As President Bill Clinton noted, some time ago, “Race is America’s most intractable problem,” and perhaps there is no more eloquent testimony to that than those swift and terrible events that bared the souls of the black residents of that small St. Louis suburb than the anger that took itself to the streets.
The seeds of racial bigotry seem to be sewn deep into the fabric of this country, and nothing, not even our first African American president has been able to rip the stitches, instead it rips us, morally and intellectually, and makes a mockery of the Christian principles that we espouse.
How many Fergusons are there till tomorrow?
While it’s easy to perhaps make concessions for a southern border state, the task before us is to address it not in the extreme but in the calm between the storms, and that can begin in the home when children should be taught respect for the difference as well as for similarities – for as psychologists have known racism is learned behavior.
So, the problem is beyond Missouri, and is from sea to shining sea.It can also begin by addressing the pain, the daily indignities that African Americans – men in particular face – from the grocer to the shoemaker.
If the civil rights leaders of the 60s took blacks from cowed and bowed to proud, what can be done in the area of hip-hop, and internet trails?
What price can be paid, or even made to take us as a nation if not to the New Jerusalem, then to a place that might be called home, in the truest sense?
Certainly many Ferguson residents called it home, but was it safe, could the cold stare turn into a nightmare?
What could make it home, what level of transparency could transform it into a land that hope had not found?
The eyes may have once been on the prize, but for many, that dream was deferred, there is a part that each and every one of us needs to play; we must rise to the challenge to stop this from happening, and yes the problem is large, or as President Kennedy notably said: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”
He continued by saying, “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs... are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice... this Nation... will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.... Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise."
This was in June of 1963, yet Kennedy’s words still ring true, giving credence to his successor’s claim that the problem is intractable.
Recently, the Chicago Tribune noted that “African–American and Latino motorists were more than four times more likely to have their vehicles searched during traffic stops last year than white motorists even though officers found contraband in the vehicles of twice as many white drivers.”
And, that is just one of many reported footnotes to life in America for its black citizens. That leaves blank spots for the unreported.
It’s almost as if the words of the old spiritual were still ringing in our ears:
“I looked over Jordan, and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels coming after me,
Coming for to carry me home.”
