Liberty is for me…

A professor I had in college once posed a question to the class: How many of you think there are still problems with racial tension in the country today? I raised my hand to indicate that I thought so. It was an easy enough answer to a question that begged for the obvious response—or so I thought. The professor’s brow furrowed a bit, so I surveyed the room to find that only one other student in the class of 25 had raised a hand, an African American male in the back row. This was no more than two years ago.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon—I was walking to the gym (saving on fuel costs, preserving the environment, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, all at once), when I moved unknowingly into the path of an errant and oncoming one-man tirade. From what I gathered of this man’s heated monologue, he’d just been terminated from his job as a dishwasher, and was none too happy about it. He was African American, in his early to mid-thirties, and was looking everywhere but straight ahead as I approached him on the sidewalk. That is, until we crossed paths, at which point, he postponed his monologue and addressed me firmly and directly, with a wagging finger in my face, as though he’d been looking for the source of his agitation and found it personified in me. “You know what?” he said, “I hate all you white [expletives].” The confrontation and projectile racial epithets commanded my undivided attention as the tirade continued. “They should kill all you [expletives]. You’re the reason I don’t have [expletive].” His direct address dragged on for a few moments, then his tirade wandered again, and before long, the man was bounding on behind me, beguiling cars at an intersection, as I resumed my walk to the gym.

Now, I’m not one to give in to baseless ridicule, but the man’s words stuck in me, as though the projectile racial epithets had achieved their objective. They got my wheels spinning, and I began to wonder at the true source of his remarks. I wasn’t twenty feet from the altercation, when a woman at a bus stop, who I had not noticed before, stopped me again to ask if I was all right. She was an older white woman, possibly in her sixties, and had, no doubt, heard what had taken place a few paces away. I told her I was fine. I would have resumed my walk right there, but something in the air told me I was in for another address. This time, it was a lecture.

“I can’t understand why they do that,” she said.

I did my best to settle in and get comfortable at the word “they;” the most ambiguous and incriminating personal pronoun in the book. This woman was looking to impart some wisdom, and I was the target destination. She went on. “You don’t bother them at all, and they still hate us. It’s not right.”

Her lecture more or less fizzled out from that point, and I was grateful. I finally got on with my trek, workout gloves and sweat rag in hand, but my wheels kept spinning. A block or two up the road, a notion descended upon me. In the woman’s three or four sentences of rambling conjecture (not all of which have been included here)—which she may have assumed empathized with some underdeveloped opinion of my own—she did manage to identify what can be said, arguably, to be the perceived variables and result, respectively, of the racial equation in the United States: “us”, “them”, and “it’s not right.”

It is not at all absurd to view the matter of race relations in the states as a veiled tension. Countless civil rights victories and pending struggles, while incrementally liberating minority groups in the U.S., have also served to mask a very real tension that has proven more difficult to amend or abolish than many of the nation’s more questionable policies that have since fallen. This is not a tension that can be rooted out through court adjudication. It is woven and tangled throughout a nation of personal stances and ingrained beliefs, on either side of an indefinite dividing line.

Like many suppressed emotions, racial tension undoubtedly reveals itself in response to specific triggers. In the case of the man, the trigger may very well have been losing his job. In the case of the woman, it may have been witnessing the object of her own racial tensions make his unchecked emotions a spectacle.

When tension fosters opposition, it is helpful to locate the nucleus of the conflict, so to speak, the place from which the tension is brewed and dispersed. So, where is the current nucleus for racial tension in the United States? It seems that our inability, as a country, to weed out hatred and prejudice altogether is matched by our inability to agree upon its source. To many in minority groups, a lengthy history of oppression and its residual effects is a smoking gun when pondering the source of any disenfranchisement they experience today. To many in the majority group, the history of oppression is just that: history. Many in this group feel that they are being forced to give ground to affirmative action and equal employment opportunity initiatives, which, to many in this group, seems unjust compensation for a history of oppression that they don’t feel they’ve had a hand in, and that they believe no longer influences society. The capitalist mindset—private and personal gain from private and personal initiative, and one of the canonized American ideals: being afforded the opportunity to pull oneself up by the bootstraps—undoubtedly perpetuates the vindictiveness that many in the majority group harbor for those in minority groups whom they perceive as being unwilling to do for themselves. Add a healthy dose of negative stereotype to the mix, as well as a hefty portion of ridiculous and unfounded generalization, and it’s not quite the harmonious melting pot one might extract from his or her ideals.

So, we have opposition without cause; tension tracing back to faults that none will claim. The solution to this tension will not be achieved through any government due process. It will be a process that is far more personal and far more difficult. The U.S. is a heterogeneous hodgepodge of people who must, one by one, eradicate our own personal hatred and prejudices at a rate that exceeds that at which they are being adopted by others and renewed in younger generations every day. The effort this feat requires exists independently of any and all civil rights gains. While these strides have seemed to correspond with an increase in collective understanding and cohesion among Americans of all races and ethnicities—perhaps a direct result of more extensive interrelatedness and communication, stemming from the rights now available to all citizens—there is a rock that government action and court ruling cannot overturn, and that is where the tension hides: in those who open themselves up for it. Irrespective of the extent of future gains granting liberties to people from whom they’ve been withheld, everyone must be accountable for his or her own personal thoughts and feelings, which are not actionable in a court of law. And, if race is no longer to represent a problem in the U.S., everyone must act to that end, personally.

This brings me back to the memory of my college class, and of the professor who asked if there were still problems with racial tension in the country today. After taking the butt of a stranger’s wildly emotional tirade on the chin, and after enduring an impromptu lecture that was as uncomfortable as it was unsound, the memory of that day and that class flung itself back and forth off of the walls in my brain as I made my way to the gym. I had always considered the puzzled look on my professor’s face to have resulted when only two students in the class acknowledged a belief that there continues to be a race problem in the country today. As vivid as the memory of that day was (and still is), I had never stopped to consider the other twenty-three people in the room who kept their hands at their sides, or folded on their desks. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the look on my professor’s face probably had less to do with a pair of raised hands, and more to do with a multitude of knowing glances that shot back and forth across that room, to and from the people who acknowledged nothing.