How Black Women Shaped the Suffrage, #MeToo, and BLM Movements

I’ve tired of the orange jester in the White House, his racism, and his general lack of concern for 99.99% of the people in his life, the nation, and the world. He’s a sick puppy, and the nation elected him president almost by accident.

This morning I heard reports about the role of African-American women in three powerful movements. Here are their tales (click the image to see the YouTube video).


Suffrage

#MeToo



Black Lives Matter



I thank you. My wife thanks you. All of America should thank you.

"Demand Respect for Human Dignity"

"While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity."

These are the last words of famed Congressman John Lewis. He asked the New York Times to publish it upon his death. I suggest you read his wisdom.

The Jester Dons His Racist Crown

Several years ago, a developer petitioned my hometown for a zoning waiver. He was building an affordable housing development of fewer than 50 units under a program started by the Obama administration.

I was upset. We didn't live on a typical suburban street. The lots were 50 by 100, and a third had three-family homes. It was designed in the 1930s. It was a narrow street. Two cars couldn't pass if someone was parked at the curb. No-never-mind. Cars were a luxury at that time. People walked to work. Families were lucky to own one car. In the 1960s, the south end of the street was cut off from the rest of town by I-95.

Jobs no longer are a walk away. Cars are necessities. Some families had four cars, so members could get to school and work. The new units would bring approximately 75 more cars to a street that was only a tenth of a mile long.

I researched the developer. It had several affordable housing projects in the county and all were well managed. I went to town hall and saw the plans. The developer wanted a waiver that I thought troublesome, a reduction in the mandatory number of parking spaces. I presumed it would cause problems. I wanted the zoning committee only to deny the parking variance. At a town meeting, the developer argued that experience said it would not be a problem.

At meetings and in curbside conversations, my neighbors did not care about the parking issue. They talked in vagueries. I realized that their protest was about race. They assumed affordable housing would change the racial makeup of the neighborhood, an already mixed-race neighborhood

A journalist visited me, asked a few questions, and took notes. I got the distinct impression he did not understand the tight focus of my position. He took a picture. A neighbor put a no affordable housing sign on the edge of her property. The reporter identified it as mine.

The developer received his waiver. My neighbors were terrified. The developer built the apartment complex. Its contractors moved their vehicles and supplies across the narrow street with as much courtesy as possible. It was finished and units were rented. As the developer promised, there were no issues with parking.

I was glad.

A developer tried a similar project in a wealthier section of town. Wealth provided greater access to power and attorneys. The developer ran into the stone wall of Not-in-My-Backyard (especially if it involves people of color).

These are the people who foster and perpetuate inequity in America. They don't see. They don't want to see how their shortsighted selfishness limits the futures of their children, towns, and America.

The value of real estate acts as a segregation force in most states. The artificial world of suburban America, with its unjustifiable lot requirements, drives up the value of land, making it unaffordable for 60% of the American population. Combine that with the racist real estate and banking practices of the 1960s and 1970s, which created poverty zones, and in some cases, they facilitated the decline of neighborhoods, even cities, and you get an innovative Jim Crow system.

This confluence created unparalleled education inequity.

Real estate taxes support education. The wealthier the neighbor, the greater the tax revenue, the more money for schools. The poorer, less revenue, less for schools. The difference in money allocated per student can vary as much as 33% among school districts. Which student has a better chance of receiving a quality education? The kids from the wealthier neighborhoods. It's not much different than the "separate but equal" education programs of the Jim Crow South.

Connecticut's lame affordable housing program was an attempt to rectify this problem. The idea is simple. Spread affordable housing in all of Connecticut's towns. The program hopes to give more students an equal opportunity to succeed, enabling  the students, their families, and the state to improve. People will be happier, more productive, wealthier.

It's not the best program, but it's a damn sight better than what the Don wants. Our jester of a president has "painted a false picture of the suburbs as under siege and ravaged by crime, using fear-mongering language...Mr. Trump said on Twitter that 'people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream' would 'no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing built in your neighborhood.' The president was referring to the administration’s decision last week to roll back an Obama-era program intended to combat racial segregation in suburban housing."

He has finally donned his racist crown, showing the world his disregard for what amounts to 30% of the nation's population. He doesn't give a lick for the well-being of some 99 million Americans. In doing so, he hurts the future of 330 million Americans.

It might be time for Donny to stop wearing black suits. He might look more natural wearing a white cone.

P.S.: As appeared in the New York Times: “'In the presidential campaign of 1968, my father, Governor George Wallace, understood the potential political power of downtrodden and disillusioned working class white voters who felt alienated from government,' his daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, said by email the other day. 'And Donald Trump is mining the same mother lode.'"

AG and Jordan Blow Their Dog Whistles

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing, Attorney General William Barr stated: “Rioters and anarchists have hijacked legitimate protests to wreak senseless havoc and destruction on innocent victims.”

As shown nightly on televised news coverage and as appeared in print, most of those protesting the unjustified killing of African Americans by local police were peaceful. Some jerks, protesters and local police, screwed things up. Compared to many other protests, they were tame.

Let’s assume the AG is correct. Based on the overall peacefulness of the protests, America must be raising some of the most incompetent rioters and anarchists in the world. They’ve hijacked nothing.

His remarks remind this old fart of those by Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. Their clarion for law and order grew louder when African Americans protested. Like Nixon and Wallace, Barr pulled out some tired rhetoric: “’I don’t agree that there is systemic racism in police departments generally in this country,’ and he quoted statistics that more white Americans had been killed by the police than Black Americans.”

He’s deluded. Racism permeates every aspect of our society for one simple reason: Too many people are racists, and a society and all its elements are created and run by people. I’ve dealt with deluded Whites. They fear the coming “changes” in America, much as the Anglo-Saxon Americans feared the Irish and Italians.

The second half of his sentence raises more concern, especially when an intelligent individual utters the phrasing as a rebuttal. Of course, more Whites die at the hands of police. Some 330 million people live in the U.S, of which 47 million are African American and 200 million are European American and non-Hispanic. In other words, there are more than four times as many European American as African Americans. Of course, more Whites died more frequently at the hands of police. What matters is why and how they die. George Floyd and others didn’t deserve to die, and it was for him and others BLM protesters filled the nation’s streets.

It’s bold and offensive when an attorney of Barr’s stature abandons common sense and surrenders to specious logic. His lack of reason was outdone by Jim Jordan.

Jordan, a Republican representative from Ohio, ran a video montage, showing the jerks. If it had been done logically, the video could have effectively made Barr’s point. Jordan wanted to make another point, a misleading point.

Jordan showed the video in a hearing about the response of federal agents in Seattle. The video didn’t focus on Seattle. It scanned the nation for every idiotic and illegal thing done during the protests. He created the illusion of our nation’s cities crumbling, and the featured actors tearing down our cities--African Americans.

Let’s ignore one simple concept: When you suppress, threaten, and illegally kill people based on one condition, the color of their skin, you foster violence. It’s no longer a question of will people protest and maybe riot but when will they. Our history has taught us this. World history offers the same lesson. Biblical stories tell the same. The marginalized remain quiet only so long. Think of Moses’s Jews.

More damning: Jordan’s video had nothing to do with the testimony of the AG. Nothing. It sensationalized a moment. He was race baiting, playing to his fears and those of many White Americans today and for more than 400 years. They fear African Americans. Why? I think the reason is simple. They don’t respect, trust, or like African Americans. They think Nat Turner was a murderer, not a liberator. Harriet Tubman, a thief, not a liberator. Martin Luther King Jr. an agitator, not a liberator. Barack Obama a usurper, not President.

As a White American, I wish I had something positive to say. I am at a loss.

Obama Gave Donald the Best Day of His Life

A few days ago, CNN’s Alisyn Camerota interviewed with six Americans who voted for Donald in 2016. Half said they would not vote for him in 2020. That’s not surprising based on recent polls. Tommy Spallings, one of the former supporters of Donald, made an telling observation. He watched the Barstool Sports interview with Donald. The president said that the best day of his life was the day before he announced in candidacy. He noted that he had completed successful projects and his company was doing well. Spallings remarked: “I would like to remind him that Barack Obama was president on the best day of his life.”

"Each Man's Death Diminishes Me"

Charlie Warzel of the New York Times called for Americans to disengage from ideological pissing contests. (My words, not his.) His challenge makes sense. It's difficult heeding his advice.

Shortly after Donald assumed office, I wondered why the Times and others gave credence to the man’s tweets. They reflected ignorance. They propagated lies. He’s the president, though. I have never thought much of that. His position, an unfortunate Constitutional accident, hasn’t righted the man. He remains inept and manipulative. He's a bleach loving ignoramus.

Like the Times, we too are diverted by the specious, inept, and manipulative. In doing so, we give voice to individuals, like Donald, who are intellectually terrified by ideas they don't like to consider, such as human equity, or by ideas from people with advanced degrees, such as renowned epidemiologists.

In their fight to prove the inane right, they take illogical and possible illegal positions. For example, the nation's high jester insisted Portland needed federal agents patrolling its streets. He sent them, and he quivered with pleasure. He was the strong man, the don, the American Putin. “His” agents gassed protesters and broke bones. They attacked mothers and veterans. They incited more people to protest in the streets of Portland and other cities. As local officials around the country warned, the unwanted and ill-advised move provoked unrest.  Donny and friends haven't seen so. They, like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, point to the streets: “There’s anarchy. We need law and order.”

The sophist and his supporters heard the bell of victory. Their hearing is off. Theirs is a toll of a coronach.

They don’t remember, never read, or never understood John Donne’s five-century old warning: “No man is an island,/ Entire of itself./ Each is a piece of the continent,/ A part of the main./ If a clod be washed away by the sea,/ Europe is the less./ As well as if a promontory were./ As well as if a manor of thine own/ Or of thine friend's were./ Each man's death diminishes me,/ For I am involved in mankind./ Therefore, send not to know/ For whom the bell tolls,/ It tolls for thee.”

They don’t understand how each person’s death—whether by the hand of inhumane police work or the incompetent management of a government’s response to a pandemic—diminishes them, makes them less, makes families less, makes the country less because they are not "involved in mankind." Rather they believe they ride above it. With each illegal use of police force and each mask not worn, their strength is renewed. They tweet, instagram, and facebook post more, creating a cacophony of stupidity.

They achieve another goal. Their babbles frighten some and depresses others. Their dissonance distances us from each other.

Their rhetoric creates the illusion America has lost something valuable. Think of it as a reverse mirage. He and his kind cannot erase, hid, or disguise the truth, goodness, and righteousness of the promised America. It's there, and Warzel's proposal is the solution. We must stop engaging with Donny, his followers, and Republicans who bow to the jester, for they negotiate in the interest of only the wealthy and their re-election--not for the nation or its people.

We must assert justice and equity for all, and stop engaging with the selfish and foolish who worship of the feet of an orange demagogue.

Time for an Apology

It was Spring 2017. Donald had been president for three months. A university student and I were in the library coffee shop, a novelty which still amazes this old fart. We were discussing the in's and out's of his research paper about racism and the inequitable distribution of wealth in America. He had command of his research. I was guiding him as to whether he would argue how racism affects wealth distribution, how wealth distribution affects racism, or how the two cannot be separated. I was encouraging him to write about the first or the last.

In the middle of the conversation, Donald came up. (He was a new anomaly to us all. Now he's an old, boring, stupid anomaly better described as the antithesis of reason.) The student, an African American, called him a racist. I asked what was his evidence. He had none. His reaction was instinctual.

I had met the Don on his "private" rented jet with "gold seatbelts." (They were plated with something that looked like gold.) I listened to him talk about his new Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. He explained in eager detail how he invested heavily in the "front of the house" (areas seen by guests) and put nothing into the "back of the house," where his workers produced banquets, did laundry, and cleaned the hotel. I came away thinking him cheap and unethical but with no cause to think him racist. At the time, I did not know the federal government had sued Donny and daddy for violating the civil rights of African Amerians living in their apartment buildings.

I asked my student to consider Donny more of a manipulator than a racist. In other words, his race baiting was a political tactic as opposed to an expression of belief.

The student stared. His eyes also screamed: "You really believe that?" As we shook hands, I sensed a feeling of distain, pity, or disappointment. It was as if he were saying: "Another White fooling himself about this country and some of its people."

My student was right on two counts..

I wanted to believe Donny was only a manipulator. I wanted it not because it was right but because I didn't want to believe almost 50% of Americans voted for a racist, not in the 21st Century, not after electing President Obama twice.

God, I was wrong. So wrong. His race baiting was born from a belief in racial superiority. He used that belief to create a political tactic and has used with increasing intensity since, as displayed in his recent attack ads against former Vice President Joe Biden.

To my student, whose name I have forgotten, I apologize.

A Lesson from an American Observer—Mark Twain

Mark Twain taunted 19th century America. His humorous and cynical observations cut to the quick, a lesson rarely addressed with students read Tom Swayer and Huckleberry Finn. The man embraced change, as Shelley Fisher Fishkin noted in a 2007 article in Stanford Magazine.

“Conversations with his father-in-law and other abolitionists—and with former slaves—helped prompt Twain to re-examine the moral underpinnings of the world in which he had grown up. And find them wanting. Yet no trace of the pain inflicted by slavery and or the injustice of racism had cast a shadow over the luminous happy “boy’s book” he had just published—despite the fact that Twain now knew just how deeply pain and injustice had infused the world in which he had lived as a boy. A decade after a bloody war that left the nation reeling in contradictions and confusion, Tom Sawyer evoked a prelapsarian Eden, a time when life was infinitely less complicated.

“When Twain began writing Huckleberry Finn he thought he was writing another boy’s book, a sequel to Tom Sawyer. But Twain soon found himself with several hundred pages of a manuscript like no book anyone had ever written before. It was about a child who grows up in a world in which no one—including that child—questions the God-given legitimacy of a society in which people who think of themselves as supremely civilized endorse a system that is uncivilized, illegitimate and inhumane.

“Twain wrote the book at a time when ex-slaves were subjected to economic exploitation, disenfranchisement and racially motivated lynchings, and the last third of the novel is increasingly understood as a satire of the many betrayals and indignities African-Americans endured after the breakdown of Reconstruction. Huckleberry Finn is a masterful satire not of slavery, which had been abolished a decade before Twain began writing the novel, but of the racism that suffused American society as Twain wrote the book in the late 1870s and early 1880s and which continues to stain America today. This theme is as integral to Huckleberry Finn as it is irrelevant to Tom Sawyer.

“The author of Huckleberry Finn had a clearer view than the author of Tom Sawyer did of the grim trajectory American race relations were likely to take as the 19th century closed. (Indeed, he had embarked on his own private affirmative action plan as one small step in addressing the problem, paying for the education of several black students. Recall his 1885 letter to the dean of the Yale Law School explaining his decision to pay for one of the first black law students there. Twain wrote, ‘We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.’)”

It’s time for all White Americans to follow Twain’s lead.

The Pursuit of Happiness—A Dignity Deserved by All Americans

More than a month ago, Army Specialist Aaron Robertson hammered Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen to death. With his girlfriend, he attempted to dismember the corpse. They gave up and buried Ms. Guillen's remains 25 miles outside Fort Hood. The U.S. Army found the site a month ago.

Much as George Floyd's death rallied millions of Americans in support of Black Lives Matter efforts to change policing and to fight racial inequity, Guillen's death has rallied female veterans, GI's, and civilians against sexual harassment, violence, gender inequity, and death.

Women have fought for this nation (yes, killed enemies) since the American Revolution. Millions of others steadied the home front as their fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, and sons and grandsons went into battle. These are and have been the nation's unsung fighting women. These patriots--those in uniform, those not--have suffered and died from harassment, assault, rape, and death at the hands of their comrades in arms.

In the case of the armed forces, military command and political leaders have failed to respond effectively. Female veterans, some officers, politicians, and military observers have condemned Guillen's death, the reasons behind it, and the obscene suffering absorbed by our nation's female commissioned and non-commissioned soldiers.

Some observers have called it #MeToo's BLM moment.

I understand the point: Guillen is a cause célèbre of #MeToo as Floyd is for BLM. My understanding doesn't change the myopic nature of the observation.

Simplistic comparisons do wonders to inspire slogans for protest banners or Twitterish expressions used to rally people in the street. At the same time, the simplistic underestimates the sin committed against Floyd and Guillen.

Neither wanted to die. They weren't fighting for a cause, in a war, or guarding liberty. They fought off attackers who had sworn oaths to protect the library and safety of Americans. They died in the shadows of American indignity.

These supposed guardians of simple American rights robbed two ordinary Americans of the most fundamental of rights, life. In doing so, these villains denied them a dignity deserved, not just as Americans but as human beings.

For these very reasons, Floyd and Guillen shouldn’t be mythicized. They aren’t cause célèbres. They were people whose lives were rubbed out. Their futures eliminated. Their loved ones left in grief. Their deaths have a meaning far greater than found in the objectives and solutions offered by BLM and #MeToo.

Their deaths should be immortalized by a movement yet unseen--the same one created and betrayed by most of this nation's founding fathers: all people “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Their deaths must not be in vain so that all Americans are endowed with the liberty and dignity to pursue happiness as they see fit.

The distinction is crucial to the well-being of all Americans, for if we see only Floyd's and Guillen's mistreatment and deaths, then we only glance at the true problem, and that glimpse won’t fuel the determination needed to bring about change.

We must recognize that since America’s founding, women and people of color have lived under tyranny’s whip of self-interest and indulgences. America has betrayed them, for these two groups have been denied their inalienable rights. To live without being abused or killed. And to be treated on par with all Americans. In other words, American society must ensure and enforce the equitable treatment of people of color and women. With this assurance will come the solutions sought by BLM and #MeToo: the rightful dignity to women and people of color. Should we as a society treat people with the dignity deserved, we ensure their opportunities to receive an education, housing, and compensation on par with all Americans.

Then America will fulfill the claims its founders made in 1776.

America’s Troubled Legacy Is Morphing

Symbols have one role in a society—to perpetuate myths about itself. We absorb them. They're parts of our American selves with their beauty and with their ugliness. We celebrate the beautiful. We ignore the ugly.

Now, seemingly for the first time, millions of Americans see the ugly side of the American dream. They, meaning White Americans, are protesting in the streets about violence against Black Americans as if there weren’t hints of the nation’s sins taught in grammar school and high school history classes. Most Americans I’ve encountered—until three months ago—don't give a hoot about history. What’s the point of history? Can’t get a job with a history degree. We are our history. "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it," said British MP Edmund Burke some 240 years ago.

We're repeating it.

A portion of America today looks at its history through the lens of 21st-century anger. They have ignored the one historical fact: With the U.S. Constitution, America's founding fathers legitimized the greatest sins of humankind, a sin shared and fostered by other great countries such as Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, and minor kingdoms along the coast of western Africa.

They--all of them--set the stage for the most mortal war in the nation's history, the Civil War. Finally, they set the stage for Jim Crow, de jure and de facto segregation, the murders of thousands in towns like Rosedale and Greenwood. And more.

Somewhere in the psyche of White Americans, the Civil War absolved us from that sin. The immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century left us untainted by the sin. Northerners looked at the South as the Eve and serpent to their Adam. Prior to the 1960s, hell today, they’d say, “Tut, tut, tut. Isn’t it terrible that Emmett Till was hung because he offended a white woman? Do you know he was only fourteen?” European Americans went no further in 1955 and long after. Here’s why history is important. Did you know that the white woman recanted her accusation? Did you know that his admitted murders were acquitted by an all-White jury? Did you know that he was not the first or the last?

Now White Americans are meeting their doom. They have set the stage for repetition.

The Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America, documented 4000 African Americans lynched between 1877 (most or less the end of Reconstruction) to 1950 (four years before Brown vs. the Board of Education). The map shows lynching around America. It was created by Monroe Work Today. It’s not named for President James Monroe, a slave owner, but for Monroe Nathan Work, who compiled data about lynching.

Lynching has been ignored by a vast majority of White Americans. They don’t get hit by a lightning bolt of fear when they see a noose hanging from a tree. A noose is not frightening. It's a knotted rope with legitimate functions. It’s not the noose that strikes fear but what it symbolizes: the ability of any White American to murder a Black American without ever serving time and sometimes being cheered for the lynching. That legacy flooded the imagination of NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace (an African American) when he saw a noose in his garage. (An investigation indicated the noose had nothing to do with Bubba Wallace.)

Obviously Donald Trump, who more than once declared himself a genius and a person who knows everything, is a moron when it comes to our nation’s legacies. DT rubbed Wallace’s wound with salt. He ridiculed Wallace, and his Administration’s spokesperson implied Wallace was committing a hoax. This is racism. This is defamation. DT was egging on his out-of-sync supporters who cheer and roar during his semiliterate speeches. In doing so, President Blubber-butt has become a symbol—the symbol of what is wrong with too many White Americans. They don’t know their history, and when the lights go out at night, they don’t care.

Repeat, repeat.

These symbols oppress, intimidate, and punish. DT’s lack of empathy for Wallace and the legacy that haunts all adult African Americans brings back the hatred of presidents such as James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Ronald Reagan.

Like most symbols, we don’t “see” the attributes associated with them immediately. Think Santa Claus—chubby, old man in a crazy red suit. Meaningless. That is until society tags the image. Then symbols attached themselves to others: Santa and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (neither having anything to do with the birth of Jesus). They have a snow ball effect in December, as symbols of good cheer and human kindness. One legacy builds on another.

The lack of recrimination for lynching a Black man snowballs into the lack of recrimination of police officers killing Black men. For every Black man killed, there’s a ghost of lynching past haunting America, especially Black America. Most White Americans cannot see the ghost. Neither they nor their forebears saw a family member, neighbor, or friend lynched. They don’t know the history of lynching. They don’t live with police violence. They don't feel the connection. (They could empathize with a little effort.)

 



 

The experiences aren’t there for White Americans, but the statistics are. Look at the ones gather by Mapping Police Violence.

• African Americans are three times more likely to die at the hands of police than European Americans.


• African Americans are 1.3 times more unlikely to be armed than European Americans.


• African Americans are six times more likely to die at the hands of police in Oklahoma than in Georgia.


• Eight out of the 100 largest police departments in the U.S. kill African Americans at higher rates than the U.S. murder rate.


• Ninety-nine percent of killings by police between 2013 and 2019 have not resulted in charges against the police.


• Between 2013 and 2019, 1944 African Americans have been killed by police.


• Some may say that is because African Americans live in violent cities. That argument does not hold water. See the MPV map.

Initially a few of these deaths sparked the BLM movement protests throughout the U.S. and the world. Those deaths represent only the tip of the tip of a large iceberg. The leaders of America are like the captain of the Titanic, sailing full steam ahead without regard for the nation's legacy. There's a preference for ignorance and fears.

Compare the data between lynching and police killing of African Americans. They aren’t parallel but one echoes the other. Both rationalize the killing of African Americans.

Ignorance and fear modified the lynching legacy. Those two elements have enable too many Americans to pass the burden of "lynching" African Americans to the police.

"I never did that," you may claim. Didn't your silence allow it?:

There has been too much silence in the White community. European Americans don’t feel the consequence of these legacies. It hasn’t visited neighborhoods, families, friends, and forebears.

Let's Celebrate a New Independence Day

For 244 years, Americans have celebrated its independence from Great Britain. We light fireworks. We barbeque. We drink beer, eat corn, drink soda, eat frankfurters. We lie on blankets and watch 20-minute firework displays.

The beer, the eats, the booms and crackles of fireworks obscure the greatest achievement made by any American, a sacrifice imposed on them.

The date is July 4th, the date when individuals such as Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, and George Walton.Soon after these White men or associates, some slavers and other profiteers of slavery, began pounding out the Articles of Confederation. It became law of the land in 1781. It flopped. They rebooted. In 1789, they stumbled upon what has become known as our Constitution.

We weren't fighting only a war with Britain at the time. We were fighting our better angels, and they lost. It was during that 15-year period, Americans, meaning White Americans, codified racism. They stripped Africans of their humanity. They equated them with chattle. They were the property of European colonists (later European Americans), who could do as they wished with them, work them, punish them, torture them, rape them, kill them and sell them. Not for one generation, but for all generations. Their value on this planet was in the eyes of the White man.

It was not a new concept. By the time we declared war on Great Britain, European colonists had enslaved Africans for 157 years in the English colonies (longer in the Spanish). Each delegate knew slavery would remain a part of the United States after the war with Britain.

So on July 4th, we surrendered the freedom of people of African descent in order for European colonists to be free of Great Britain. We also surrendered our anti-colonialism furor for the remnants of colonialism's harshest realities.

On past Fourths of July, we--meaning European Americans--have ignored our compromises. We've forgotten those whom White Americans sacrificed for White American freedom. We've looked away from our ugliness. This year should be different.

July 4, 2020, should be a day of reflection and of penance for sacrificing the lives of a race. We should use this upcoming 24 hours to thank those men, women, and children and to ask their forgiveness for not making more of their sacrifice. We should grant them all citizenship, albeit post mortem.

Let's also celebrate the new America in people such as Maya Moore as captured by Kurt Streeter of the New York Times:

Still in her prime, Maya Moore sacrificed her career, stepping away as one of the greats in basketball for a long shot bid to help free a prisoner she was convinced had been wrongfully convicted.

There would be no fifth W.N.B.A. championship, no bid for another Olympic gold medal, no fans gasping at the perfect jump shot.

In a shock to the sport, she left the game — temporarily, she said — in early 2019 to free Jonathan Irons, a Missouri man who continuously claimed innocence as he served a 50-year prison sentence for burglary and assault with a gun.

Let’s Change the Great Equalizers

The Murderkill River is a quarter mile from where I sit. I see it out my window. It winds down from interior Delaware into Delaware Bay, another quarter mile away. It looks like most rivers, a meandering blue that rises and settles with the bay’s tides. During a full moon, its water snakes through the wetlands, and the distance between me and the Murderkill’s shallow overflow is measured in feet.

When you walk to JP’s Wharf, a local restaurant along the river, you see the current going in or going out. The murky blue is swift. Ducks float atop, speeding upriver or downriver depending on the fates of the tides. The waters twirl quickly around dock pilings, creating small whirlpools. If you know anything about water, you wonder about the currents two feet down, where the water is chilly. You never see anyone in the water even when temperatures exceed 90F.

Across the river, there’s a sandy point separating the river’s mouth from Delaware Bay.

Yesterday afternoon, four individuals decided to go for a swim. It’s thought they were near the point. The current caught them. An observer went in and rescued two. The other two vanished.

My wife watched rescue crews and divers, along with local jet skiers and fishermen,  rush past our home on Main Street to Bowers Beach. She walked down.

More rescue workers in trucks or towing trailers with rescue boats passed her. None of them honored the 25 mph speed limit. They were from the towns of Magnolia, Millsboro, New Castle, and others whose names I don’t remember. They came to help rescue workers from Bower’s Beach and South Bowers. Most were volunteer firefighters and rescue workers. They worked alongside the Coast Guard, state troopers, and workers from the Department of Transportation, who created the staging area.

Helicopters flew up and down the river. Rescue skiffs patrolled the shores. Divers plunged the depths, and others searched under the pilings. You could see the Bower’s divers—dressed in their red wet suits that covered them from head to toe.

My wife stood with the onlookers a distance from the staging area. She watched as boats plied the river and as divers worked the water. She along with the rest were quiet except for an occasional comment or thought about the promise of the rescue.

There were more than 100 people in the area, a massive gathering for a town of slightly more than 300. Around 6:00, my wife and other onlookers left for home, dinner, and a chance to understand the dark fate of those two individuals.

After dinner, I walked down to the staging area. The strobes atop the rescue vehicles flashed red, white, and blue. Men milled about the site. At 8:30. they called the search. I watched as the rescue vehicles, trucks with rescue boats hitched to a trailer, and pickup trucks weaved between the orange pilings set up by the DOT workers. They drove down Clifton Cubbage Drive and returned to their stations or homes.  As I went to leave, a rescue boat sailed upriver--one last time.

I walked up Main Street. I passed the firehouse. A firefighter in her mid-thirties was shaking out a red wetsuit, spraying it with water, flipping it, shaking it, and spraying the other side. She looked depressed. I wanted to ask if they found one of the other two swimmers. I thought best to leave her alone.

The two missing weren’t found as of this morning, but the search will continue.

Throughout the episode, one fact was missing--constantly. The ethnicity of the swimmers. It wasn't mentioned by rescue workers, onlookers, or reporters.

There was a simple reason. It didn’t and doesn't matter. Two people are missing. Their families are upset and possibly already grieving.

The community came together for these individuals. You might call it kindness. I think it intuitive. It's an intuitive response to the great equalizers of human existence: danger and death. We know its pain, its finality. We don't want to bear it. We don't want others to bear it. We will go to great effort and expense in an attempt to ensure those outcomes.

It’s great that we as human beings can easily and quickly recognize the humanity of others. The protestors are doing it in the streets of America. Once is not enough. Life should be the great equalizer, not death.