My Long Journey

 I retired in 2013 into a life of outdoor recreation and adventure. I liked it. So more than once I have asked myself how did I get myself into a position where I’m traveling all over the country, searching out stories that are not uplifting, and writing and filming in an attempt to bring to light the long history of racism in this country – the thing that won’t go away -  and to answer the oft-asked question, “Why aren’t Black Americans further ahead?”, said with an implication that we have vanquished racism.

I used to be race neutral. I was born and raised on a small dairy farm in an all white town in NH, and went to school in an all-white school, and as far as I knew, in an all-white state.

I was aware of the occasional overt racism. I wasn’t aware of the nuanced variety. I didn’t understand Black America’s frequent references to slavery that had ended so long ago. And I didn’t see the institutionalized racism imbedded in the foundation that America was built on.  That awareness would come later. America had a fictionalized, rhetorical story about itself – land of the free/home of the brave/all men are created equal/life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - and I bought into all of it. My Dad and I installed a flagpole and I proudly flew the American flag every day.

Semper Fi!  It was during my four years in the Marines where I really started to become aware of race. I had no choice. The Marine Corps in the 60’s and 70’s was a rotten place. Southern rednecks, urban Blacks, and in the middle was me. More accustomed to a white culture, but neither White enough nor Black enough. I vividly recall the joy and celebrations of White Marines when Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King was murdered.

Vietnam – a violent war zone to begin with - was a whole entire other step up with altercations almost everyday from one side or another.

Back in the states I tried college. Didn’t like it. So I went to work trying to find a career and eventually settled into an unrewarding corporate life in Information Technology. I was still considered race-neutral. But not really. My years in the Marines and the trouble and hostility and danger I had encountered from both White and Black Marines had etched a place in my mind.

During those corporate years I was not personally confronted with overt racism. But white America was slowly and subtly re-gaining ground lost during the Civil Rights era and the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act. When I paid attention I could detect a troubling hint of racism coming from our politicians. Then in 2016 Nixon operative John Ehrlichman was blunt and racism in American politics came out of the closet: In creating the so-called War on Drugs “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or (to be) Black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” They succeeded spectacularly in terrifying and thus dividing the American people.

I witnessed the sad, 15-year drive to make Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday. It should have been a no-brainer. But I saw the white protest and angry, senseless arguments against having a day that honored a Black man and the lame excuses. “It’ll impact national productivity!” I noted that a prominent senator from Arizona voted against the holiday, and later, in a tight race against an African American, became ‘woke’, realized his mistake, and apologized.  

In 2000 I kayaked the Grand Canyon and this might be where I ‘came out’ and had maybe my first deep discussions about race. There were a bunch of wealthy, liberal, middle-aged, white men who in their discussions believed that racism was largely over and the playing field had become level. Proof positive in their minds was the plethora of Black athletes. But the plethora of Black athletes exist because for those talented enough, or delusional enough to think they are talented enough, that’s one of the few ways to dream of getting out of the ghetto...precisely because the American playing field is not level. But don’t bother looking for more than a very few Black coaches, or Black owners, or Black managers, or Black reporters in this utopian proof of equality.

I knew that from the dawn of time that in poll after poll, from the Jim Crow era forward, that white people had declared that the playing field was level. But I noticed in the Grand Canyon, as I’ve observed since, that White people seem to be just completely unable and uncomfortable having a discussion about race. More often than not they try to make it about ‘class’, or anything other than race. I started to learn that it was going to be difficult to change something that so many turned a blind and ignorant eye to and believed didn’t exist.  The popular book, White Rage, has an entire chapter, “Rules of Engagement”,  devoted to the complexities and challenges of talking to white people about race. Every point made, I’ve experienced numerous times.

I took my young son to Washington DC to see some of the monuments and museums. We took a tour of the capitol building. The last stop was the rotunda under the dome. The senator’s aid pointed up to the mural painted on the underside of the rotunda 180 feet above our head and proudly proclaimed that this gigantic mural was an elegant display of the entire history of the United States. There were all kinds of people on the mural: George Washington, of course, appearing very God-like. Pioneers. Chinese building the rail road. Noble Native Americans. But high above our heads on a 4,664 square foot mural and frieze, in this building built by forced Black labor, beneath a statue representing freedom designed by a Black craftsman, there was not one depiction of an African American. Not one. Once again African Americans were intentionally erased from the history of the United States.

I learned that our national anthem - written by a man who owned slaves while he was eulogizing freedom and was so committed to the cause that he tried to hang a man who’s only crime was being in possession of abolitionist literature and who wrote about how Black Africans were the worst curse that could befall a country - pays homage to slavery if you sing it all the way to the third verse. That’s the song my country chose to honor and define itself.

It vaguely bothered me that so many of our heroic founding fathers owned and terrorized human beings that looked like me. But there seemed something even more damning that my country would select not only a slave owner and slave trader to grace the twenty dollar bill, but a man who paid extra for the return of his runaway slaves if they’d been whipped. Whipped up to 300 times. Our hero…our future president…paid extra for the return of a corpse! I took notice when Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin placed on hold the change from Andrew Jackson’s image to that of an actual American hero, Harriet Tubman. And I took notice again when our 45th president went out of his way to praise Jackson. Calling him a “Great and well-loved American.”

I took note of our selected and distorted teaching of history when I realized that I knew about the concocted myth of George Washington’s cherry tree a long time before I knew that “The father of our country” was a slave owner. I could not help but wonder why we had been taught a thing that was a lie, but not taught a truth of substantial consequence.

The things I noticed politicians doing to ‘stir and divide’ kept stacking up. When Ronald Reagan announced his first run for the presidency from the state fair in Philadelphia MS, was it because it was the spot where three civil rights workers had been so brutally murdered sixteen years earlier? Or did the fair just have really good acoustics? And when during his announcement he emphasized ‘states rights’, the post Civil War myth of the cause of the war....who was he speaking to? Lee Atwater, senior political consultant to Reagan and later to George H.W. Bush clarified precisely who he was speaking to:

 “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.” He was speaking in code to White people and their fear and resentment of Black people.

As we moved into the Tea Party era, race took on a new and frightening significance.  All protest to the contrary, those of us who are Black had no confusion whatsoever about what was meant by the phrase, “Take the country back”.

When Trayvon Martin was killed by a wannabe cop, Black and White Americans banded together to say Black Lives Matter too! But even that plea for simple justice and respect and life was usurped by police and supported by those who chant ‘Law and Order’. Leading the chant were two of the most racist law enforcement executives in American history – Joe Arpaio and David Clarke. Coming so soon after the Black Lives Matter founding, Blue Lives Matter was clearly an eye-rolling, code-talking façade, masquerading as something good and wholesome and American when in reality it was just one more subtlety disguised, racist rebuke rolled up with the ultimate insult, Black Lies Matter. If we ask not to be wantonly killed, we’re dismissed as liars.

A very good friend of mine, a ranking federal law enforcement officer – as kind and fair and honest as I could ask a person to be, but naïve, displays a Blue Lives Matter edition state license plate on the required rear of his truck, and a custom Blue Lives Matter plate on the front. It’s hard for me to look at. So subtle has racism become that it can be disguised as patriotism, or law and order, and unknowingly perpetuated by good and decent people.

And again, with increasing dismay, I took note and wondered, “What can I do?” Because I don’t believe that this is who we, as Americans, are. I thought about Doctor Martin Luther King’s simple request: “All we ask From America is to be true to what you wrote down”. I reflected on when Beyonce presented Colin Kaepernick with Sports Illustrated’s Muhammad Ali Legacy Award, she said, “It’s been said that racism is so American that when we protest racism, some assume we’re protesting America”…so hardened is racism into the concrete foundation of America.

I questioned how we as a country and we as a race had gotten to where we are today. For years I read. I studied. I didn’t know that redlining and housing discrimination were official government policies, and not just whims of racist bankers...that my government intentionally created ghettos, and then intentionally neglected them, turning them into slums.  I didn’t know because I was never taught that Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, and VA benefits were all originally denied to most Black Americans. I hadn’t connected how such an uneven playing field in the recent past, or all the myths over the true cause of the Civil War had contributed to where we are today. Not only was this country built on a foundation of racism, but then we’d lied about it. We said that White people did everything.

I slowly had the realization that if white people didn’t know how deeply institutionalized racism was rooted against Black Americans, than their only logical conclusion had to be that Black Americans had caused the situation they are in through their own fault. Laziness and stupidity… lack of personal responsibility. Descriptions of us that are often just below the surface. Or on the surface. That we choose to live in dangerous, sub-standard housing. That we choose the jobs on the bottom rung of the jobs ladder. That we choose poor, dangerous, underfunded  schools for our children. That we chooseincarceration.  But those are not what we choose. Those are what Black Americans reluctantly endure. So deeply is this narrative woven into our national fabric that I myself have been guilty of sometimes thinking it was a choice. Bias runs deep in America.

And then in 2015 and 2016 racism seemed to explode onto the American political landscape and divided us even further!I pondered what, if anything, I might do to help close the great divide.  I wondered...if words could so thoroughly divide this country, could words help heal? So I decided to write. To track down stories all over the country. Stories of where Black Americans worked hard to create their piece of the Great American Dream. And where they had been thwarted by entrenched, systemic, institutionalized racism. Not the KKK variety that ends life. The business and government variety that alters life … makes it harder … more difficult …less pleasant. Two steps forward. One step back. The history of Black Americans.

As I’ve traveled and talked to folks in pursuit of Civil Conversations, I’ve learned much. I’ve been inspired and awestruck by the hard work of those from several generations or more in the past. I still cannot imagine walking to Nicodemus KS, a flat plain, and having the fortitude to envision a home, a farm, a family, a town, a life. I am struck by those early Black pioneers’ reliance on faith in their God. And on each other. Their endeavor and success required not only strong backs and a strong fortitude, but also a stunning work ethic and unwavering integrity. I wished that all Black Americans could experience Nicodemus. I wonder what a third generation inner city Black American knows of his or her heritage? Of how proud they would be to know of things they’ll never learn in school.  They, like I, would be inspired.

In Denver’s Black Five Points, where I wandered around trying to piece together a story, the lessons are similar. Hard work. Foresight. Integrity. Faith in God and neighbors. Vision. In Denver I am surprised to learn that the early Black pioneers, only a generation or two away from slavery, with such high levels of education and entrepreneurship. Clearly, once these folks were free, they pursued opportunity  - the classic American Dream - with a vengeance. Some Black Denver citizens found unique ways to help their community. Some started banks that would make loans to their neighbors. Others started real estate firms. Or created decent, low-income housing opportunities. I am surprised at the stunning vitality of the Black so-called ghetto. The jazz greats who came from New Orleans and New York, but despite their fame and even adoration, could stay and eat in Five Points, but not Denver proper.

And in Portland, despite the racism and housing discrimination, I found what I found in Denver and Nicodemus. Hard work. Faith. Education. Hope. Vision. Vitality.

I was looking for institutionalized, racist pushback and I found it. I’ve been surprised at the breadth and depth of organized, sanctioned, coordinated, long-term, structural racism. At the effort to “keep us in our place”.  How the past has affected the present. We like to think that as a country we’ve made more progress than we actually have.

I wonder what Nicodemus would be today if the railroad and the highway would not have by-passed it in favor of a barely existing white town. What would the Albina district of Portland have become if it had not been for redlining, bulldozers, and gentrification? Would the African American population of wealthy and exclusive Marin County CA be higher than a paltry 2.8% if the county was as open and welcoming as they like to say they are? For that matter, where would African Americans on the whole be if we’d been allowed to live in those first, government supported suburbs, instead of being forced into projects and then abandoned altogether? If we’d had the opportunity to build wealth through home ownership … access to good jobs ... quality education? Where would we be if at every turn in the hard work to grab our share of the good life if we hadn’t constantly been racing into a headwind, while our fellow Americans were not? And how do we tear down that wall so that we so we can race forward now? And how many problems would we quickly solve if we weren’t so enmeshed in race?

I am reminded of the last verse of the famed African American poet Langston Hughes’ poem, “Let America Be America Again”. Except I’d replace “again” with “finally”.

So finally, in 2020, 155 years after the end of the war that assured the end of forced labor…151 years or so after the 13thamendment ending slavery and the 15th amendment guaranteeing the right to vote to all American men… 64 years after Brown v Board of Education assuring equal education... and 56 years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act once again assuring all people equal rights and treatment...and 6 months or so after George Floyd got the world’s attention by being tortured and murdered by a police officer – my team and I started The Civil Conversations Project. Help me close this terribly damaging divide. Help make America great. It's time.

So the answer to how did I get myself into a position where I’m traveling all over the country, searching out stories that are not uplifting, and writing and filming in an attempt to bring to light the long history of racism in this country is it became my time to stop being a bystander and to start actively help make this thing that won’t go away, go away. It’s also your time.