No Picture. Just Words

With protests regarding the police execution of George Floyd still raging after several nights I have been inundated with article after article addressing many of the issues. I never entered the social justice arena voluntarily. But it seems that one cannot be neutral in a time like this. Admittedly, I have always swung to the far left. And maybe it is something that some do not like about me but I have always been equal in making all people, without exception to race, feel uncomfortable with my ideas. The reason is we think we have ideas—but ideas actually have us. I will explain this as I rattle on.

Tonight, I was invited to view a discussion between Brooklyn Senator Myrie and Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer winning journalist. They had some very insightful views. Of course I have no idea what it means to wake up black in America, but I do have the view of my wife who does. I am married to a women of color. I have been reeducated several times by her on this issue and I can’t say I have learned everything. There are still splinters hidden in my own racism.

Yes. I said my own racism. 

Racism is a toxin that was implanted when none of us were looking. Our parents didn’t know they were infecting us, but they did infect us. It did help being brought up Jewish and inherently aware that our next persecution was just around the corner, so it helped me to at least have an empathetic heart toward my black friends.

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, None but ourselves can free our minds. — Bob Marley, from Redemption Song

So a little history is in order here. My father was a Seltzerman. He ran a wholesale warehouse where he would be the middleman selling soda, seltzer, syrups and beer to other truck drivers who had local delivery routes. My Uncle Rocky was one of these truckers. Almost without exception, all of the drivers had at least one black worker who would help them with the heavy work along their routes. My father had three such men who helped him at the warehouse all with somewhat affectionate nicknames and I have very fond memories of my interactions with these men. Ace was my dad’s foreman and then there was Richie and Kenny the Deacon. These men would also occasionally come to the house on weekends doing extra work around our house. It didn’t dawn on me until I was much older that my father was exploiting them. Why did they need to do house work? Was my dad not paying them enough? I know the latter to be true because I became my dad’s helper when I was 14 and I worked on my dad’s truck until I was 20. To say the least I worked long hours and was grossly underpaid all in the name of making a man of me.

So this was my first interaction with people of color. But the infection came from what was said at home about these workers or about black people in general. They were always referred to as lazy even though they were working 10 hour days at my dad’s shop. I feel the karma of this every day as I face the challenges of running a garden program in the South Bronx just as I approach senior citizen status in life.

Also, another memory that has always bothered me. If a black man would be on our Queens street, there was no animosity but always a question as to why he was there. An ingrown distrust. My dad once told me that this came from his growing up on Manhattan's Lower East side. He said that different ethnic groups would rule their blocks and that you knew not to enter their territory. Italians with Italians. Jews with Jews. Blacks with Blacks.

One more memory I will share is that I remember a neighbor’s house keeper coming to our street and she brought along her son who was my age. We used to play slap ball in the street and this boy was sitting on the sideline watching us. My friends, all of whom were Jewish as was most of our part of Bayside, were fearful of him. But I invited him to play with us. It was at this moment I became doubtful about this aspect of the people who looked like me, prayed like me, lived with me. They all had this fear of blacks.

Following this the city began forced integration in the mid 60’s and the same whispers of fear went around the school. My tact, at age 10 was to deal with the situation head on and become friends with whomever presented themself as affable. My best friend in 7th grade was a boy by the name of Charlie Broughtan. On our school trip to Washington D.C, I got on the bus only to be teased by my white friends. I saw Charlie, the only black kid on the trip and I immediately blew off my then friends to sit with Charlie. We were inseparable that whole weekend.

I tell these stories because in one way they reveal my prejudices and also that part of my nature that was curious to explore other cultures and ethnicities. I was not content to accept the status quo and my life has been a long creative ride which has allowed me to face my weaknesses and embrace my strengths. Which now brings me to the reason I felt the need to scratch my itch to write this.

I was very interested in hearing the discussion between Senator Myrie and Nikole Hannah-Jones. In some ways I heard a few things that were new to me, and then there was something that set me off. It is something that I feel just about everyone in social justice gets wrong (in my opinion.) There was much discussion about systemic inequality. And then the two things that I will now rant about: Education and Religion.

Education is an especially singular issue for me and I wrote about it extensively on my now dormant blog The Free School Apparent. Public education in it’s very inception is unequal. To say that one is good and the other bad is already unequal. To say that one is smarter than the other is unequal. In our system, there always has to be one who is at the short end of the stick. This is the end of the stick that blacks and other people of color have always been forced to hold. But in truth, the inequality passes up and down the line and it lies in the very approach in how we treat children. ALL children. To sit them at desks in neat little rows. Seat them alphabetically and force them to listen to an adult spew some propaganda is a crime of such depths it makes my blood boil. And black children, indigenous children, latino children have been subjected to the bottom end of the spectrum and this educational approach harms EVERYONE. To say that some benefit is a fantasy. What benefits is a dysfunctional and decaying system. A system that has been so destructive it is hard to imagine what life on planet Earth will be on the other side of all these events. When you ask to dismantle a system, you have to include education at the top of the list because that is where the disease of inequality is rooted. It is pumped into us on a daily basis from a young age and it never stops. It reaches us through the media, through marketing and through our working lives. The thoughts in our heads are the voices of our parents, teachers and peers. It infects everything and there is not one shred of it that is worth salvaging. Disadvantaged people should not be asking for equality in an already compromised, unequal and decaying system. We need to build a new system.

The answer to this, or at least one answer is that my wife and I saw this when my son was born. We could not bring ourselves to participate in public schooling. I had already seen with my children from my previous marriage that dealing with the school system was a losing battle. So I did not want to fight that battle. We were lucky to find a group of people who felt the same way and we worked to start our own school based on principles that put the responsibility back into the hands of the children. If you wish to know more you can browse some of the things I wrote when my son was in that school or you can go to the Brooklyn Free School website. There are quite a number of Free Schools around the country and you might want to start your research with AERO. I will end this portion by saying that the only time I ever witnessed real democracy was in the Brooklyn Free School where I saw 8 year olds lead a meeting with 40 children.

The other point I will make is about people of color and religion. People often mistake spirituality and religion. For me they are absolutely not the same. You can be spiritual without religion. A question I have always asked my wife who was raised Anglican in Jamaica is why did people of color embrace the religion of the oppressors? It is something that has always bothered me. Is it that no better idea was offered? I was raised Jewish and we were made to feel that it was an ancient connection. I was not attracted to all the dogma and my path in life was to seek out other forms. These meditative approaches are what my life has been built on and have pushed me in a direction to be curious not only about myself, but the life around me. And I would love to see more people of color throw off the shackles of religious oppression. We are trying to free our minds from a form of slavery that has poisoned the entire human race. The events of the past few days, decades, centuries, eons should inform us that we keep repeating the same old shit. Recognizing that we are ALL infected can lead us to a new beginning.

To my white friends especially I will say not punitively, these events require us to review our own prejudices. Can you admit that you have been racist in your thinking? That maybe you do not experience the things that others take as daily air. We do not know what it means to wake up black in America. How can we. We’ve never been black. But we are human and we see other humans suffering. We need to reach out to them. Not to make ourselves feel better, but because we care about humanity. We all want a better world. One that is in the direction of living harmoniously with the planet, realizing that we are extraordinarily far from that ideal. The path to self realization is how it starts. Then we can have a much more interesting dialogue about race, because in truth race does not exist. It is a concoction and it was invented to keep a broken system in place. If we can begin to let go of the old thinking, maybe we can begin to grow something new. But I am afraid that men will be men and the dog will continue to chase its tail.

I would have liked to end on a more positive note, but I will leave it to you. If there is a wish to really make a difference, it has to start with “Know Thyself.” Other then that I will let the words of James Baldwin take me out of this.

“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time — and in one's work. And part of the rage is this: It isn't only what is happening to you. But it's what's happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance. Now, since this is so, it's a great temptation to simplify the issues under the illusion that if you simplify them enough, people will recognize them. I think this illusion is very dangerous because, in fact, it isn't the way it works. A complex thing can't be made simple. You simply have to try to deal with it in all its complexity and hope to get that complexity across.”

Village Hidden from Memory

2018 - Watercolor and Pen