The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
The worst lie is a problem wrongly stated.
Variously attributed
Even those of us who didn't take to the streets have been shocked by the video of Minnesota police officers murdering a black man in full public view. The images are more than merely chilling in their own right. Perhaps, also, they trouble a cultural stereotype that makes Minnesota -- among other places -- seem an unlikely setting for deadly, institutionalized racism. In what climate of attitude could police be content to have onlookers watch them savage a helpless man?
Cultural stereotypes, alas, give (white) people too much comfort room on matters of race. For starters, they require of us little acknowledgement that Jim Crow has been widely welcomed across the United States.
First, a story:
When I was a teen, my family moved from the deep South to a New England suburb. Thinking to get a jump on a housing search, my mother phoned ahead to several real estate companies. All told her there were no homes for sale in the town where we wished to live.
Puzzled, she traveled there. She discovered that houses were plentifully available for sale, and that real estate agencies were only too glad to help her.
My mother had a southern accent. On the phone, the Realtors assumed she was black and turned her away.
We lived there for five years, pleasantly so for the most part. I did have to learn to overlook negative suppositions about my racial attitudes because of my southern background. And I learned not to point out that in the town there was not one family of color; in my high school not one student of color. I learned not to comment on a cheerful complacency made doubly obdurate by its utter and terrible sincerity.
The example is not isolated. The record of racial segregation in America includes, to take just a few examples: schools and public accommodations in Delaware and New Jersey; schools employment and housing in Pennsylvania and New York; employment, housing, hotels and dining rooms in New England; employment and housing in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Until 1926, the constitution of the state of Oregon forbade black people to live there. The Ku Klux Klan was a strong political force in Oregon throughout the 1920s. Lynching and castration were not common. Just one of each, on the historical record. But black men were commonly threatened with both.
And one of Jim Crow's favorite bugaboos is, of course, sex. At some point in their history, every one of the lower 48 states had anti-miscegenation laws.
Fast forward to here and now, as white supremacy is brazenly encouraged by the moral degenerate in the Oval Office. Yes, the November elections are crucially important, for the opportunity to get rid of him and some of the bottom-feeders who support him in Congress. But today's high obligation of citizenship doesn't stop there. After election day it will be essential to remain mindful of this central lesson of these times:
He got elected.
Millions voted for him, which is bad enough. Millions of others didn't bother to vote against him, even knowing full well what he was. "Good men" did nothing, and here we are.
Though social change can be awakened by episodes of civil crisis, it is sustained -- if at all -- afterward, in the way ordinary people behave in the day to day. It is sustained in the workplace; school; church; home, family and voting booth by people who bestir themselves to know, specifically, what is actually going on right around them -- and who bestir themselves to deal with what they learn, as citizens, colleagues, neighbors, friends, customers, parents, sons and daughters.
Jim Crow's staple nourishment is complacent assumption that racism is someone else's doing and remedy someone else's job.
And to the question, But what can I personally do? the answer is ...
More.
