FLOTSAM & JETSAM

Friday, June 05, 2026

From anger to action

Sam Smith, 2017 - One of the sad things about the ethnic conflict that has increasingly defined our land is the lack of movements that produce change rather than merely more anger. While the victims of such things as police brutality have more than enough reason to express this anger, that doesn’t mean the anger will produce results by itself.

Even when alternatives are proposed, the media continues to show its bias for conflict over resolution. For example a check of Google found that in the last month less than 5% of online news mentions of Black Lives Matter also included a description of the group’s list of police reforms it is seeking.

Then there are those of liberal bent who seem to prefer semantic and symbolic change over more substantial improvements. For them, to remove the sign on a building named after John Calhoun or to label a whole ethnic group as possessing “white privilege” takes the place, say, of actually changing how a police department operates.

In fact, the number of whites in poverty is almost twice as large as the number of blacks and the number of whites earning a minimum wage or less is more than twice the combined black and latino figure. And because it is considered acceptable by many liberals to ‘dis lower class whites, it is not surprising that so many have sought salvation on the right.

To deal effectively with the issues that confront us, we need alter our language, convert justified anger into effective action, and build cross-cultural alliances that are currently ignored or disparaged. At the present time, for example, blacks comprise only 13% of the population, far too few to achieve righteous goals without the aid of a large number of whites. Lumping the latter into a constituency of privileged racists is not only wrong, it’s not going to change anything for the better.

As the new book, Third Reconstruction, based on the important work of the Moral Mondays movement, points out:

Fusion politics is about helping those who have suffered injustice and have been divided by extremism to see what we have in common. We do this by bringing people together across dividing lines and helping them hear one another. We have no permanent enemies, only permanent issues, rooted in our deepest moral and constitutional values.

Some of the authors’ other important approaches can be found here.

And here are a few other ideas we could be talking about and acting upon, some of them excerpted from my book, Great American Repair Manual.

Stop using the word race: There is simply no scientific definition of race. What are considered genetic characteristics are often the result of cultural habit and environmental adaptation. As far back as 1942, anthropologist Ashley Montague called race our "most dangerous myth."

Yet in our conversations and arguments, in our media, and even in our laws, the illusion of race is given great credibility. As a result, that which is transmitted culturally is considered genetically fixed, that which is an environmental adaptation is regarded as innate and that which is fluid is declared immutable.

Many still hang on to a notion similar to that of Carolus Linnaeus, who declared in 1758 that there were four races: white, red, dark and black. Others make up their own races, applying the term to religions (Jewish), language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has little impact on our views. Our concept of race comes largely from religion, literature, politics, and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks of territoriality, of jingoism, of subjugation, and of the abuse of power.

DNA research has revealed just how great is our misconception of race. In The History and Geography of Human Genes, Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford and his colleagues describe how many of the variations between humans are really adaptations to different environmental conditions (such as the relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to dissipate heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of thing you can easily build a system of apartheid around. As Thomas S. Martin has written:

The widest genetic divergence in human groups separates the Africans from the Australian aborigines, though ironically these two 'races' have the same skin color…. There is no clearly distinguishable 'white race.' What Cavalli-Sforza calls the Caucasoids are a hybrid, about two-thirds Mongoloid and one-third African. Finns and Hungarians are slightly more Mongoloid, while Italians and Spaniards are more African, but the deviation is vanishingly slight.

If we were to come to accept the fact that our social identity is best defined far more by the ethnicity and culture in which we are raised and live than by biology, we would, for example, pay more attention to the fact that our first “black president” spent considerably more time with the Harvard Law School then with a black parent. And that the color of his skin was not the best clue to who he really is.

The real reason race is important to us: Even as we talk endlessly of race, we simultaneously go to great lengths to prove that we are all the same. Why this contradiction? The answer can be partly found in the tacit assumption by many that human equity must be based primarily on competitive equality. Listen to talk about race (or sex) and notice how often the talk is also about competition. The cultural differences (real or presumed) that really disturb us are ones of competitive significance: thigh circumference, math ability and so forth. We accept more easily other differences -- varieties of hair, degree of subcutaneous fat, prevalence of sickle cell anemia -- because they don't affect (or affect far less) who gets to the top.

We don't spend the effort to separate facts from fiction because both cut too close to our inability to appreciate and celebrate our human differences. It is far easier to pretend either that these differences are immutable or that they don't exist at all.

The Catch-22 of ethnicity: It is hard to imagine a non-discriminatory, unprejudiced society in which ethnicity and sex matter much. Yet in our efforts to reach that goal, our society and its institutions constantly send the conflicting message that they are extremely important.

For example, our laws against discriminatory practices inevitably heighten general consciousness of race and sex. The media, drawn inexorably to conflict, plays up the issue. And the very groups that have suffered under racial or sexual stereotypes consciously foster countering stereotypes -- "you wouldn't understand, it's a black thing" -- as a form of protection. Thus, we find ourselves in the odd position of attempting to create a society that shuns invidious distinctions while at the same time -- often with fundamentalist or regulatory fervor -- accentuating those distinctions.

The most important fact about prejudice - It's normal. That isn't to say that it's nice, pretty, or desirable. Only that suspicion, distrust, and distaste for outsiders is a deeply human trait. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote that "all primitive tribes agree in recognizing [a] category of the outsiders, those who are not only outside the provisions of the moral code which holds within the limits of one's own people, but who are summarily denied a place anywhere in the human scheme. A great number of the tribal names in common use, Zuñi, Déné, Kiowa . . . are only their native terms for 'the human beings,' that is, themselves. Outside of the closed group there are no human beings."

Many attempts to eradicate racism from our society have been based on the opposite notion -- that those who harbor prejudice towards others are abnormal and social deviants. Further, we often describe these "deviants" only in terms of their overt antipathies -- they are "anti-Semitic" or guilty of "hate." In fact, once you have determined yourself to be human and others less so, you need not hate them any more than you need despise the fish you eat for dinner. This is why those who participate in genocide can do so with such calm -- they have defined their targets as outside of humanity.

What if, instead, we were to start with the unhappy truth that humans have always had a hard time dealing with other peoples, and that much ethnic and sexual antagonism stems not from hate so much as from cultural narcissism? Then our repertoire of solutions might tilt more towards education and mediation and away from being self-righteous multi-cultural missionaries attacking yahoos in the wilds of the soul. We could turn towards something more akin to what Andrew Young once described as a sense of "no fault justice." We might begin to consider seriously Martin Luther King's admonition to his colleagues that among their dreams should be that someday their enemies would be their friends.

Telling stories: If we are to rid our minds of stereotypes, something needs to fill the empty space. Nothing works better than the real stories of real people drawn from the anecdotal warehouses that supply many of our deepest values, feelings and philosophy.

If you find your classroom, organization or workplace bogged down in cultural tension and abstract confrontation -- or perhaps feeling the silence that comes from being near one another and not knowing what to say -- why not take a break and let people tell their own stories?

How Mr. Platt did it: In the middle of the stolid, segregated, monolithic 1950s, Howard Platt taught one of two anthropology courses available in an American high school. I was lucky enough to be among his students. Mr. Platt showed us a new way to look at the world.

And what a wonderful world it was. Not the stultifying world of our parents, not the monochromatic world of our neighborhood, not the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of fantastic options, a world in which people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary variety of ways. Mr. Platt's subliminal message of cultural relativism was simultaneously a subliminal message of freedom. You were not a prisoner of your culture; you could always go live with the Eskimos, the Indians or the Arabs. By the time the bell sounded I was often ready to go.

Mr. Platt did not exorcise racism, and he did not teach ethnic harmony, cultural sensitivity, the regulation of diversity, or the morality of non-prejudiced behavior. He didn't need to. He taught something far more important, something so often missing from our discussions on race, something frequently absent from college curricula. Mr. Platt opened a world of variety, not for us to fear but to learn about, appreciate and enjoy. It was not an obstacle, but a gift.

Be friendly and respectful: In a culturally varied society, it is easy to transmit signals that are misunderstood but, fortunately, kindness, friendliness and respect come across clearly. Make good use of them.

Learn about other cultures: We typically try to resolve inter-cultural tensions without giving people a solid reason for liking one another. Mutual enjoyment and admiration provide the shortest route between two ethnicities. Education is one thing that we know reduces prejudice. Yet for all our talk about diversity, this isn't so easy to come by. We could well spend less time on abstractions of racism and more on the assets of each other's traditions.

We could be teaching, in high school classes and college seminars, the variety of the world as something to explore and enjoy, not just as a problem or an issue. You don't have to teach diversity. Diversity is. You don't have to defend it in lofty liberal rhetoric. Studying humanity's medley is not a moral act; it is simply intelligent.

And you don't have to learn it all in school. France became a haven for black exiles in the last century in no small part because of French enthusiasm for jazz and African art. Similarly, jazz clubs and concerts were among the few places in segregated America that apartheid was regularly ignored.

Diversity within cultures counts as well as that between them: Just because jazz is important to black culture doesn't mean all blacks like jazz. Or that colleges shouldn't recruit black cellists as well as black forwards. Or that just because someone's white, they have to be Anglo-Saxon or a Protestant.

Find something in common that's more important than what's not: It can be a political goal, a sport, an avocation or a business. I've seen it work in situations as diverse as a project to train church archivists, a kid's team headed for a playoff, the creation of a city’s major third party, and the stopping of one of the largest planned freeway systems in the country. The importance of ethnicity is often inversely proportional to what else we have on our minds

Stop being shocked by prejudice. We have attempted to exorcise racism much as Nancy Reagan tried to get rid of drugs, by just saying no. It has worked about as well. Once we recognize the unpleasant persistence of human discrimination, once we give up the notion that it is merely social deviance controllable by sanctions, we will be guided away from puritanical corrective approach towards ones that emphasize techniques of mitigating harm, and towards activities and attitudes that become antibiotics against prejudice.

Talk about it but not too much: At a meeting called to discuss racial problems, a black activist said, "I don't want to talk about race unless we are going to do something specific about it." It's not a bad rule for every public discussion of race. Unproductive talk can leave people feeling more helpless and frustrated than when it began.

Diversity includes people you don't like. Even liberals don't talk about this but a truly multi-cultural community will include born-again Christians opposed to abortion, Muslims with highly restrictive views on the role of women, prayer-sayers and atheists, Playboy readers as well as Seventh Day Adventists. Remember that you're not required to express -- or even have -- an opinion about everyone else in the world. Encourage reciprocal liberty: I can’t have my freedom unless you have yours.

Don't sweat the small stuff. Common sense is a great civil rights tool. Even in a multi-cultural society, loutish sophomores are going to use tasteless language, fundamentalists will sneak in private prayers on public occasions, and eight-year-old boys will grab girls where they shouldn't. Hyper-reaction to such minor phenomena hurt and trivialize the cause of human justice.

Try to avoid putting virtues in competition: School bussing placed the virtue of integration in direct conflict with the virtue of neighborhood schools. Often such conflicts can be avoided or mitigated by choosing other tactics. For example, why was there so much attention to bussing and so little to residential integration?

Attack economic discrimination, too: After every ethnic or gender group gets its rights, the powerful among them will still discriminate against the weak and the wealthy against the poor. As Saul Alinsky said, "When the poor get power they'll be shits like everyone else." Opposition to affirmative action might have been much less had the programs been based on zipcode as well as on race and sex. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out in 1964 that "the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education." And bear in mind that slavery was not just ultimate ethnic discrimination, it was also ultimate economic discrimination as well: the master had all; the slave nothing.

Be tough on leaders, not on followers: Those with tightly defined ideas about how we should behave often make little distinction between people who merely accept the values of their culture and those who control, market and manipulate them. It helps to remember that we are all creatures of our cultures and often speak unconsciously with their voice. This may not be an admirable characteristic but it certainly is a human one. After all, if it weren't for Rush Limbaugh, dittoheads would have nothing to ditto.

Recognize that we are all part something else. By dint of exposure to TV alone, it is virtually impossible to live in America and not have absorbed aspects of other cultures. We all, in effect, belong to a part-culture, which is to say that our ethnicity is somewhat defined by its relationship to, and borrowing from, other cultures. There are almost no pure anythings in America anymore. The sooner we accept and enjoy this, the better off we'll be.

Remember that everyone is an ethnic something. There are no unethnic Americans.

If you are in a minority you can still lead the majority –There are all sorts of ways. The moral leadership of civil rights activists, political leadership, leadership in the arts and literature, or in a high school.

Or creating cross cultural spaces such as the traditional Irish bar As one politician said in Chicago many years ago, “An Italian won't vote for a Jew and a Lithuanian won't vote for an Pole but all four will vote for an Irishman.”

Create new alliances: A long needed black-latino alliance representing approximately 30% of American would shake up our politics. Create a black-latino-labor alliance and politics could be changed forever. You don’t have to agree on everything; just go for the goals you all like.

Monday, August 11, 2025

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Wednesday, December 11, 2024

The passing wonder of fame

Sam Smith – I have become fascinated by the extent of coverage being given the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare. For one thing, I had never heard of him before. I can’t even remember his name. And I noticed that MSNBC in its headlines referred to him just as CEO rather than giving his name which I suspect means I’m not alone in my ignorance on this topic.

We’re apparently meant to respect him and scorn his killer because he is a CEO, a position of significant importance to those working in firms like MSNBC, but for me it’s another case of something that has interested me of late, namely who is important and for how long. Having recently turned 87, I have a daily acquaintance with insignificance, which doesn’t bother me since the alternative might be mortality or having to do some stupid stuff. Beside I have lived a life with some amazing people. They just weren’t famous.

I have also been mulling the topic of fame and what happens to it. People put a lot of energy into achieving it, but even if you’re famous for awhile, not long after you are forgotten. In fact, I think there is a period ranging from a few years ago to the past century in which even history hasn’t earned its fame by our standards.

I was reminded of this recently reading a book that discusses Lyndon Johnson, a major figure early in my life but – like Richad Nixon and Hubert Humphrey – rarely mentioned these days. Even Franklin Roosevelt doesn’t get that much attention. I’ve come to call this period protohistory.

Then I remember that during the four decades I was covering national news in Washington, I was also deeply involved at the local level. And when I think back, I can only come up with one national figure – Senator Eugene McCarthy – with whom I actually became friends.

There were local issues like DC self government, civil rights and freeways that absorbed me and created activist friendships. And when I think back of the people who had the most impact on my life they were overwhelmingly local friends and neighbors, teachers I had in high school, a farmer for whom I worked in the summertime when a teenager and so forth.

I’m coming to feel that our view of who’s important has been seriously distorted by the mass media of modern times, giving us role models that we won’t think about much in a few years. Very much like the media handles movie stars. Fame is just a passing status.

Obviously, some of these – like Donald Trump – can cause considerable damage along with those they give fame, like Robert Kennedy Jr., but can you remember who was the first director of then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. And what did Oveta Culp Hobby do of particular interest?

What I’ve concluded from this is that fame is a passing advantage. During the long decades of protohistory even the famous are forgotten and only a few are revived by scholars.

The truth is the most important people in our lives are those with whom we live near, talk much, share ideas and do each other favors. This is the actual world of our lives rather than what the media tries to tell us.

The guy who’ll help you most with today’s being problem may live right across the street.

Saturday, June 08, 2024

Tales from the Attic: Getting started in civil rights

Note: Some of this was written before the term Negro was replaced by the term black.

Sam Smith, 2010 - There was a story that wound its way across the pages of The Idler - forerunner of the Progressive Review. It was first expressed in a moving fashion in letters written from Mississippi in the summer of 1964 by my college roommate, ex-wrestler and ex-paratrooper Gren Whitman. From Biloxi on August 8, 1964 he wrote:

|||| Fear cannot be described, only felt. I have been frightened many times In my life in varying degrees, in varying circumstances. And courage is not the absence of fear. Fear is the essence of courage. What are your emotions now, driving with us along a lonely highway in rural Mississippi, in an integrated car? It you are frightened, you are with friends, and you are sane. If you are not afraid, you know nothing about Mississippi. You have never heard of the Freedom Rides and how they ended in Jack-son. You have never heard of Herbert Lee and Louis Allen, and countless others. You have not heard of Neshoba County. You have never talked with a Mississippi Negro or a civil rights veteran.

And if your fear has overcome your convictions, you have no business with us. Go home. Our three colored companions are profoundly aware that two whites are in the car with them and what this will mean if we are stopped for any reason. The two of us, likewise, know that though we are white, we become as black as tar once we are known to be CR types. White Mississippians make no distinctions. There is a strange and wonderful and, for you, a new bond between us, compounded of fear, and dedication and brotherhood. . . .

In January 1966, I got a chance to help plant the seed. The notorious DC Transit wanted to raise its fares and the local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had organized to stop it. They urged citizens with cars to drive bus passengers during a one-day boycott. I joined the volunteers. On the morning of January 24, 1966, I hauled myself out of bed, swallowed a cup of coffee, warmed up my '54 Chrysler, and made my way to Sixth and H Streets Northeast, one of the assembly points for volunteer jitneys. A boycott organizer filled my car with three high school girls and a middle-aged and rather fat woman.

If both the fat lady and her husband worked, the five cent fare increase Chalk was seeking would cost them two week's worth of groceries over the course of a year.

I let my passengers off and headed back to Sixth and H. At Florida and New York, I counted five empty or near-empty buses. It wasn't even nine o'clock in the morning and the boycott was working,

"It's beautiful," the man in the slightly frayed brown overcoat said after he told me he was headed for Seventeenth Street. "It's working and it's beautiful. Hey, you see those two there. Let's try and get them."

I pulled over to the right lane by a stop where two men stood.

"Hey man, why spend thirty cents? Get in," my rider called to the pair.

"You headed downtown?"

"Yeah, get in."

"Great. It's working, huh? Great!"

At the delicatessen at Twenty-fourth and Benning, one of the assembly points, a young black who worked with SNCC greeted me: "Been waiting all morning for a car to work from here; said they were going to have one, but they didn't send it. Want a cup of coffee?"

"Thanks."

"I'm tired, man. Been up all night down at the office. We got some threats. One bunch said they were going to bomb us, but they didn't."

We got into my car and continued east on Benning. Lots of empty buses.

"We've got to live together, man. You're white and you can't help it. I'm Negro and I can't help it. But we still can get along. That's the way I feel about it." I agreed.

"You ever worked with SNCC before?" "Nope," I said.

'Well, I'll tell you man, you hear a lot of things. But they're a good group. They stick together. You know, like if you get in trouble, you know they're going to be in there with you. If you get threatened they'll have people around you all the time. They stick together. That's good, man."

Later, I picked up a man at a downtown bus stop. The woman in the back seat asked him, "You weren't waiting for a bus, were you?"

"No. I just figured someone would come along and pick me up."

"That's good, 'cause if you were waiting for a bus I was going to bop you upside your head."

We all laughed and the man reassured her again.

"You know," the woman in back continued, "there were some of the girls at work who said they were going to ride the bus and they really made me mad. I thought I'd go get a big stick and stand at the bus stop and bop 'em one if they got on Mr. Chalk's buses. Some people just don't know how to cooperate. And you know, you don't have nothing in this world until you get people together. Hey, lookit over there, let's see if that guy's going out northeast."

People stuck together that Monday, I carried seventy-one people, only five of them white. SNCC estimated that DC Transit lost 130,000 to 150,000 fares during the boycott. Two days later, the transit commission, in a unanimous but only temporary decision, denied DC Transit the fare hike. The commission's executive director dryly told reporters that the boycott played no part in the decision. He was probably right. The commission worried about such things as cash dividends, investor's equity, rate of return, depreciated value, and company base. The boycotters worried about a nickel more a ride. And in the end, the commission was to approve the fare hike and then more; a few years later the fare was up to forty cents.

But the boycott was important, anyway. Never had so many Washingtonians done anything so irregular and contrary to official wishes. The assumption that DC residents would passively accept the injustices of their city was shattered. SNCC and the Free DC Movement had laid the groundwork for future action.

After the bus boycott, I wrote a letter to its leader congratulating him and offering to help in the future. Not long after the leader, Marion S. Barry, and his colleague, L. D. Pratt, were sitting in my living room talking about how I could help in SNCC's public relations. I readily agreed; for the first time in my life I had joined a movement.

Three years earlier Barry had quit his $5,500 a-year post teaching chemistry at Knoxville College in Tennessee and joined SNCC. He was the group's first chair. He then showed up in Washington to head the local office. Barry early formed an improbable and ultimately nearly explosive partnership with an erstwhile farm implements manufacturer, salesman, self-styled nutrition expert, and economic theoretician named L. D. Pratt. Barry was lean, black, soft-spoken, self-contained, and given to wearing a straw plantation style hat; Pratt was husky, white, excitable, demonstrative, and covered his baldness with a felt fedora that made him appear a character out of a one-column cut in a forties edition of Time magazine.

Together they designed the boycott and a drive to win self-government for the colony of Washington. Barry and Pratt both worked themselves to the marrow and it was during those months that Barry first gained a long-lingering reputation for always being late for appointments, news conferences, and actions. "I work on CPT-- colored people's time," explained Barry. Part of my job was to stand on the street-corner and convince the press that Marion really would show up if they just waited a bit longer. The reporters would bitch, but since Barry was shaking up the city, they mostly waited anyhow.

Barry's subsequent moves in his drive for passage of right-to-vote legislation in Congress included an effort to get businessmen in downtown stores and along H Street (a black shopping area second only to downtown in commercial importance) to support the movement by displaying its sticker in their windows. Hundreds of orange and black stickers with the slogan "Free DC" below a shattered chain went up in store windows; but the threat of a business boycott led other merchants to cry blackmail, and some of the more traditional civil rights and home rule leaders began to back away from Barry's tough tactics.

In the coming months, Barry and his organization would disrupt the calm of the city with increasing frequency. A number of Free DC supporters were arrested at the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. By the following fall, Barry would have been arrested three times, for failing to "move on," for disorderly conduct, and for holding a Free DC block party without official sanction.

Barry used his arrests to make points. After being arrested for failing to move on at a policeman's order, Barry said, "It is a bad law that gives policemen the sole discretion in such matters. Especially in Washington where the cops are so uneducated and awful. They use the law as a harassing device against Negroes." And he warned, less than two years before the 1968 riot, that the attitude of police might lead to an outbreak of racial violence.

While Barry was on the streets, on the tube, in court, and in jail, his associate, L. D. Pratt, was developing a reputation as the mystery man behind the operation disturbing the tranquility of the colonial capital. Pratt refused to be interviewed by reporters and, although it was known that he was closely involved in designing the bus boycott, few knew who be was or what he was up to.

The pair belied their public images. In person. Barry, the mortal threat to peace and order, was personally a gentle and quiet individual and Pratt, the mystery man, was, out of range of the press, open and loquacious.

Marion was leading a movement, but it had some of the intensity, closeness and spirit of a rebellion. Barry enlisted into the cause anyone he could find. You would be talking on the phone and a friendly special operator would break in with an "emergency call" and it would be Barry or Pratt or someone else with the latest crisis or plan. There were black cops who had been spiritually seconded to the movement and ministers who served as a link between the radical Barry and the more moderate civil rights movement and friendly reporters who still believed there was an objective difference between justice and injustice,. And through it all was movement, excitement and hope, not even dampened by the thirtieth chorus of "We Shall Overcome" sung in a church hall while waiting for Marion finally to show up.

Pratt described his relationship with Barry this way: "I am the theoretician and Marion is the practitioner. I just give suggestions and he makes the decisions. I re-spect his opinions more than my own."

Barry and Pratt not only upset policemen and government officials; they perturbed the established civil rights and home rule leadership in the city. It was not just the Free DC's militancy and independence that upset the old leaders. They also were profoundly disturbed by the rise of the black power idea; Coalition co-chairman Channing Phillips stated, "The black nationalist stand of SNCC is inconsistent with the Coalition's philosophy."

Still, while the 20-something Barry was an anathema to the white business leaders and considered a rogue by the local civil rights establishment, as early as 1966 a poll found him ranked fifth by black residents as the person who had done the most for blacks in DC.

In SNCC and elsewhere, the spirit of black nationalism was indeed awakening. Black power had its roots in the deep frustration of the civil rights movement with the progress towards some sustainable form of equality. In 1963, Howard Zinn, then a professor at Spellman College, told a SNCC conference that the ballot box would not give blacks much power. Zinn said SNCC should build up "centers of power outside the official political mechanism."

This was a time when the official symbol of the Alabama Democratic Party included a banner reading "White Supremacy -- For the Right." The SNCC-organized Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had attempted to be seated at the national Democratic convention and was rebuffed, offered only two non-voting at-large seats to represent not just Mississippi all American blacks. SNCC communications director Julian Bond twice won election to the Georgia legislature, and twice that body refused to seat him. Jerry Demuth, writing in The Idler in October 1966 asked: "After Julian Bond, Atlantic City and the Alabama Democratic Party with its proclamation of white supremacy, what is there except a Black Panther Party?"

The voices of black power of the time were varied. Two months after being replaced as SNCC chair by the more militant Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis explained:

"I support the concept of black power and I have tried repeatedly to articulate it to people in terms they can understand, so that they will know it is for civil rights, not against whites."

The National Committee of Negro Churchmen of the National Council of Churches tried to combine black power and integration in an August 1965 newspaper ad:

"A more equal sharing of power is precisely what is required as the precondition of authentic human interaction. We understand the growing demand of Negro and white youth for a more honest kind of integration: one which increases rather than decreases the capacity of the disinherited to participate with power in all the structures of our common life. Without this capacity to participate with power -- i.e. to have some organized political and economic strength to really influence people with whom one interacts -- integration is not meaningful. For the issue is not one of racial balance but of honest racial interaction."

But this was a hope far from current reality and many more blacks listened to the view of Carmichael: "Integration is an insidious subterfuge for white supremacy." He told a crowd in Greenwood, MS, "We been saying 'freedom' for six years and we ain't got nothing. What we're gonna start saying now is 'Black Power.'"

The most important white at SNCC, L. D. Pratt, continued to play a important role for some time, but his ability to work with Barry declined sharply and, and after receiving physical threats dropped out of the local scene. . .

But before it was over, Barry and Pratt had one more "good shot," as L.D. liked to call them. Hauling an odd assortment of black and white activists off to a weekend retreat, the pair organized a lecture, seminar, and planning sessions to pave the way for a massive push against slum housing. In fact, that's what it was going to be called - PUSH, People United against Slum Housing. It would be no ordinary effort. Barry theorized that the reason slumlords were invulnerable was because protests were usually directed against only a small portion of their holdings. If you could uncover the full economic interests of a slumlord, Including his commercial holdings, you could organize an effective boycott against him.

From L. D.'s theoretical charts and Marion's discourse, the action moved to strange places like a hall at a Catholic woman's college where volunteers sorted out thousands of paper slips containing important information about DC eviction cases over the past two years, and the basement of the Court of General Sessions, where a friendly judge had permitted the group space to do its research closer to the source material. The little slips of paper slowly built up information concerning slumlords, lawyers, front corporations, and their interconnections. From the long tables in the basement of the Court of General Sessions, the slips went to the Recorder of Deeds office where more volunteers began arduously sifting through official records. The project never got much beyond that. Perhaps it fell of its own weight; the task of organizing all those slips of paper without a computer was staggering, Perhaps the separate directions in which various participants were rapidly going was a factor, In any event, the days of the Free DC Movement were just about over.

And sometime later, I attended a meeting in the basemen to the SNCC office. There were only a handful of whites there. Stokely Carmichael arrived and announced that whites were no longer welcomed in the civil rights movement. My time with SNCC was over

When people would write about Marion Barry years later, they wouldn't mention the good part because they had never seen it. All they saw was the cynical, corroded shell of a man they hadn't known and thought it had been that way all along. Like an old car rusting in a pasture.

As Barry moved into politics, first on the school board, then the city council, then the mayor's office I had moved my support and enthusiasm with him, and without apologies. Once in the top job, however, his weaknesses quickly lost their constraints and whatever greatness Marion might have possessed started to disintegrate.

And yet I still think of the good years. The years in which Barry was one of a handful of people who made self-determination for DC possible, the years in which he was the voice of progress and sanity on the school board and city council. I think of a man who was willing to risk his life for the freedom of others, who was willing to go to jail on the chance it would help others gain a measure of liberty. And like Jack Burden writing of Willie Stark, "I have to believe he was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that."

On the wall of my office was an autographed bumper sticker from Marion's first campaign for mayor. It read: "Barry -- the way things ought to be."

Our relationship deteriorated during the years he rose to power. But I still remember something he said about me that, given his nature, I still take as a compliment: “Sam’s a cynical cat.”

Thursday, June 06, 2024

The difference between dumb and mean

Sam Smith, 2014 - One thing that I have known hardly anything about are those who use trans to describe their gender or sexuality. In fact, if I know anyone in these categories I don't know it.

Thus, I was interested when I stumbled upon Piers Morgan interviewing 29 year old transgender advocate Janet Mock who has recently written a memoir, Redefining Realness.
It seemed to me an informative interview. Others, however, did not see it that way. The Twitter and other responses were so strongly antagonistic towards Morgan that he had Mock back to explain what the problem was.

What fascinated me about some of these responses was that they seemed a metaphor for what is wrong with our political and cultural discussion these days. It is as though both conservatives and liberals view their viewpoints as fundamentalist theology and if you don't see things their way, you're going to hell. And it's not just about philosophy, it is about using the right language and not making descriptive errors that are considered offensive.

Mock was, in fact, quite reasonable compared to some of her enthusiasts. At one point there was this exchange:

Morgan: Why have I been vilified for being transparently supportive of you? I don't get it!

Janet Mock: Being offensive and being kind are not mutually exclusive things. We can be good people but be ignorant. It's about understanding.

But for others there were the purportedly outrageous mistakes that Morgan had made. For example, Robin Abcarian wrote in the LA Times: "Many in the trans community took issue with Morgan's description of Mock as 'a boy until she turned 18' and his focus on how she revealed her gender identity to her boyfriend."

Of course, if you belong to a subculture representing roughly 3% of the overall population it is not likely that the other 97% will be as well informed as you would like them to be. This doesn't mean they're mean, just ignorant. The best approach in this situation is not scold or berate but to explain. I've frequently been in political positions supported by not much more than 3%, so I have some sense of the problem.

Further, as a reporter, I know that asking dumb questions can be a good way of getting better explanations from people. And how an interviewee felt about something such as their gender back when they were a teenager is not irrelevant. It helps to tell the story.

But today's liberal culture seems to have developed an almost gated approach to acceptable attitudes, values, details and even questions that can quickly put the untrained and uninformed in harm's way.

I grew up as one of six children so I learned early that this doesn't work too well. And along the way some things reinforced this view. I remember, for example, flying to my son's New England university next to a man from North Carolina whose son was on the same campus. I asked him how his son was liking Brown and he responded with something like, "Well he's never had to deal with those liberal types before. but he's learning."

I had never thought about the difference between someone like that man's son and mine. The southern teen had not chosen his upbringing but apparently now had chosen another course, suggesting that he was looking in new places. How much harder that could be, I thought, than what my own son faced.

I also think about Martin Luther King's advice to his staff that they should remember that, if successful, the people they were fighting today would some day be their friends.

And I am reminded of my Puerto Rican nephew who, as an ESPN sportscaster some years back, had to do play by play broadcasts heard in all Latin American countries. One of the problems: carefully avoiding slang that might be acceptable in one country but not in another.
Diversity is not as simple as it may seem. For example, using the right language is probably not at the top of the list of things that will subdue the brutality now experienced by many of in the trans community. The wrong language of the mean is not the cause of their problems, but a reflection of it. Treat people nice and your language will follow.

And it is strange that those who talk so much about diversity can close the door so quickly on one of the consequences of that diversity: namely, the more diverse our relationships are, the harder it is to know enough about others, the feelings and language they prefer, and what annoys them. Given all the humans raised throughout history in a monoculture, is it really odd that some the stories of a multicultural America are not known by everyone?

And it is an America where things can change pretty fast. As I was writing this piece, Facebook came out with a list of over 50 gender and sexual terms folks can use on its pages to describe themselves, such as agender, androgyne/androgynous, bigender, cis, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, gender questioning, gender variant, genderqueer, intersex, male to female/mtf, neither, rneutrois, non-binary, pangender, transgender, trans man, trans woman, trans female, trans male, trans person, and two-spirit.

Meanwhile, some words we don't understand well at all. We have already paid quite a price by not making an adequate distinction between the ignorant and the mean. Groups that were once more pro-liberal have drifted to the right. And while we always have had fundamentalist Christians in America, but there was a time when we called many of them New Deal Democrats.

To live successfully in a diverse culture we have to learn how to inform, convince, and convert rather than scold and condemn. And we have to value reciprocal liberty. Remember that liberals, for example, only comprise a bloc about seven times the size of the trans population.

So when Pierce Morgan doesn't say the right thing, help him, don't ball him out.