byChrisWhite – 2015

Lately, I find myself more baffled than usual by the popular dialogues sweeping through our beloved nation. Am I so naive, so disconnected from the great societal “truth” swirling around me, that I can’t make sense of it? Or perhaps—Heaven forbid—I’ve simply gone mad, and I’m the only one unaware. Maybe, in some subconscious evasion of truth, I’ve stuffed my head into the proverbial sand out of guilt or confusion. Whatever the reason, here I am—like a lone spectator staring through a foggy window—unable to make sense of the show on stage. Either I’m in denial, I’ve been deliberately left out, or, and this is a solid possibility, the whole dang world has simply lost its mind.

I remember a particular day, about twenty-five years ago, when I was attending a lecture at the University of North Florida, a seminar for Drug Unit Commanders, which had a lot to say about crowds, riots, and mob behavior. The instructor—a bespectacled fellow with a penchant for melodrama—spoke of something called the “Emergent Norm Theory.” The gist of it was that crowds, initially united only by a single shared grievance, tended to drift into all manner of mischief once an alpha member suggested a course of action. Absent any voice of dissent, the whole throng would be swept along into mayhem, irrespective of the sensibility of it all. There’s a lesson there, friends, and one that’s been put on display for us far too often in recent times.

So, to all my dear friends, family, acquaintances, and even those who have taken up the peculiar hobby of hating me, if you find yourself in a crowd, and some fellow stands atop the hood of a car, yells out “Let’s stone him!”—please, do me a favor and be the voice of reason. Lest, I end up dodging rocks because not a soul had the gumption to speak up, leaving the mob to follow some spray-paint-wielding simpleton with a bullhorn.

I was born in 1964—the very year that saw the passage of our most recent Civil Rights Act. So, in a sense, I was among the first generation to attend racially integrated schools. I can’t say the number of Black students in my school was impressive—maybe five percent, at most—but we, the children, did our part to integrate better than our parents ever imagined we would. By the time my son came along, born in 1989, integration wasn’t something to grapple with. To him, it was history—a quaint relic, mentioned in passing in classrooms alongside powdered wigs, musket battles, and, for reasons I’ll never quite understand, possum dinners.

The point I’m making is this: for most of us modern white Americans, racial injustice is considered a relic of days past. It’s a chapter we like to close, rarely thought of, and almost always dismissed. My generation is only a couple removed from a time when segregation was the law of the land, and now we struggle to see those injustices because our children grew up without them. And more to the point—those old folks who enforced those unjust laws are, by and large, no longer with us, leaving the rest of us with a sanitized version of history and a desire to believe it wasn’t our kin who did the oppressing.

But here lies the rub: the world I see—the one I perceive through my pale, middle-class lenses—isn’t the same world that my Black neighbors see. And it doesn’t make me a racist to admit that—it simply makes me dismissive, ignorant even, of their experience. It is a fundamental truth: perception becomes reality. And if your perception is that the world is fair now, that it’s time to put on those big-girl panties and let bygones be bygones—well, you might have missed the point entirely.

I didn’t grow up in a household filled with stories warning me to be wary of the government. I didn’t have parents or grandparents with tales of violence, injustice, and fear inflicted by people who looked like me. My history isn’t colored by pain and tragedy, and that’s a gift. Black folks, though, grow up differently. Whether they’ve personally experienced racial injustice or not, the burden of their ancestors weighs heavy, and it shapes their reactions to the headlines and broadcasts that paper our news cycles. It’s not simply an alternate perspective; it’s an inherited reality.

Consider a popular program like “Ancestry.com,” with its intriguing forays into genealogy, unveiling the secret family histories of celebrities and the like. Now, pause a moment and think how a Black viewer might perceive that show. Generations of African Americans were denied even the simple human dignity of a family history. Denied graves for their dead, sold off in fractions, and shipped from one plantation to the next. Their ancestry is fractured, scattered to the winds, with nary a headstone to visit or a name to trace back. It’s a history robbed twice over—once in life, and again in memory.

Whereas, when I watch some good-for-nothing yokel still fighting the Civil War on national television, I see one ignorant mullet-wearing buffoon. I can afford to laugh it off. A Black person, I suspect, doesn’t have that luxury. To them, he isn’t one mullet-sporting idiot—he’s a reminder of something larger, something that never quite goes away.

This disconnect—this chasm between us—has been festering and growing beneath the surface, making us into what sometimes feels like the Divided States of America. We white folks tiptoe through the landmines of political correctness, hoping not to offend, while our Black brothers and sisters must swallow the insincerity of our efforts, leaving everyone wanting for something that at least resembles authenticity.

And then, there was Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014—a tragic stage upon which all of these elements collided. A cauldron of misunderstandings, misconceptions, and manipulations. There were the riots, of course—sparked by anger, stoked by those loud alpha personalities who took facts, twisted them up, and set the whole pot to boiling (that would be the Emergent Norm Theory in action). There were also well-meaning white folks, eager to stand in solidarity but unsure what they were even standing for. And the Black community—angry and grieving—galvanized not because this particular incident mirrored the past but because it reignited the deeply buried fires of collective memory.

It’s not that racism doesn’t exist. Far from it. There have been countless incidents since Ferguson that still surprise even me—the cop who shot a Black man nine times as he ran away was an eye-opener, to say the least. As a former lawman myself, I see a rogue officer—a man acting outside the bounds of morality, much less his badge—but I can see, too, how someone else might see racial bias laid bare. And that’s precisely the problem. There are two Americas, and neither side quite knows how to talk to the other.

Our country, like every country, has its haves and have-nots. It’s part and parcel of capitalism, but it’s also something fundamental to human nature. God and Nature, in their infinite wisdom, have seen fit to create a balance—equal numbers of men and women, people with all manner of skills, strengths, and weaknesses. We lean on one another; we’re meant to. And yet, depending on when and where you live, some skills are more valuable than others, creating divisions. It’s a strange thing, this game of supply and demand—even farmers are cool again, now that there’s a shortage of pork and beef.

The trouble with human systems, though, is that we have this terrible tendency to tinker with things until they break entirely. Karl Marx, with his ideas about the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat, gave us socialism—a system which, while well-intentioned, took the wind out of the sails of productivity. Here in America, we ended up with a different problem—generations of people trapped in poverty, the descendants of those who were once denied education and opportunity, now caught in a web of social welfare with no clear way out.

And let’s not forget how this welfare system affects the minds of those stuck within it. Imagine, for a moment, growing up in that system—dependent on it. The idea of leaving it behind is terrifying, because it means becoming something different, something uncertain, something untested. And we—the rest of society—have offered no real way for people to make that leap.

It’s a complicated, tangled mess, and no one has yet had the courage to step up and try to fix it.

And now, here we are, twenty-five years later, still grappling with the same old demons, while new ones creep in from the shadows. Racism, poverty, inequality—it’s a laundry list of wrongs, and at the bottom of that list, you might just find the names of our newest victims: the LGBTQ community. Yes, friends, I’m going to say it—gay people are getting the short end of the stick, and we’re all too familiar with how this story plays out.

We’ve all heard the arguments, the biblical justifications, the Old Testament citations. We like to cherry-pick our verses—use one to support the death penalty, another to denounce it. During the days of slavery, scripture was used to justify the institution, to demand obedience and submission. Now, it’s used to condemn those whose only sin, if it can even be called that, is love.

But the Bible, my friends, is a complicated thing, and human beings have a way of simplifying what they cannot understand. And I’ll tell you, it doesn’t matter what century we’re in or what supposed truths we cling to—God did not put us on this earth to judge one another. Jesus himself said as much—if even He, the Son of God, did not deem it his place to judge, what makes us think we should?

So maybe, just maybe, we ought to stop condemning our brothers and sisters for the simple, human desire to love and be loved. Because, when all is said and done, when all of this dust settles and we stand before our Maker, what will matter isn’t who loved whom, but how we treated one another in the here and now.

I am not the authority on these matters, not by a long shot. I know that there are folks who will read these words and disagree—some vehemently. And that’s fine. But if nothing else, I hope we might all pause, take a breath, and think about what sort of world we want to leave behind for our children. We’ve already made enough mistakes to last us a lifetime—maybe it’s time we learned a thing or two from history.

After all, we are all travelers in this land, bound by the same laws of nature and gravity, seeking the same joys and dodging the same sorrows. We may come from different backgrounds, we may carry different burdens, but in the end, we are all human. And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.