A White Problem

 

Reading Eddie Glaude, Jr.’s Begin Again provokes thought about what we need to do here in the Arrowhead, far away from both the Deep South and big-city issues. A graduate of historically Black Morehouse College, Temple, and Princeton, he now teaches at Princeton. You have seen him if you ever watch MSNBC. Glaude’s recent book looks at the life, writings, and speeches of James Baldwin, whom we may think we know. It is mixed biography, history, and literary criticism. Glaude seeks to see what is relevant today in Baldwin’s work from the 1940s and ended with his death in 1987. The main point of both Glaude and Baldwin is that the echoes of white supremacy are a “white problem,” not a “Negro” problem. Speaking of his own experience, Glaude writes: “It is exhausting to find oneself, over and over again, navigating a world rife with deadly assumptions about you and those who look like you, to see and read about insult and harm, death and anguish, for no other reason than because you’re Black or Black and poor or Black and trans or ….”

He further writes of “… the mess of a country that believed … that if you were white, you mattered more than others.”

We need go no farther than the daily litany of “Karens” and store managers calling police on innocently behaving people of color. Or of vastly greater police violence against blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanic people. Or of hate crimes against Asians recently revived because of the “China virus.” Or the mass incarcerations at local, state, and federal levels. Or the Charlottesville horror with one dead and 35 injured by one white supremacist driver.

These indignities are not experienced by us white folks, except likely, some poor or homeless of all races. Cook County elected the first Black sheriff in Minnesota, and we pride ourselves on a ‘live and let live” culture.

What else to do? Perhaps we may ask ourselves a series of questions:

–Do I know about America’s whole history, including slavery and its aftereffects and the Manifest Destiny that resulted in the decimation of the Native American populations?

–Have I read “The 1619 Project” and its serious, not political, criticisms?

–Have I ever met, socialized with, or helped an immigrant?

–Do I know people of color as friends?

–When is the last time any Black, Indian, or Hispanic person came to my house?

–Do I know that more Native Americans live in the Twin Cities than on Minnesota reservations?

–When is the last time I attended a church not mostly white?

–Do I ever give money to homeless people on the corners?

–Do I vote, work for, and contribute to candidates who promote racial equality?

–Do I support local, national, and international groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Doctors Without Borders, etc.?

–Do I affirm that Black Lives Matter, not instead, but also?

–Do I know that the wealth of typical white people is nearly ten times that of typical Black people?

–Do I volunteer at schools or in other ways that will erase white supremacy?

–Do I work with folks from the Grand Portage Reservation on issues of importance?

–What about a First Tee program to bring young people to the experience of golf? Coaching youth sports? Other ideas?

–Have I visited the Chippewa City Church and/or read Staci Drouillard’s book, Walking the Old Road?

–Have I ever attended an Indian ceremony, Pow Wow or otherwise? How did I feel?

–Am I aware of the black and European roots of barbershop harmony as I sing and listen?

–Do I socialize and debate with people who agree, and disagree, with Baldwin and Glaude?

I cannot answer “yes” to very many of those questions, so I have work yet to do. Echoing Baldwin, Glaude gives me motivation:

“…. Martin Luther King noted that “black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient, and deservedly doomed to servitude to the grave.” —

“At the core of this ugly period in our history is the idea that who “we” are as a country is changing for the worse—that “we” are becoming unrecognizable to ourselves.”

–”Baldwin never gave up on the possibility that all of us could be better. …We still needed to fight for that. But we would do so without the burden of having to save white people first.”

–”But, in the end, we have to allow this “innocent” idea of white American to die. It is irredeemable, but does not mean that we are too.”

….

–”Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost; it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”

May it be so.

Steve Aldrich is a retired Hennepin County lawyer, mediator, and Judge, serving from 1997-2010. He and his wife moved here in 2016. He likes to remember that he was a Minnesota Super Lawyer before being elected to the bench. Now he is among the most vulnerable to viruses. Steve really enjoys doing weddings, the one thing a retired judge can do without appointment by the Chief Justice. He officiated at a wedding last month where the “congregation” waås in Grand Marais, Norway, and White Bear Lake. Copyright Stephen C. Aldrich and News-Herald, 2021.