The Race Is Not Always To The Swift

Augustus Fink-Nottle memorably explained this concept to the scholars of Market Snodsbury Grammar School, but minorities in America may well wonder if it is always to the white. The Black Lives Matter movement has torn aside the curtain that hid the simmering discontent amongst Black Americans and forced the nation to confront uncomfortable concepts like White privilege. While I generally dislike the BLM approach towards their nominal allies - do you gain anything by interrupting and insulting Bernie Sanders, Mike O'Malley or Hilary Clinton? - I can understand and empathize with some of the frustration within the community.

Critics of the movement, and they are legion and for most part shielded by the anonymity of the internet, have two main arguments against the protest cry. Firstly, why do only Black Lives matter? And secondly, why doesn't the community clean up its own act and quit blaming the whites for all the ills that bedevil them. They also level a number of other arguments, but most of those are of a straw man variety, arguing against aspects and positions that are not represented by the BLM activists. Even the main criticisms are easily addressed. The logic of the argument rests on the struggles faced by other ethnic groups that have faced adversity and yet do not blame the majority for their problems. But this ignores the most basic difference between African Americans and all other minorities. The ancestors of today's African Americans were brought in against their will as slaves; all other groups have arrived on American shores, for most part, by choice. They may have fled economic hardship or persecution, been coerced or otherwise pressured by their feudal overlords, or in my case, boredom and a lack of wheat beers and strip clubs, but they were never forced into America against their will and with absolutely no choice in the matter, to that same level. Also significantly, the Africans came from a vast variety of countries, regions and ethnic groups across the vast swath of continent but were lumped together by their new overlords with scarce a thought or nod to their deep differences. Their identity as a single ethnic group was forged in the fetters of slavery, and later, even after the 13th Amendment, in the shadow of Jim Crow laws. The damage wreaked upon this group through two hundred years and more of oppression cannot be easily undone; more significantly, the ethnic and cultural history that other groups could fall back upon for solace in the face of injustice and suffering was denied the African Americans - their history and ethnicity, to all extents and purposes, started with their enslavement. In my opinion, this makes it so much harder for them to overcome the roots of the problem in a way that was possible for the Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese and even the Mexicans. It's also why newer African immigrants have a widely different experience.

The oppression did not end with the Civil War, nor even with the Civil Rights movement. Subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle prejudicial policy continues to damage the community and to be sure, in some cases, well meaning policies have hurt as well. The building of the interstate system facilitated the flight of affluent whites to the suburbs setting the stage for the decay and impoverishment of urban centers. In slowly dying cities the vicious cycle was set in motion whereby poor communities are denied education advancement, trapping them deeper in poverty and furthering the deterioration of the city and its amenities. No other community has faced quite that same level of challenges. Which brings one to the second argument against the validity of BLM's angst, that the majority of violence is perpetrated by Blacks against Blacks and that they are focused on a tiny fraction of killing by the police. Regardless of the reality of the statistic, what is missed here is that not only are the police not supposed to kill unarmed Black men, but that they are actually supposed to serve those communities and protect them from the violence of their own misguided members. Instead the police have unwittingly become a wall between these urban ghettos and the "good" communities, and have become enemies of the ghetto communities rather than their partners and servants.

There are problems with the BLM, as there are bound to be in any anger-fueled movement. Lacking a clear leadership - or any leadership - each group of activists vocalizes its own views and interests rather than a coherent overarching message. While the majority of the movement embraces non-violent protest, there are always going to be those who have less patience. There are some who will challenge their biggest national supporters to draw a reaction, ignoring how it may help or hurt the movement in the long run. There are some who have so lost faith in the police that they see them as implacable enemies and advocate violence against them, or at least cheer and condone violence against police officers. These are the real problems with the movement, along with a failure to get the actual message of "Black Lives Matter" out to the wider world. They've certainly tried, and of course, some people will never accept the message and will seek to misrepresent them. But the lack of a national face to the movement does not help and makes dissemination of the message much harder. It's why both Clinton and O'Malley responded to the BLM activists with the statement that "all lives matter". On the face of it, that sounds like a reasonable response, except that it totally misses the real message of "black lives matter". It is not that some lives matter and some don't, it is not a dismissal of the importance of Caucasian, or Asian or Hispanic lives, but an agonized statement that one group in America is targeted for violence on sight, that they are guilty until proved innocent and that they suffer a disproportionate amount at the hands of law enforcement, much of it unjustified.

My buddy posted a video some years ago that showed reactions of the general public to the sight of a young black man, a young white man and a young white woman trying to force open a lock on a cycle in the park. Need I mention which person attracted hostility and a 911 call? That's why the slogan matters. Because a twelve year old like Tamir Rice was shot down for holding a toy gun and we're arguing about whether he had the orange cap on the barrel to designate it as a toy rather than admitting that he would have likely never been perceived as a threat if he was White or Asian. Because till today the media is obsessed over the disappearance and possible murder of a young white woman on vacation in Aruba, while thousands of black men and women are killed and are no more than a statistic. Because if I see a group of black men standing by the side of the road, I'm nervous and will probably try to turn off before I reach them no matter how peaceable and nonthreatening they may seem, but I'll walk right by other ethnic groups with scarcely noticing them. All ethnic groups get stereotyped to an extent, but African Americans are prejudged as trouble and danger and the risk of violence against them is dramatically ibcreased as a result. The fact that so much violence is within the community is not a matter to be ignored; rather it is wrapped up in the scream that "black lives matter".

This movement, like other activist movements that spring from a deep and real cause, will not go away quietly. The challenge is to transform themselves into agents of positive change - and that means accepting that everyone has an interest and stake in the issue and that other groups are capable of empathizing. Excluding all other groups or declaring that no one else may address issues like slavery or racial prejudice is counter-productive. Attempting to exclude allies is counterproductive. This is a moment when the BLM movement faces a critical fork in the road. Down one road lies frustration, probably increasing violence, radicalism, splintering and eventual irrelevance - excluding whites and others from discussions of problems in the Black community is an unfortunate step along that road. The hope rather is that they coalesce around a real agenda for realistic change and find a way to galvanize their activists into working towards a better tomorrow. There are problems and it is in everyone's interest that we address and solve them, or risk having a repeat of the race riots of the sixties and seventies.

New Ways in the Old Country

I returned from my biennial vacation to the Old Country last week and the one thought that kept running through my mind was that misplaced nationalism, bordering on jingoism was alive and well and doing better than ever. I could be biased - after all, I am an avowed liberal living in the US, who visits India only once every few years and my perspectives are limited, at best. But there is a shrillness that runs through the rhetoric that harkens back to McCartyism even, which is more than a little ironic - historically India's political class has always railed against all things Western, but the country appears willing to borrow all the worst of modern American life and unfortunately very little that is good.

To be honest, there were some changes that were positive and unexpected - my (once-beloved) hometown has acquired a pub culture and love for microbreweries, and I could actually get a very good Hefewiessen at an Irish pub - words that I would never have dreamed of, much less been able to say when I lived in India some sixteen odd years ago. There is a new interest in fitness and state-of-the art modern gyms have sprung up across the more affluent sections of the city, a welcome change from the eighties when there were only a couple of antiquated weight rooms in a city of millions and even the colleges lacked any general fitness culture. For the first time, there were modern buses plying some of the routes and the city has introduced exclusive rapid transit lanes along some of the busiest roads.

But as in all things in my homeland, every step forward is accompanied by not just a step and half backwards but also a couple of giant dance steps sideways for good measure. Now this progress so reminiscent of a drunken ant would be mildly amusing if India had retained it's relaxed attitudes. But today India has awoken to it's potential position in the world and has decided to adopt the language and attitude of a regional power, even if its glittering facepaint hides its feet of clay - middle class India has convinced itself that the country is a superpower and is willing to talk the talk, even as hundreds of millions of its people remain trapped in a hopeless life. It is not that millions have not risen out of poverty, for they have - in fact that is one of the great and positive changes over the last quarter century. But the millions have risen out of a life of abject poverty only to find that all that awaits is air unfit to breathe and water unfit to drink (when one is lucky enough to get any) in cities choked and bursting with hundreds of shiny cars on streets too narrow to accommodate one tenth the number. And all the while the rural poor slide ever further back, left behind in India's rush to modernity and that feeling festers and feeds a huge (and generally non-discussed) class war (Naxalism) that threatens the very existence of India to a degree that her avowed enemy, Pakistan, could never hope to approach.

India has forever been a land of contradictions, and today's juxtaposition of wealthy yuppies side by side with starving farmers would not be cause for alarm - sadness and determination for change, perhaps but not fear and alarm, for India's citizens still retains a positive belief that they can provide a better tomorrow for their children and would rather build towards that future than tear down the upper classes. The cause for fear and alarm is the attitude of those who have and their blind attitude of extreme chauvinism and jingoism. They refuse to acknowledge the shortcomings of their country and instead wrap themselves in the tri-color and declare that any criticism of the way things are is unpatriotic. To be honest, they mostly focus on criticism of security and foreign policy more than domestic, but by creating an environment where nothing but praise for the country is acceptable, they stifle all freedom of expression and damp down very legitimate criticism of economic policy and the deep class divides.

Worse yet, the Modi government has conflated criticism of itself and government policy with criticism of the country as a whole. Somehow, it is now considered unacceptable to disagree with decisions of the Supreme Court; as though a court comprised of very human judges is incapable of error and should be treated with the same reverence usually reserved for gods. Whether one agrees or disagrees with a death penalty handed down by the court to a man accused of involvement in a terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, every Indian should have freedom to express his opinion. But today, a vocal and aggressive faction of India's educated middle class has taken it upon itself to wage a social media campaign against anyone who disagrees with the current government. Back in the post-Bangladesh War heyday, the prime minister who led India to victory was hailed as the personification of righteous wrath, the Goddess Durga and a slogan was coined that "India is Indira and Indira is India", essentially conflating the entire nation with Mrs. Gandhi and launching the country down a path of sycophantic excess that culminated in the once great Indian National Congress party believing that policy and actions meant nothing so long as their prime ministerial candidate was named Gandhi. The resounding defeat of the Congress party and the overwhelming mandate to Mr. Modi to change the economic outlook and help Indians realize their dream of improving their lives momentarily suggested that India had moved past empty political theater and was embracing the politics of policy. Alas! that lasted only as long as the positive economic news and now India is back in a world where cheap emotion trumps substantial debate.

India has problems enough to debate from now until the twelfth of never, from out of control pollution, woefully inadequate infrastructure, income disparity and above all pervasive corruption. Instead, all discourse is focused on a handful of students who may have abetted some Kashmiri students raising slogans praising the above mentioned terrorist and some anti-India chants for good measure. One would hope that a strong nation would have nothing to fear from such behavior, little as one may agree with the slogans. Yet India's government has reacted with a bustle that would make Kim Jong Un proud, charging the bystander students with sedition (an old Colonial law that should never be invoked in a democracy). Worse yet, its supporters have reacted, violently against anyone who would support the students in some cases, and in general viciously against any and everyone who would oppose their action. The legion of social media warriors have manned the walls, flooding the forums with doctored video purporting to prove the seditious nature of the students and links to videos of speeches that support the government. The social media warriors would be acceptable, if they had eschewed false proofs and if they had shown just a little more tolerance to opposing views. But criticism of any government action is seen as an attack on India itself and the media warriors fly to thwart it with all the patriotic fervor as if they were defending Parliament from the terrorists. Greater fervor perhaps since they are generally happy to sit back in well paid civilian jobs while lauding the bravery and selflessness of the Indian armed forces.

And so, while the many real problems remain, as difficult and crushing as they were a year ago, India's elites close their eyes to the suffering of those with less, and seemingly oblivious of the very real issues that go beyond quality of life and threaten the health and life of hundreds of millions who cannot afford air-conditioned living spaces and bottled water instead tilt at the windmills of Fifth Columnists and traitors within the walls. They lambaste liberals for daring to question national policy and demand that students and institutions with socialist leanings be stripped of their privileges (there is a striking similarity in tone to the Tea Party rhetoric in the US). In nearly every way, by offering a smokescreen of outraged nationalism to obscure the very real issues at hand, they prove Dr. Samuel Johnson's famous words that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel".