Panther Party, including those like Mark Clark and Fred Hampton in Chicago, asleep in their beds at the time their apartment was raided. In 1985, Philadelphia law enforcement perpetrated an all-out assault on members of the MOVE organization, bombing their row houses from state police helicopters, killing eleven, including five children, destroying sixty-one homes and leaving hundreds homeless.

These are but a few of the stories one could tell, and which Kelley does in his extraordinary recitation of the history---and for most whites, we are without real knowledge of any of them. But they and others like them are incidents burned into the cell memory of black America. They haven’t the luxury of forgetting, even as we apparently cannot be bothered to remember, or to learn of these things in the first place. Bull Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, Deputy Cecil Price: these are not far-away characters for most black folks. How could they be? After all, more than a few still carry the scars inflicted by men such as they. And while few of us would think to ridicule Jews for still harboring less than warm feelings for Germans some seventy years later---we would understand the lack of trust, the wariness, even the anger---we apparently find it hard to understand the same historically-embedded logic of black trepidation and contempt for law enforcement in this country. And this is so, even as black folks' negative experiences with police have extended well beyond the time frame of Hitler’s twelve year Reich, and even as those experiences did not stop seventy years ago, or even seventy days ago, or seventy minutes.

Can we perhaps, just this once, admit our collective blind spot? Admit that there are things going on, and that have been going on a very long time, about which we know nothing? Might we suspend our disbelief, just long enough to gain some much needed insights about the society we share? One wonders what it will take for us to not merely listen but actually to hear the voices of black parents, fearful that the next time their child walks out the door may be the last, and all because someone---an officer or a self-appointed vigilante---sees them as dangerous, as disrespectful, as reaching for their gun? Might we be able to hear that without deftly pivoting to the much more comfortable (for us) topic of black crime or single-parent homes? Without deflecting the real and understandable fear of police abuse with lectures about the danger of having a victim mentality---especially ironic given that such lectures come from a people who apparently see ourselves as the always imminent victims of big black men?

Can we just put aside all we think we know about black communities (most of which could fit in a thimble, truth be told) and imagine what it must feel like to walk through life as the embodiment of other people's fear, as a monster that haunts their dreams the way Freddie Kreuger does in the movies? To be the physical representation of what marks a neighborhood as bad, a school as bad, not because of anything you have actually done, but simply because of the color of your skin? Surely that is not an inconsequential weight to bear. To go through life, every day, having to think about how to behave so as not to scare white people, or so as not to trigger our contempt---thinking about how to dress, and how to walk and how to talk and how to respond to a cop (not because you're wanting to be polite, but because you'd like to see your mother again)---is work; and it's harder than any job that any white person has ever had in this country. To be seen as a font of cultural contagion is tantamount to being a modern day leper.

And then perhaps we might spend a few minutes considering what this does to the young black child, and how it differs from the way that white children grow up. Think about how you would respond to the world if that world told you every day and in a million ways before lunch how awful you were, how horrible your community was, and how pathological your family. Because that's what we're telling black folks on the daily. Every time police call the people they are sworn to protect animals, as at least one Ferguson officer was willing to do on camera---no doubt speaking for many more in the process---we tell them this. Every time we shrug at the way police routinely stop and frisk young black men, even though in almost all cases they are found to have done nothing wrong, we tell them this. Every time we turn away from the clear disparities in our nation's schools, which relegate the black and brown to classrooms led by the least experienced teachers, and where they will be treated like inmates more than children hoping to learn, we tell them this. Every time Bill O'Reilly pontificates about "black culture" and every time Barack Obama tells black men---but only black men---to be better fathers, we tell them this: that they are uniquely flawed, uniquely pathological, a cancerous mass of moral decrepitude to be feared, scorned, surveilled, incarcerated and discarded. The constant drumbeat of negativity is so normalized by now that it forms the backdrop of every conversation about black people held in white spaces when black folks themselves are not around. It is like the way your knee jumps when the doctor taps it with that little hammer thing during a check-up: a reflex by now instinctual, automatic, unthinking.

And still we pretend that one can think these things---that vast numbers of us can---and yet be capable of treating black folks fairly in the workforce, housing market, schools or in the streets; that we can, on the one hand, view the larger black community as a chaotic maelstrom of iniquity, while still managing, on the other, to treat black loan applicants, job applicants, students or random strangers as mere individuals. That we can somehow thread the needle between our grand aspirations to equanimity as Americans and our deeply internalized biases regarding broad swaths of our nation's people.

But we can't; and it is in these moments---moments like those provided by events in Ferguson---that the limits of our commitment to that aspirational America are laid bare. It is in moments like these when the chasm between our respective understandings of the world---itself opened up by the equally cavernous differences in the way we've experienced it---seems almost impossible to bridge. But bridge them we must, before the strain of our repetitive motion disorder does permanent and untreatable damage to our collective national body.



*Robin D.G. Kelley, “Slangin’ Rocks…Palestinian Style,” in Police Brutality: An Anthology, Jill Nelson, ed., (New York, W. W. Norton, 2000), 21-59.

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/11/25/1345457/-Repetitive-Motion-Disorder-Black-Reality-and-White-Denial-in-America



 

The Lie About When Slavery Ended
by Denise Oliver Velez

SNIPPETS:

I hate lies. History books are still full of them.

Lies about the founding of this country. Lies about the treatment of Native Americans. Lies about the Civil War and slavery.

One of the most important things that takes place each year in Black History Month is the outing of lies and attempts to correct the distorted history we have been taught.

Slavery in the US did not end with the emancipation proclamation.

Slavery did not end in 1865. 


Thanks to PBS, we have an accessible documentary to address the truth. Too many textbooks distributed to schoolchildren are as yet unrevised. So we have to take it upon ourselves to spread some truth.

Directed by Sam Pollard, produced by Catherine Allan and Douglas Blackmon, written by Sheila Curran Bernard, the tpt National Productions project is based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Blackmon.

Slavery by Another Name challenges one of our country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.

Based on Blackmon’s research, Slavery by Another Name spans eight decades, from 1865 to 1945, revealing the interlocking forces in both the South and the North that enabled this “neoslavery” to begin and persist. Using archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments filmed on location in Alabama and Georgia, it tells the forgotten stories of both victims and perpetrators of neoslavery and includes interviews with their descendants living today

If you have not yet seen it, Slavery By Another Name, is available in its entirety online. 


The first book to expose this travesty in our history was written as a novel, by James John L Spivak and serialized in several newspapers in the 1930's.

Agelbert NOTE: I corrected the name error in the article. It's John, not James.

John Louis Spivak (June 13, 1897 – September 30, 1981)

Spivak was a firebrand leftist journalist. Many of the photos Blackmon has used are from his groundbreaking book. His papers are housed at Syracuse University.

He was an investigative reporter and author whom fellow muckraker Lincoln Steffens described as "the best of us," was most concerned with the problems of the working class and the spread of fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States from the 1920s through the 1940s...

Spivak traveled throughout the South in the early 1930s interviewing prison camp officials and photographing camp atrocities and their corresponding punishment records. His novel, Georgia Nig ger, depicting the brutality of prison camp chain gangs was serialized in the Daily Worker.



His 1935 exposé in the New Masses charged a congressional committee with deliberately suppressing evidence of an offer made to Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler by Wall Street financiers to lead a military coup against the U.S. government and replace it with a fascist regime.


http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/spivak-NewMasses.pdf


He also investigated the anti-Semitic and financial activities of Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic radio priest who founded the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak, Michigan.

Agelbert NOTE: Empathy Deficit Disorder has a LONG HISTORY in American culture, along with the vigorous denial of GUILT and RESPONSIBLILITY for BENEFITING from the exploitation of people, animals and nimby profit over planet.    

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/27/1068168/-The-lie-about-when-slavery-ended

Second Confederate Flag

According to "William T. Thompson of Savannah, the creator of the second Confederate flag, the emblem he devised would be "hailed by the civilized world as the white man's flag." As rediscovered by Jonathan Wilson, history professor at Syracuse University, Thompson declared in explaining his design, "As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race."  

The Confederate Flag Stars and Bars Deconstructed
 

SNIPPETS:
Flags first emerged in human history as banners of war. They would convey allegiances of battle combatants and provide a standard under which wavering or scattered troops could rally.

The earliest flags were simple colors, until the introduction of commonly understood icons to convey meaning. The flag of Denmark, for example, one of the oldest national flags in Europe, prominently features a cross in white on a red background, a Christian symbol.

Given how many Europeans nations share a common Christian heritage, Dannebrog, meaning "the flag of the Danes" or "the red flag," isn't the only national banner to incorporate the cross. Switzerland, Norway, Finland and others European countries include it as well into their own designs.

The Saltire

The Confederate flag incorporates a variation on the cross in its design. Known as the saltire, the diagonal cross represents the crucifixion of St. Andrew, who insisted to his Roman executioners he was unworthy of the same death as Jesus Christ. The apostle is the patron saint of Scotland, which is why the cross is used on the Scottish national flag.


Scottish Flag

The Confederate flag deliberately takes its cue from the Scottish flag, owing to the Scottish background of many Southerners in 19th-century America. In this one regard, the flag does carry echoes of a religious and cultural heritage, but there's more to the story.



Original Confederate Flag

Stars

In addition to the saltire, the Confederate battle flag also contains 13 stars in its modern incarnation.

The original Confederate national flag, seen here, similarly incorporated stars into its design. It began with seven, each one representing the original Confederate states: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. As new states joined the Confederacy, more stars were added. The stars in other words are a token of membership to a rebel nation that no longer exists.



Did the Klu Klux Klan employ the Stars and Bars as a symbol of Southern pride, history and heritage? I DON'T THINK SO.

The Real Meaning

Stars and Bars boosters typically claim the flag is a symbol of Southern pride, history and heritage. Nothing contained within the flag itself necessarily discounts that argument.

However, flags don't just appear out of nowhere (except for maybe the Danish flag). These banners have designers. According to William T. Thompson of Savannah, the creator of the second Confederate flag seen here, the emblem he devised would be "hailed by the civilized world as the white man's flag." As rediscovered by Jonathan Wilson, history professor at Syracuse University, Thompson declared in explaining his design, "As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race."

Those words reveal the flag's racist origins -- and why the Ku Klux Klan employed it as a symbol, and why Dylann Roof posted pictures of himself with the banner to identify with the white supremacy movement.


Full article here:
http://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/confederate-flag-stars-and-bars-deconstructed-150626.htm

Agelbert NOTE: Despite the OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE of what the confederate flag is REALLY ALL ABOUT, you will continue to have folks that claim that Germans who want to fly the swastika Southerners who want to fly the Stars and Bars are just doing it for pride, history and heritage...

UH HUH, SURE.

Thank you Rep. Jenny Horne , for telling those foot dragging, bigoted, double taking racist sadistic apologists for murder, mayhem and slavery why that God Damned flag has to be taken down AND live in INFAMY.   


South Carolina Approves Bill to Remove Confederate Flag 
 
—By Inae Oh| Thu Jul. 9, 2015 8:42 AM EDT

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/07/south-carolina-approves-bill-remove-confederate-flag-jefferson-davis

State notifies Reach Up recipients of $125 a month reduction in benefits 

Elizabeth Hewitt Jul. 19 2015, 4:18 pm 23 Comments

Agelbert NOTE: The article gives the surface facts but the comments tell the real story. A few Empathy Deficit Disordered dissemblers try to make a case that the "poor get too much". Vermonters with a conscience then proceed to methodically make mincemeat of said fallacious arguments. 

http://vtdigger.org/2015/07/19/state-notifies-reach-up-recipients-of-125-a-month-reduction-in-benefits/?

Here are Reed’s five recommendations for Sanders:

1. Stop saying you are from a white state. “Acknowledge there are people of color living in Vermont,” instead of “reinforcing a narrative that people of color simply do not count” here.

2. Meet with groups of Vermonters of color across the state “to learn of the micro-aggressions, micro-invalidations, and micro-injustices we experience.”

3. Meet with organizations governed and managed by people of color who are “engaged in the struggle to dismantle structural racism in Vermont” and learn from them.

4. Meet with white Vermonters who are operating at a consciously skillful level to learn the “challenges they face while helping their well-intentioned white colleagues.”

5. Stop talking about your experience in the civil rights movement “like an Eagle Scout showing off his merit badges” and instead focus on actions to deal with racial injustices today.

http://vtdigger.org/2015/07/30/vermont-diversity-leaders-have-advice-for-sanders/

Agelbert NOTE: The comments are a real eye opener for any racist reading them. But since I am of color and live in Vermont, I am gratified to see more and more Vermonters get it AND do not remain silent when fellow Vermonters spew racist code speech comments. 


Rich Lachapelle
July 30, 2015 at 5:25 pm
Bernie would be wise to completely ignore the advice of these local “race hustlers”. With his long track record of promoting social justice in general he has nothing to apologize for, especially for his own lack of skin melanin. Race relations in Vermont and in the US will only improve when we all stop our long, tireless obsession with the “race issue” and with the liberal culture of victimology in general. The incessant focusing on race by the lamestream media and by our current President has set race relations back 100 years. The criticisms of Bernie by these charlatans for his supposed lack of empathy in this area are in themselves a “micro-aggression”.

John Davy
July 31, 2015 at 8:31 am
Unfortunately there’s a long history of “social justice in general” not being shared with black Americans and other people of color (not that that’s likely to bother anyone who thinks Obama is responsible for setting back race relations. Sheesh.) By the way, literally zero people have criticized Sen. Sanders for his “lack of skin melanin.” I love Bernie but his pointing to his actions 50 years ago as evidence that he’s invested in racial justice here and now is a little embarrassing.

Mari Cordes
July 31, 2015 at 1:29 pm
These are hardly “race hustlers” and “charlatans”. These are our friends, neighbors, community members and leaders calling on all of us, and in this case Bernie Sanders, to stop the ignorance, stop the defensiveness, and stop the denial that race IS, actually, still an issue. The fact that you call this critical work for our community health “incessant focusing” just shines the light on your own ignorance. I’m very grateful that Curtiss wrote these recommendations, and am very grateful for the brave many that are speaking out. And I wish that President Obama had spoken more publicly and earlier on the race issue – he actually has said quite little until the media finally picked up on how many black people are being killed for nothing other than their race. Oh, and I’m white, and not a charlatan.

Vicki Garrison
July 31, 2015 at 7:24 am
I agree with the sentiments of this article. Sanders has historically spoken about economic inequality without consideration for how this is impacted by race, racism, privilege, and power in American politics. This is because he approaches the issue of economics from his privileged lens without ability to connect with or regard for other equally valid perspectives, impacted by race. Bernie’s one-size-fits-all approach to economic inequity fails to acknowledge and address the historical and current reality and impact of racism on the lives of people of color. In essence, Bernie’s approach is offensive and endorses colorblind racism ideology.

As a native black Vermonter, I was familiar with Bernie Sanders as a child, as he frequented and collaborated (in some capacity) with The King Street Youth Center, an organization my mother co-founded. Because of this young real life connection with Bernie, I maintained interest in and followed his political career with the desire to support his political agenda (as I knew my mother had in the early 80’s). This, however, posed an internal conflict for me, that has increased throughout the years, because Bernie’s agenda and messages have remained consistent AND these have been consistently void of me, void of people of color, which is extremely problematic/privileged/racist.

What is equally problematic/privileged/racist is that after not mentioning or responding to resounding nationwide concerns related to racial inequality during the launching of his presidential campaign, Bernie, three months in, added some superficial, safe, and, potentially, minimizing sentiments about the “tragic history of racism” in this country and progress obtained through civil rights activism. As a person of color, this is too little too late and not enough, as Bernie continues to fail to meaningfully consider and address how people of color are included in and impacted by his vision, his agenda, as a presidential candidate.

Why? Because he can’t. The fact that Bernie marched with Martin Luther King means little to nothing because his ally-ship is perceived to have ended there. He has consistently demonstrated a lack of care for, engagement with, and understanding of people of color throughout his political career that manifested into the continuation of us being rendered invisible and our needs mute as evidenced by his political voice, vision, and accomplishments.

In essence, Bernie’s political conduct to date serves as a metaphor for racism in this country where complacency is the norm to meet the needs of the dominate culture (privilege), engagement in “race talk” is self-serving, and where black lives don’t matter.    

Bernie Sanders needs to unpack his white privilege and learn how to deconstruct and reconstruct his own vision to include voices and needs of people of color before he can be a presidential candidate that has the ability to serve ALL people and impact racial progress in America. As a child, I looked up to Bernie Sanders and viewed him with hope. As a young adult, I maintained hope that I would one day be reflected in his vision. As a mature adult, Bernie has proven to me there is no hope for people of color in his politics.

Jill Michaels
July 31, 2015 at 7:44 am
I would also suggest that all Vermonters watch this compelling video by a young woman of color who recently relocated to Vermont and entered high school in Chittenden County. The video was shown this spring at the WRJ White River Indy Festival:

Agelbert NOTE: Did you know that Mike Brown "deserved to be killed because he was black"? Did you know that "black people can't afford shoes like those"? Did you know that ONLY white people can get away (i.e. NOT feel like they are insulting you are acting like an ass hole) with saying things like that to a person of color or in their presence? THAT FEELING OF ENTITLEMENT IS INTRINSIC to WHITE PRIVILEGE! But, if you are white,  you just never noticed that, did you? SURE...
 


Justin Boland
July 31, 2015 at 12:13 pm
This is excellent and fascinating – thank you so much for bringing it to my attention.

Agellbert NOTE: Judith McLaughlin's comment below is an excellent example of buck passing double talk presented as an "everybody does it" excuse OFTEN USED by YOU KNOW WHO to avoid the very selective and cruel prejudice applied to children (and adults) of color in the USA in general (and Vermont in particular). Judith's world is egocentric based. She is unconcerned about anybody but herself and her offspring. She tries to cover her egocentrism with a cheap empathy deficit disordered generalization. Closed minded types like her will always tell you to "move somewhere else" when confronted with the truth that they are dissembling in order to avoid facing their bigotry. So it goes. 

Judith McLaughlin   
July 31, 2015 at 12:45 pm
The same thing happened to my stepdaughter when she had to locate to a new school.
The kids in her new school were horrible to her – they made fun of her, laughed behind her back, told lies about her, ignored her, etc..etc.. This went on for an entire year.
It didn’t matter that she was white and from a well to do family.
Kids can and will be cruel to anyone. 



Jess Wisloski
July 31, 2015 at 2:07 pm
Thanks for sharing Jill!

Ann Raynolds 
July 31, 2015 at 7:59 am
Dear Rich,
I reach out to you from the vantage point of a white American who lived & worked years in the predominantly black neighborhood of Boston (Roxbury). You know not of what you are speaking. We are privileged as white people and some do not even recognize this. It is ONLY through open discussion, engagement with the realities almost daily confronting our fellow Americans of color that we can resolve injustices and fears.

Their concerns are real and should be ours as well. People of color face danger just living anywhere in America, and I would be glad to meet with anyone to discuss the pain I have experienced firsthand from experiences of friends of color. Mr. Reed’s advice to Bernie is right on target, and, being a Sanders supporter, I do believe Bernie is looking honestly at his lack of knowledge of how it has been to live with dark skin color for over 400 years in this country.

I am old, I returned to my home country of Vermont when I thought I was dying (and I’m still kicking 15 years later), but I am always activated to speak out when I read such things as your comment. I continue my visceral sorrow and upset when I read comments such as yours — all too prevalent I fear.

I reach to you not with anger but with compassion to ask that you open your mind, because you are probably writing from the vantage point of a well-intentioned person who simply does not know or understand that these issues are not going away if we white people ignore them (most black people live with them and so cannot ignore them.). If you are not, as apparently you are not, following the tragedies to African-Americans at the hands of the police this year, then please consider reading online about the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center on the threats to anyone of color by groups of white supremacists and worse.

Nate Orshan (@Winooski)
July 31, 2015 at 1:15 pm
Ann, thanks so much for working compassion into your response. I truly believe that working from an attempt to be compassionate, especially to people at whom I’d rather just yell, is the only lasting way to effect change.
May I also add Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” to the list? http://newjimcrow.com/

Jess Wisloski
July 31, 2015 at 2:11 pm
Thanks for that share Nate – I can add this for some context.

Janice Prindle
July 31, 2015 at 8:22 am
Well, Mr. Lachapelle, you’ve just proved Mr. Reed’s point. Racism is indeed alive and well in Vermont, as in our nation.

I am appalled at your characterization of Curtiss Reed and his organization as “hustlers,” not to mention your bizarre view that focusing on the problem of racism in America is due to a “liberal culture of victimology” and has “set race relations back 100 years.”

Do you know what was happening to blacks in this country 100 years ago, Mr. L. ? Lynchings, Jim Crow laws, extreme segregation and every trick in the book to prevent blacks from voting — not just in the South, either. No indeed, liberals and other decent Americans of every color, concerned about racial equality, have not “set us back,” they have been the ones to move us forward. But not far enough.

When people of color can be denounced as “charlatans” for speaking up about the racism that they experience daily, even in “liberal” Vermont, it’s pretty clear racism continues to be alive and well. The national statistics on employment, wages, and police shootings support Reed’s statement that a progressive candidate like Bernie needs to speak to all Americans, honestly, acknowledging that America has a racism problem — not a race, but a racism problem.

I know that being white and of the same generation as Bernie, it is easier to see the progress made in our lifetime than it is to truly experience what it’s like to be a person of color in America today. Mr. Reed is right, we can’t expect “brownie points” for righteous actions 50 years ago.

I think Bernie is smart enough and cares enough to take this advice, in fact, I understand he already has, in a more recent speech, begun to “connect the dots” between the economic issues and racism.

Wanda Hines
July 31, 2015 at 9:46 am
Thank you Mr. Reed….clear and concise. As a Vermont African-American woman, it is a shared perspective I’ve witnessed all to often first hand over the last few decades. With this in mind, I especially concur with your following recommendations:
1. Stop saying you are from a white state. “Acknowledge there are people of color living in Vermont,” instead of “reinforcing a narrative that people of color simply do not count” here.
2. Meet with groups of Vermonters of color across the state “to learn of the micro-aggressions, micro-invalidations, and micro-injustices we experience.”

John Greenberg
July 31, 2015 at 12:32 pm
Bravo Curtiss Reed!
 
Lindsay Wenkouni
July 31, 2015 at 2:33 pm
As a Vermonter of color I also agree with the sentiments of this article. Thank you Curtiss Reed.

Michael T Heath
July 31, 2015 at 2:37 pm
Wislowski delivers a first-rate examination of the erstwhile presidential candidate and his better-late-than-never conversion to broaching the touchy subject. Like a true socialist, Mr Sanders has tunnel vision around class struggle – perhaps believing that ALL issues spring from economic ones.  Certainly if everybody made the same wages and lived in the same neighborhoods we’d have fewer problems, but we don’t and don’t, with enough egregious violence still lurking as if the KKK controlled police and politicians and armed citizens cost to coast. Sanders is intelligent, but wisdom comes from experience. He hasn’t gone through the same hell black folks face daily, nor does he sincerely empathize with them yet. Grow a bit, Mr Senator. We will notice for sure.

Ron Pulcer
July 31, 2015 at 3:30 pm
Regarding: “Sanders was caught off guard, and it has been reported that he shouted at the protesters, …”
I actually watched a video of Sen. Sanders at NetRoots, the day after the event. Yes, he was caught off guard by the protesters interrupting the event. But he was NOT “shouting” back at them. He raised his voice to try to be heard. He even stated that he did not want to shout at the audience. So much for “it has been reported that”.

Also, Sen. Sanders has acknowledged that these protesters are bringing up a very valid issue and concern on several subsequent interview programs, and stated his willingness to listen and work with them.”

I do agree with Mr. Reed’s first 4 points. On the fifth point about Bernie Sanders history during the 1960s, from the perspective of Mr. Reed and other commenters, Bernie’s work during Civil Rights era of 1960s might be old history, old news, or not as meaningful today to them. However, it does point out Sanders differences with other Presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican. Voters in other states might be interested or surprised to learn about this. So to go completely silent on that aspect of Mr. Sanders life is probably not the way to go. Yes, he could tone it down or drop it from some speeches. There’s got to be a happy medium to reach voters in other states who don’t know much about Bernie Sanders.

From Pinterest:
http://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/0d/01/8b/0d018bd8898e322cb32b0593a481528d.jpg
BTW, Hillary Clinton did not attend NetRoots, because she was at a “fundraiser”. So she has not gotten the same scrutiny as Sanders and Martin O’Malley.

Any discussion of race or ethnicity is always a challenging subject. Anyone can be easily misunderstood and then civil discussions can suddenly become uncivil.

Dialogue is a two-way street. Has Mr. Reed and others considered Bernie Sander’s family background?
Bernie’s parents were Jewish. His father came to America from Poland at a young age, after other family members were killed in the Holocaust. The Jewish people also have a history of discrimination and were (and still are) targets of ethnic hatred.

I am not Jewish. But as a Christian, I say everyone is a “child of God”. So Jewish lives also matter, and so do Muslim lives as well. Believers as well as non-believers. All races, all ethnic groups.
To think that Bernie is “tone-deaf” to how people are suffering in this country and around the world is a bit crazy. Yes, he probably does need to address the concerns of African Americans more directly…
However, Bernie is well aware of the “divide and conquer” strategy of the elites in power. We are also witnessing the divides within both political parties, within both the so-called right and left. United we stand, divided we fail. We are already very fragmented and divided within this country.

If Bernie goes around from state to state, city to city, and tries to tailor his message for specific interest groups, he could end up sounding just like a lot of other politicians, and sound less “authentic”. Other politicians are always changing their statements to appease different groups on different days. The fact that Bernie has been consistently concerned about economic just for “all” resonates with me.

When I attended Bernie’s kickoff event in Burlington, I thought he had a good strategy in that he addressed ALL people across the spectrum of our country. He just happens to go about it differently. He is not trying to appease a certain group or groups of voters in terms of race or ethnicity. But his platform has something for everyone, but from more of an age or life cycle basis: Free / lower college tuition for young people, strengthen Social Security and Medicare for senior citizens, higher wages and paid leave time for workers, parents, families of all ages (which just so “happens” to include all races and ethnic backgrounds, including African Americans).

Bernie’s approach seems to be more implicit then explicit. He covers the spectrum of our society, but from a different angle than race and ethnicity. If Bernie talks about skyrocketing college tuition and high interest rates, he is talking to young people, that that does include young African Americans, young Hispanics, and young people from every background. When he is talking to seniors, that includes African American seniors, Hispanic seniors and senior citizens from every background.
I can understand what Mr. Reed is suggesting and I agree with his first 4 out of 5 suggestions.

But I also can understand the approach that I think that Sen. Sanders is taking. He knows how “Divide and Conquer” works (against us), and I think he is trying to avoid “dividing” the electorate of this country. 


I hope that Sen. Sanders will dialogue with Mr. Reed. But I also hope that non-white population in Vermont will also work to better understand Sen. Sanders as well. His approach is different than what you might want or expect, but maybe there are reasons for his approach, right or wrong.

If only it was just the Republicans...   

"When I go to the grocery store and see a choice between cr ap cereal and sh it cereal, I'm not buying cereal. It's not my problem, it's the cereal makers' problem." -- Puddytat on low voter turnout