I'd much rather be camping...
I’m not sure how to frame this, so I’ll just start pecking away on my keyboard and see where it takes us.
America has a large array of issues that if we care about our country, our children, or if we just care about humanity overall – which I do - and you probably do too, we are concerned and we want to do something. If we are not united by anything else, we are united by our mutual concern.
America has a race problem - a problem so intricately woven into our fabric that more than once I have been known to say that all of the other issues that all of us care about exist on the crumbling foundation of America’s Race Thing. I hesitate to call it America’s racism. It’s more complicated than what comes to mind when one says, “racism.”
The entire purpose of these post is to wake people up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah…race. I care about it…but racism is mostly over. We’ve had a Black president. What else do those people want? We’ve gotta pay attention to global warming, the war in Ukraine, the January 6th insurrection, factory farming, public land.” And all of those things are true. But it is also true that they all rest on a crumbling foundation. A well restored home is ultimately no better than the foundation it rest on.
So what struck me over the last few days and is causing me to delay my camping trip to the red rock canyons of southern Utah today with my buddy so that I can chat with you is the voluminous number of articles the last three days in the national press that have to do with race in America. Ignore it or not…believe it or not…it’s a real thing.
On Saturday the Washington Post ran a story on Governor DeSantis’ plan to kill any diversity-related teachingin FL public schools. Diversity was supposed to be what America was all about. Remember the ‘melting pot’ thing that nobody mentions anymore? Or the inscription on the Statue of Liberty? "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” I’m betting that’s a pretty diverse group.
If you don’t have a subscription to WAPO, you may not be able to find a way to read their stories. It’s the fact of the numerous stories more than the content that is important here. But if you want to read any of these stories, email me and I’ll send them to you in a Word Doc.
Also on Saturday in the same paper, there was a story about a prosperous White county in Michigan that has gone to war…with itself. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say the residents of the county have gone to war with their friends, family, and neighbors over ‘Other’…and there’s no bigger or more noticeable ‘other’ than black or brown skin. It’s tearing a county apart. And it doesn’t need to. There are bigger issues that need to be dealt with. But the county is stuck fighting over who matters and who doesn’t.
The next day, Sunday, the Huffington Post ran this story about Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey replacing Barbara Cooper, the state director of early childhood education over the use of a teacher training book, written by a nationally recognized education group, that the governor denounced as teaching “woke concepts" because of language about inclusion and structural racism.
Yesterday MSN ran a story how while we were all focused on the expulsion of two Black state legislators in Tennessee, the very same legislature passed a resolution proclaiming April as Confederate History Month, encouraging “all Tennesseans to increase their knowledge of this momentous era in the history of our state.” I do wonder if that will include the history of Tennessean Nathan Bedford Forest. Forest, a Confederate General, has more statues in his honor than any other Confederate “hero” save Robert E. Lee. I wonder if the TN lawmakers and governor want their citizens to focus on our even know about Nathan’s roles as an enslaver, a slave trader, a founding member of the Klu Klux Klan and as a war criminal.
During the battle of Fort Pillow, or what is more properly called the Fort Pillow Massacre that ironically occurred on this month in 1864, General Forrest and his troops, which vastly outnumbered the Union Troops 3:1 that were trying to hold on to the fort located on the banks of the Mississippi River in Henning TN, refused the attempt to surrender by the Union troops. Forrest ordered his men to continue fighting and to slaughter the Black troops – which they did, killing upwards of 200 Colored Troops from a total of just over 500 total Union troops.
Then yesterday the NY Times reported that Carroll County sheriff’s department in northern Kentucky, has hired Myles Cosgrove, the former police officer in Louisville KY who shot and killed Breonna Taylor in a botched raid. Incredibly, some Black county residents do not feel safe with this officer.
Of course every news outlet has reported on Tucker Carlson’s ignoble firing from Fox News today and yesterday. Today, the NY Times reported it this way, highlighting the core of what was wrong for America with Carlson: “Carlson took over Fox News’s prized 8 p.m. slot in 2017 and increased its already-high ratings, quickly becoming a fixture on the right-wing network and in conservative politics. How? Carlson tapped into white viewers’ fears over the country’s changing racial demographics, which fueled Donald Trump’s rise in the 2016 election. He would regularly focus on the notion of the “great replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory that claims elites are importing supposedly obedient immigrants to disempower native-born Americans. In 2018, Carlson argued that hordes of immigrants were making America “poorer and dirtier.””
Also today, we learned about the death of one of America’s greatest Civil Rights and racial justice fighters, Harry Bellefonte. As Mr. Belafonte wrote in 2016, “African American poet Langston Hughes writes in the first two lines of his poem titled, ‘Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,’ Hughes acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger.”
O, yes, I say it plain
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!”
We can be better and we can do better.
NOW Steve and I are headed to red rock canyon country.