I'm back in the U.S. to see my first grandchild. From where I'm sitting, in a suburban middle class neighborhood, I face a green backyard with a stand of trees that seamlessly merges into a network of trails, parks and other community recreational spaces, a public good that I have always marveled at and attributed to a successful democracy. This scenery doesn't look and feel at all like the broken America that we have seen and read about in the news.
But as Michelle Alexander writes in the New York Times (America, This is Your Chance), "we know these truths about black experiences, but we often pretend we don't." She quotes from Stanley Cohen's "States of Denial": "Denial may be neither a matter of telling the truth nor intentionally telling a lie. There seem to be states of mind, or even whole cultures, in which we know and don't know at the same time."
I reflect on what I know and don't know about the black experience in America and I have to say I don't know what I know and don't know. I realize this more when I re-read an article on race that I wrote 22 years ago during a short stint as a columnist for the student newspaper at the University of Arizona. In "Dealing with Race", I see that despite studying then about systems of racial and social control, I still clung to the narrative that the brokenness is in our innate human nature and only manifested in broader systems.
And maybe I still cling to that narrative. I too am outraged at the blatant violence and injustice done to George Floyd and Ahmad Arbery, just to name the most recent cases, but I have a long way to go on the key steps that Ms Alexander recommends are necessary "if we are to learn from our history and not merely repeat it": 1) We must face our racial history and our racial present; 2) We must reimagine justice; and, 3) We must fight for economic justice.
For me, it is also a time of reflecting on what my American citizenship really means to me. I applied for citizenship in 2002, about 18 years into my marriage to an American citizen to whom I am married for 35 years now. I can't remember now why I decided to apply at that time or what it meant to me to become a U.S. citizen. But if patriotism has any meaning, it would be for me to start caring enough to understand what my adopted country is going through, it's racial history and its racial present, and to fight for the democratic ideals that it is great about.
