Changing the arc
I’m just an old white guy. What do I know?
Harry Truman was in the White House when Mom brought me home to a little farm in southeast Minnesota. I certainly can’t claim to share or even understand the lived experience of a black child born that same day to a sharecropper’s family in Southeast Mississippi, much less a child born in a Hmong village in the highlands of Laos or a Somali child on the backstreets of Mogadishu. But here, nearly seven decades later, with emotions running high and divisions cutting deep, we’re all sharing one Minnesota, one United States – or trying to.
This past week has left me shaken. To see streets I’ve walked, neighborhoods I’ve visited turned into virtual war zones – a police station stormed, a post office put to the torch, flaming barricades blocking peaceful residential streets -- was so unMinnesotan as to challenge belief. But far beyond the scenes of chaos and destruction was the indelible record of George Floyd being put to death in a Minneapolis parking lot by one of those sworn to “serve and protect.” Across Minnesota, across the nation, across the whole world, thousands have taken to the streets in outrage.
Upon reflection, it is a wonder that we have come so far so quickly.
Let’s not minimize the depth of the racial divide challenging each and every one of us. Four hundred years ago Africans were brought here as property and designated by the framers of the Constitution as being 3/5 of a human being – the former declaration of all men being created equal notwithstanding. And let’s not pretend that this brutal heritage is a thing of the sepia-toned past – Americans born into slavery were still living when I drew my first breath. People of African descent were second class citizens at best – if their identity as citizens or even as human beings was respected at all.
But change was afoot. In the space of a short lifetime we went from Jim Crow to Barack Obama – from a rigidly segregated military force to an African-American commander-in-chief. But change of this depth and magnitude isn’t simply written in lawbooks, it takes place in the hearts and minds of the people who live it and through it. Attitudes and assumptions passed from generation to generation; folkways, traditions, patterns of thought and of speech – consider: my generation was perhaps the first and no doubt the last to be instructed that in polite company the word to use was “Negro.” In a single lifetime “colored people” have become “people of color” and those of us in the white world have struggled to come to grips with all that means.
And we still struggle. With varying degrees of success.
“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King famously observed and events and attitudes indicate him to be right. Sixty years ago George Floyd would have been quickly dismissed as just one more uppity troublemaker who got what was coming to him. For a white person, much less a white police officer, to be prosecuted for the death of a black man was all but unheard of; last week thousands, reflecting the kaleidoscope that is America, took to the streets to demand accountability and justice for George Floyd and for all people. That, I dare to submit, reflects change of the first order.
But I’m just an old white guy, what do I know?
Well, I know my lived experience and the effort and attention it has required to more closely align with the arc of the moral universe. It’s an experience littered with clumsy efforts, missteps and misunderstandings; good intentions gone awry, frustrations and disappointments. But we’re better off than we were when I came into this world and I have every confidence that through struggle and, hard as it may be to see though last week’s clouds of smoke and tear gas, good will justice will continue to come closer to reality for all of us.