Remember Preston Brown? He is the senior lifeguard at the Theodore Young Community Center, where I go for my daily swim. For a long time, Preston and I have been joking around about current events, joking with a serious punch. I play the role of the privileged white liberal, he, the skeptical black man. We first developed our parts in a year-long confrontation over the Obama candidacy. The skeptical Preston laughed at my conviction that Obama would be the Democratic nominee, and he thought it was absolutely hysterical that I thought that Americans would likely elect either a black man or a white woman to be President. As I have reported here, we made a couple of bets, which became the source of general community interest, and which Preston, to the surprise of many, paid up. We had a nice lunch at Applebee’s. It ironically, but presciently, ended with a small racist gesture coming from our waiter. We celebrated together, and we sadly noted that while things had changed, the change had its limits.
As a participant observer of Solidarność in Poland, the great social movement that significantly contributed to the end of Communism around the old Soviet bloc, I appreciate limited revolutions. Solidarność called for a self-limiting revolution. Perhaps this is even the time that I should approve of Lenin: “two steps forward, one step back.” Yet, I must admit, I have been disappointed with the stubborn and sometimes very ugly persistence of open racism after the momentous election of President Obama. While I think there is more to the Tea Party than racism, the calls to “take our country back” and the refusal of many to recognize Obama’s legitimacy have been extremely unsettling. Preston’s skeptical view was wrong about the majority of Americans, but he was right about a significant minority. And his concerns have a lot to do with the recent doings in Sanford, Florida.
Yesterday, Preston and I had a brief discussion about Trayvon Martin, which revealed to me, once again, how it is that race is a very real and persistent fact of American life, and why it is that we have so many problems with it.
When I entered the pool area, Preston called out to me, “they got your guy in Florida,” kidding that Zimmerman somehow was my guy. He was trying to get me to engage in conversation, distracting me from my primary task at hand (getting in an hour’s swim, a bit less than two miles) providing for himself some distraction from looking at the pool for hours. I had a little extra time, so I went over since we hadn’t yet talked about the Trayvon Martin controversy.
I told him how terrible I thought the killing was, how horrible it is that we live in a country where such a thing is not only possible, but likely. I confessed to him how I particularly felt badly for Trayvon’s parents, and the parents of young black men more generally, revealing my age and despair, and my recognition that this is something that I did not have to go through as a parent.
He responded by pointing out to me that most young black men who are killed are killed by other young black men. And he continued, the problem is something that we can’t ignore and must address.
I then agreed but pointed out that recognizing that problem doesn’t diminish the troubling racism that was probably at the root of Zimmerman’s identification of Martin as a threat and Zimmerman killing Martin, and the police acceptance of Zimmerman’s account. He agreed.
On that note, I reminded Preston that I wanted to swim for an hour and that the lap session ended in exactly sixty minutes. I suggested that he could allow me to swim into his break, but he would have nothing to do with that.
Our exchange was short and to the point. It was based on mutual good will and respect, which comes from our shared experience. I think it is important to note that if he made my argument and I made his, the meaning of the exchange would have been exactly the opposite of what it was. Instead of being two people talking against racism, it would have been a conversation of two people constituting racism’s persistence. There is a complex relationship between text and context in the exchange, and our mutual understanding is built upon an awareness of this, and our willingness to say things that are hard to say, especially Preston’s recognition of the problem of violent young black men. It is a question of the interaction between who can say what, what they must say and how the must say it, as Irit Dekel explored in her post about Guenter Grass’s controversial poem “What Must Be Said,” and as is implied in my reflections on Poles and Jews.
This is how I interpret the importance of the national protests calling for justice in this case, including “The Million Hoodies March” just outside my New School office, which I observed first hand. That the mobilized included people from different walks of life, young and old, black and white, was crucial. Their co-presence publicly represented at least the beginning of the kind of conversations that Preston and I and many others are having.
These are the two sides of race and racism in America. There are the hateful racists to be sure, those who make racist comments about our President and fight to get their country back, but much more common and difficult is the racism that informs George Zimmerman and the Sanford police’s decision to take his unlikely story completely seriously to the point of not seeing probable cause. And then there are the people who try to work the complexities out, difficult as this is, with no silver bullet, including the election of an African American President.
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