“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” – James Baldwin, from “Notes of a Native Son.”
Black History Month ended a couple of weeks ago. But why should our awareness of the history of discrimination and maltreatment of Blacks (and, for that matter, other non-white populations and, historically, millions of European immigrants) be relegated to one month?
Full disclosure, I’m a privileged white male, meaning I never got “the talk,” described by Kenya Young, an executive producer at National Public Radio (6/28/2020), the one “Black parents give their children, particularly their sons, about how they should deal with the police if they encounter them.”
Because I played pickup baseball and football after school in Chicago’s Lincoln Park with white friends and lived in a Gold Coast apartment, I wasn’t warned, “Don’t wear your hood. Don’t put your hands in your pocket. If you get stopped, don’t run. Put your hands up.”
My peers and I presumed a protected, nontoxic environment.
“On Feb. 23, Ahmaud Arbery went for a run in his hometown of Brunswick, Georgia,” NPR’s Ari Shapiro begins his interview with Rashawn Ray. “He never finished that jog. A videotape emerged this week showing the 25-year-old Black man gunned down by a white man.”
Ray, an associate professor of sociology, studied “about 500 middle-class Blacks and whites. All were college educated. All had professional occupations. And Black men …felt threatened … for their own lives just engaging in everyday, normal activities. ... Their social class or their high status, no degree that they have can actually remove the fact that … they’re perceived as being criminals” (May 7, 2020).
In “Black Like Me,” John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, dyes his skin to resemble a Black man. Reading about the hostile, prejudicial responses of southern whites, I learned about empathy, recoiling at my parents’ lack of racial sensitivity.
Then I, too, became Black – or at least experienced what it felt like to live as a feared and/or loathed minority. In 1970, when 21, I drove to Alaska with a friend. When hearing workers were wanted in fish canneries, we took the ferry to Kodiak Island.
Leaving the boat, we encountered stares from native islanders suggesting anger and hostility. Next day, The Kodiak Mirror reported several college students from the “Lower 48” were shot to death in a World War II Quonset hut where they’d been bunking. As outsiders, they threatened to take jobs from those living on Kodiak.
We should have left immediately. Stupidly, whether to prove we could handle cannery work or in need of money, for three weeks we lined up for work along docks heavy with the odor of the fishing fleet while at night sleeping on empty middle school classroom floors outside town where one morning we discovered our Bronco’s tires slashed.
Walking to town to find a service station that would fix the tires, we put our thumbs out when a two-door sedan flew by. Braking hard, the car swerved, clouded in dust. While two men waited in back, the two men in front jumped out and said, “Climb in.”
Fearing where that ride might take us, we didn’t.
Doris Lessing writes in her preface to “African Stories,” “Colour [sic] prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.”
• Rick Holinger’s new chapbook of poetry, “Down from the Sycamores,” is available for presale at finishinglinepress.com. The release date is June 20. A multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions 2025 nominee, his work has been published in Hobart, Chautauqua, Southern Indiana Review and elsewhere. His book of poetry, “North of Crivitz,” and collection of essays, “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences,” are available at local bookstores and Amazon. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.