Tag Archives: Race

Choosing Up Sides

Soccer, race, and one spring afternoon at Princeton

Author’s Commentary:

I hesitated to post this personal memory of a single day in my life because I’ve questioned its significance to anyone but me. At times when I think about it, it seems worth telling, but other times it seems fleeting and slight. It happened four decades ago, and while it is about race, it does not have the urgency of the life-and-death situations we are grappling with today. No one was brutalized. No police were called. No one’s right to be present on an Ivy League campus was questioned. I can’t even state with certainty that the action described came from racist intent, or caused emotional or psychological harm, which is also why I am not using any names.

I did want to write this down, and first I tried to use it as the basis for a longer short story about the fickle nature of memory. I have written most of that short story, but I’m not happy with it, so I set it aside and took a stab at telling the story directly as nonfiction.

So here you are. I still have my doubts, but who knows, maybe the outcome speaks for itself.

April 1978

“You two, over here. You and you, over there. Stand together in your corners so we can do this quickly.”

The two Princeton soccer captains running the spring practice looked thoughtful and businesslike as they motioned the players one by one to gather around one of four cones spread out in a square. They were longtime varsity starters who commanded respect and went about the task with an air of authority.

The varsity head coach was never at these spring training sessions, perhaps because NCAA rules at the time forbade his presence. I can’t recall how word got around about the practice, but most of the players associated with the varsity program knew about it. Most of us had already played for the varsity “A” or varsity “B” squads. Others would come too, especially if they had at least tried out for the team and/or had friends who had played. There must have been at least 35 young men at the practice that day, enough for four teams and two simultaneous scrimmages.

For several minutes I barely noticed how the teams were being divided up; I was just anxious to play. As a walk-on, I was never really in the coach’s varsity “A” plans, but I had been a top scorer on varsity “B,” and I always tried to be optimistic and work hard on the field so one day I might be told to dress for an “A” game. That afternoon, until we were assigned teams, I stood and chatted with a friend who played with me on the “B” squad and also was not likely to move up.

At first I assumed the captains were simply trying to divide up the talent fairly. They would pause between each selection, murmur to each other, and then one would point to a player, motion to a cone, and say, “You, over here.”

Even when the teams were nearly complete, there appeared to be some sort of calculus at work in creating balanced matches, as the captains would consult briefly and then one of them would ask two players to switch.

During my years at Princeton, the varsity “A” squad was always almost exclusively white. I’m looking at the team picture from my senior year, and there is one player of hispanic origin, one Asian-American, and one Iranian. Whatever the reasons for the overwhelming whiteness of Princeton soccer, the team makeup mimicked the color lines of top youth soccer programs across America as the sport steadily gained in popularity. Unlike in most countries in the world, where many successful players come from poor or working-class backgrounds, the United States soccer development model favored affluent suburban familes who could afford the pricey fees of the best clubs and the tournament travel that came with them.

Not pictured in my yearbook are the many black players—some American, some native African—whom I remember playing with, in varsity “B games,” in pickup games, and in spring training sessions. In my first “B” game as a freshman, a quiet young man from Ghana scored two stunning first-half goals from 35 yards out. At halftime, he left the field, never to return. I don’t know why. But others stuck it out. Maybe they thought the coaches might one day notice their talent; maybe they just liked to play. A bunch of them were there that April afternoon.

The sorting process took less than 10 minutes, and only when it was over did I realize that the captains had created two teams of almost all white players (plus the exceptions noted above), and two teams of all blacks; both of those teams were sent to play each other on an adjacent field.

While this moment from many years ago remains poignant for me, it was a fleeting moment, and (as I noted in my opening comment), I hesitate to make too much of it or speculate on any lasting memory for anyone else but me. That said, I have two personal memories, one clear as if it were yesterday, one fuzzy and thoroughly unreliable. And I have a modest regret.

I’ll never forget the faces of the black players as they trudged up the little hill to the other field and looked around at the unfolding scene: a clean separation of black from white, almost as if we were chess pieces being sorted after a match and pushed back to our respective sides of the board. While I can’t speculate whether the looks on the faces displayed barely concealed anger or hurt, I can say they carried a knowing, been-here-before look of indignity.

The regret is that I never asked any of them, that day or later in the spring, how they felt about it. The journalist in me wasn’t quite out of the bottle yet.

The fuzzy memory is whether my varsity “B” friend and I played in the “black” game. We were assigned to the “white” game, but years later when I thought about that day, I had a memory of me asking my friend if he would join me if I walked up the hill. And he agreed, and one of us turned to the captains and said, “We’ll play in the other game today, if you don’t mind.” But memory is fickle, and I don’t know if we really did that, or if I just wished we had. And since false memories are as easily etched into the brain as real ones, I can’t tell you which is the truth: the action of solidarity, or the inaction of going along with the status quo. And I guess it doesn’t matter now.

Confronting the Silence

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Albany activist Shirey Archie wants more Americans—especially those in the “silent middle”—to stand against racism by acknowledging the pain of our national history

By Stephen Leon

“I have a 13-year-old son,” says Shirey Archie. “I have a black male child in a society that doesn’t do well with black male children. And when he was born, I realized I had inherited a big responsibility.”

I ask Archie (that’s his last name, and the name most commonly used by his friends and co-workers) if he has given his son “the talk.” He smiles knowingly, but instead of answering directly, he tells me a story, leaning in a little, his eyes fixed directly on mine across the top of my laptop screen.

“I came home one night,” he says, and his son was waiting for him. “He said, ‘Dada?’ I didn’t answer. He said, ‘Dada?’ I didn’t answer. “He said, ‘Dada, is that you?’ ”

“I said, ‘No, it’s not me,’ and I said it again, and then he said, ‘Why is it not you?’

“And I said, ‘Because I had an encounter with the police, and I’m not here.’ ”

Archie had gone out to buy Chinese food, and when he got back into the car, he forgot to turn on his lights before pulling away. He realized it and switched them on, but now a squad car was flashing its lights behind him.

The officer asked if he had forgotten to turn on his lights, and Archie politely explained that he had. Nothing came of the encounter.

“But here’s the thing,” he says. “It could have gone any number of ways. Depending on him, depending on me. And for a lot of people, it’s gone badly.”

To drive home his point, he tells a variation on the original story, like a filmmaker retracing the action but altering details to show a different outcome.

“Scene two: ‘Dada, is that you?’ ‘No, It’s Mama.’ ”

“Where’s Dada?”

“He had an encounter with the police.”

***

Shirey Archie is an eligibility examiner for the Albany County Department of Social Services, but he’s not interested in talking to me about his day job, and nudges me to move on by answering my question with a single word: “paperwork.”

We are here today, at a coffee shop in Albany, to talk about the other work he does, work he does not get paid for, work he believes in but whose effectiveness he has no way to measure.

“I have a sign in my car that says, ‘Stand Against Racism.’ ”

Archie stands and holds up the sign on street corners; lately he’s been standing once a week at the corner of Watervliet and Central avenues in Albany. For the people who ask to stand with him, he designated one day a month for them to join him.

The responses from passing drivers, he says, “range from horn blowing [widely understood to signal approval] to yelling the ‘N’ word, or ‘Get a job.’ ”

“The most significant to me is neither of those,” Archie says, “It’s the silence. I’m of the opinion that people like me in the liberal population think there are more people on our side than there really are.”

“If somebody goes by and honks,” he continues, “you have a general idea what they think. If somebody yells ‘Get a job,’ you have a general idea what they think. But if they’re silent, I have no idea.”

And it’s “the silence in the middle” that bothers and confounds Archie the most.

***

As his son comes of age during a time of palpable racial tension, Archie—who was born near Bill Clinton’s hometown of Hope, Ark., and raised in Niagara Falls, NY—reflects on how much has changed in his own lifetime, and concludes, not much.

He compares the lynchings of yesteryear, in which white supremacists in white robes and hoods killed innocent black men with no consequence, to the police shootings of today, in which men in blue uniforms kill innocent black men with no consequence.

“Race is the problem,” he says. “And my question is, how do good people allow this to happen? How can you sign on to your church creed and allow this to happen?”

Pressed to clarify what he means by “allow this to happen,” Archie says he is referring both to the election of Donald Trump—which emboldened white supremacists to voice their racism more aggressively—and more broadly, to a society that just can’t seem to make the issue a priority.

“Someone gets shot,” he says. “There’s a huge protest about it. Thousands of people show up in thousands of places. A week later, you can’t find two. Why? Because there’s no commitment to it.”

“For me, it’s not an issue. I live it every day.”

But he needs support, he says. He needs the support of the silent middle. He needs more people to do the mental work it takes to really understand what’s going on and do something about it.

“People don’t sit down and take a hard look at themselves,” Archie laments. “If they do, and they come out the other side, they’re committed. If they do the hard mental work and decide it’s not for them, fine. But it’s the people in the middle. The silent ones. I need an answer.”

We talk about various things people do to make themselves feel better: attend a protest, post about the issues on Facebook.

And of course, just feeling better isn’t enough. “You gotta feel bad before you feel better,” he says. “Come feel bad with me for a little while!”

He laughs at the way that sounds. Then his face turns serious again.

“The truth is, if you can’t look at our history, and really feel the pain of it, then you can’t come out of that with the energy you need to deal with it in the present.”

“It’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s not a dissertation. It’s not a term paper.”

***

Archie does another kind of volunteer work, although he doesn’t consider it work so much as a responsibility to pay it forward. Having gone through his own dark times earlier in his life, he now helps people who have experienced similar troubles.

“I’ve been in recovery for 35 years, in 12-step programs,” he says. “After all this time, it’s simply a part of who I am. I don’t think I specifically make an effort to help.”

Archie describes “a period of time when I when I behaved badly, toward myself and others. This was primarily due to drinking and other forms of substance abuse. With a lot of help, I stopped the active abuse. With a lot more help, I am working on the changes necessary to stay sane and ‘sober.’ For me, not using has revealed how damaged I was before I ever drank. A lot of people relate to that.”

Archie’s claim that he doesn’t consciously try to help others comes across as characteristically modest understatement.

“I go to meetings. I share my life experience with people I meet when they ask.”

“I’m pretty straightforward,” he says. “People can be naive about the power of substances and how it changes folks’ behavior. And I simply try to clarify, as an end user. But not as an expert—just based on my experience, and willing to share without much reservation. Some people would rather not, but [if] you ask me a question, you’ll probably get an answer.”

“Being sober for me pushes that central responsibility. I could easily say to someone, ‘Take care of yourself, kid.’ But I couldn’t do that and consider myself a sober person at the same time.”

***

For Shirey Archie, a black man raising a black male child, a lot of thought goes into how to respond to words and situations that might be provocative, or hurtful, or hostile—and how to convey those lessons to his son.

He describes how he would take him to the Bethlehem Public Library, and how there was a young white girl who became his friend and played Minecraft with him. “And so I had to say to him that it would be possible that some group of boys might say something inappropriate to him, and that he had to know beforehand how he was going to respond, so [nobody would] get hurt.”

Thinking about this, Archie recalls another moment that took place in Delmar, at a peace vigil. The people taking part in the vigil, as well as the passersby, were mostly white. Archie was holding a sign that said, “War is not the answer.” A couple walking down the sidewalk approached him, and the man said, “What about the Civil War?”

Archie’s response was, “No war’s a good war.”

But he went home and thought about the other things he could have said.

“Part of the challenge,” he says, “when someone says something to me, I need to be careful how I respond. I need to be a little bit better than the comment.”

He talks about the hostile comments his son might hear, the tense situations he might face, the encounters with the police that might turn confrontational. Then he asks rhetorically, “Is that fair?”

Of course not. But it’s real.

“So what are we going to do about it?”

Archie raises his hands to the level of his head. “Nothing changes if we don’t put it up here.”

Then he lowers his hands until they’re out of sight—like the silent middle.

“But we keep it down here.”

***

This post also appears on the blog at the website of Albany Health Management Associates, Inc.

Dark Clouds and Silver Linings

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The electors have made it official: in January, a schoolyard bully will assume the office of President of the United States.

Those of us who didn’t believe this could happen, who thought that Trump was too crude and scary and unqualified to elected president, have had several weeks to argue over who’s to blame. Racists! Misogynists! Bernie! Jill! The Electoral College! Sleepwalking Democratic Party strategists who ignored flyover country!

I have participated in this to an extent, but I’m done. I’m not going to blame anyone any more. I’m moving on.

(I still don’t trust electronic voting machines and the corporations that own them and the people they hire to program them, but I have no proof, and someone else will have to break that story. I think Greg Palast is still working on it.)

I’ve become more interested in (and concerned about) how divided we are as a nation, how stubbornly partisan we are, and how little that is changing right now in any meaningful way. And trying to figure out the true nature of presidential elections. This much I think I know: as long as we use the electoral-college system, which tilts the playing field toward smaller states and Republicans, elections are not necessarily a case of “may the best candidate win” or even “may the most popular candidate win.” It is more like a football game in which either side can put up numbers, late momentum counts, and a good strategy for winning coveted swing states can pull out a last-minute victory like a trick-play touchdown with the clock running out.

A little more than half of eligible citizens vote; about half of them vote Republican and half vote Democratic. And only a minuscule percentage of the electorate really counts: the people directing the ground game, and the voters they turn out (or turn away), in states like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida.

Demographic trends do not appear to favor a Republican future, unless the party figures out how to appeal to more minorities and women, but Republican voters remain doggedly loyal, even when the candidate at the top of the ticket is saying things that make them wince. One of the most revealing things I’ve noticed in conversations—live, on Facebook, and in other media I’ve seen and heard—is that when milder, mainstream Republican voters (not the “alt-right” fringe whose only apparent mode of conversation is to shout crude insults) are asked how they could support such a dangerous and unqualified man for president, they usually respond with some variation on “Nothing could be worse than the last eight years.”

It almost doesn’t matter what actually happened in the last eight years—to most Democrats, it’s been lovely, to most Republicans, it’s been a disaster.

According to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center, people’s views on the accomplishments and/or failures of the Obama administration vary dramatically along party lines, by a wider statistical margin than with any administration since Eisenhower. As for this year’s two major-party presidential candidates, both Trump and Clinton received historically low “thermometer ratings” from members of the opposition party. Generally, the nation is more divided along partisan lines than at any time since Pew surveys on this subject were first conducted. More than ever, Democrats and Republicans are highly unfavorable toward both the opposition party and its members, and report being “fearful” of each other and view each other’s policies as a “threat” to the nation.

Looking at these numbers only confirms the depressing conclusion many people have already reached: we are a profoundly divided nation, lacking in common ground and shared ideals. We are in the midst of a long-running political civil war that does not appear to be ending any time soon.

There was a time not all that long ago when Americans supposedly shared core values and beliefs that were more important than our disagreements. In the post-World War II era, there were prominent American intellectuals who advanced a theory called “consensus history,” which rejected a class-conflict-based approach and stressed our presumably shared belief in capitalism and economic individualism. And if there was any one media icon the nation looked to for reassurance during the turbulent sixties and seventies, it was Walter Cronkite and his soothing baritone voice. But a consensus of white men in suits could never adequately speak for all of America, which became apparent as more marginalized people began to find their voices. Still, even as more non-mainstream ideas vied for attention, the two major parties seemed more similar than different in their generally capitalist value systems. And whatever party was in power, the rest of us lived with it.

Was Bill Clinton’s presidency the turning point, when Republicans, instead of working with him, tried to undermine him at every turn? I’m not sure, but ever since those years it seems as if our disagreements have shifted from differences over policy to differences over what is truth and what is fiction. The divide is so complete now that many people who identify as liberal or conservative simply don’t believe each other’s preferred media. I’ve heard plenty of criticisms of The New York Times over the years, but only this year did I begin seeing right-wingers refer to it as “fake news.” And this has an echo effect on how public opinion shades other important issues. For example, many on the right not only doubt climate scientists (who, they say, are advancing theories on global warming merely to advance their own careers), but also the media who report on such left-wing “hysteria.”

Are you ready for a silver lining yet? I’ve got one.

The Republican Party has long supported dirty energy and opposed regulation aimed at curbing pollution, and Republican voters tend to listen to the party’s reasoning as filtered through right-leaning media. So Republicans are typically measured to have low trust in the validity of climate science and to be generally anti-regulation. That is the party line, after all.

But ask people a slightly different question, and the silver lining appears. According to Pew, there is now broad, bipartisan support for expanding investment in wind and solar power—more so than for any fossil fuels.

Partisan environmental politics aside, clean energy is making more and more sense to more and more people. The future brightens.

Martin Luther King Jr., borrowing from Theodore Parker, famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Race relations in America have been severely strained in recent years over the many deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police or overzealous vigilantes. But Pew has found a silver lining here too. After the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, American opinion split significantly across racial and partisan lines on police culpability, case outcomes, and whether race played a significant role. There were also smaller but significant differences across age, with younger people being more critical of the killings and more sensitive to the racial issues.

However, while there was and still is a predictable disparity between black and white respondents to the questions of whether blacks’ rights are being violated, and whether racism in society is a significant problem, an interesting thing happened after the percentages remained fairly steady from 2009 to 2014. In 2015, across all races, the numbers of people saying society should give more attention to racial problems spiked significantly.

In dramatizing the need for change and driving public opinion, social movements matter. Occupy Wall Street brought a measurable change to the words media used to describe class issues—it mattered. And what the 2015 survey on race relations tell me is that Black Lives Matter does, in fact, matter. There’s a long way to go, but maybe the arc has begun to bend, however slightly, toward justice.

One more.

In a 2001 Pew survey, 35 percent of respondents supported same-sex marriage, and 57 percent opposed.

In 2016, 55 percent supported, and 37 percent opposed. And while younger people have driven a great deal of this change, the shift in support for same-sex marriage, and LGBT rights, has taken place across all generations.

Bending toward justice, indeed. And I don’t believe this one will ever bend back.

Your Words Matter

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black-lives-matter

Of course blue lives matter. Of course all lives matter. Just don’t say it that way, or use those words on a t-shirt or bumper sticker, unless you want to announce to the world that you think blacks are second-class citizens, and should shut up now and accept their place as permanent suspects in American society.

Because that is what you are really saying when you respond to a legitimate movement with words clearly designed to negate or belittle it.

Words have meaning, and the contexts in which they are used have meaning. The same is true of images and symbols. As an aside, I’ll give you an example.

I do not, and likely never will, display the American flag on my home, car, or clothes.

I must hate my country, right?

Wrong. I like my country. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes it disappoints me. I don’t believe in nationalism, or American exceptionalism, and I do think some countries do certain things better overall than we do, but dammit, I was born here and I live here and I’ll stand up for it in many ways. (Constitutional freedoms and protections: Yes. US World Cup team: Yes. Most wars: No.) I also love its many great cities and its beautiful mountains and lakes and seashore—and its wonderfully diverse people. I don’t think I’d be as happy in Russia, or wherever it is conservatives tell liberals to go and live these days.

But none of that has much to do with why I would never fly the American flag. The reason is, I understand its symbolic meaning. So do most people, whether they realize it or not.

For as long as I can remember, the Republican Party has claimed to be the party of patriotism while portraying their opponents and critics as being soft on communism (then) and terrorism (now). They claim to be on the side of God and country and family values. They wave their flags and talk about making America great again. And they blame tree-huggin’ war-protestin’ welfare-cheatin’ gay-lovin’ Black Lives Matterin’ liberals for the nation’s supposed moral decay.

It doesn’t matter how wrong or hypocritical they may be. It does matter that they have succeeded in associating the display of the American flag with right-wing beliefs and bluster and intolerance. In my opinion, that is the tone of the message that displaying the flag sends. I don’t identify with that, so I wouldn’t fly a flag. That’s all. No disres7pect to you, United States of America.

Back to Black Lives Matter, a protest movement that sprang up when the epidemic of police shootings of unarmed black men became too much to bear any longer without speaking up. A young black man is 21 times more likely to be killed by police than his white counterpart, according to a ProPublica study of more than 30 years of statistics reported to the FBI by local police departments. Because the numbers are self-reported, and many departments don’t report at all, the disparity could be worse.

In any case, the statistics validate the anecdotal narrative we see played out over and over in the news: Police kill unarmed blacks with frightening regularity, perhaps because the ones who pull the triggers know they will almost always get away with it, and also, perhaps, because they harbor an irrational fear that all black men are inherently dangerous. Whatever the reasons, it is an epidemic, and trying to cure it needs to be a national priority.

The Black Lives Matter movement is a lot of people, black and white, saying enough is enough. Hard evidence supports the need for this movement. To counter with “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter” is just a way of saying you don’t support the Black Lives Matter movement—and that deaths of innocent blacks are the acceptable collateral damage of robust law enforcement. If your cause really needs a movement, maybe you can come up with an original slogan that isn’t just a smack in the face to an entire race.

***

Have you shared a fake news story on Facebook today?

If you’re a Facebook user, you should be aware by now how many fake (or extremely distorted) news stories are pinging around the Internet—stories to discredit Democrats, stories to discredit Republicans, stories appearing to discredit Democrats but actually meant to discredit Republicans for being so outrageously false, etc., etc. And of course, wacky and sensational stories that don’t shape opinions so much as they fatten some geek’s bank account because they get so many shares and click-throughs. I don’t know if this by-product of user-driven content will affect this election in any discernable way, but it has never been this bad, has it?

Facebook has tried, and failed miserably, to dam this flood. And for the really gullible people who actually believe Obama was born in Kenya to Muslim parents from Mars, and that Hillary is sending drones out to confiscate your guns and poisoning your water supply with drugs that will turn your children gay, what will this mean after the election when the crazies are looking for reasons to start an armed insurrection?

All I know is, something is terribly wrong when a story from Fox News looks refreshingly credible.