It will take work to fall back in love with America

I love America. Like the women I have loved in my life, her positive attributes are not the reasons for my love, which is unconditional. They just make me realize I was right.

Those who have loved deeply and blindly may understand what I am going to say: there are times when a lover has taken on such unexpectedly vile dimensions that you sit in a dark room trying to figure out how you could possibly not have seen this coming. How could the universe allow such behavior? What’s the point of it all?

Many of us have recently had this experience as a unit, a family. We love our country, but it suddenly feels hellish.   Unfamiliar.

I submit that like suddenly finding an evil person in your bedroom, it has probably been unexpected only because we have missed the signs. They have not been scattered and aberrant. We have been rotting from the core since long before I was born, and during my lifetime, I have watched it become more obvious.

My challenged education began as a child, in 1966. It was when, like many Americans, I saw pictures of James Meredith shot down on Highway 51 in Mississippi, in front of reporters and photographers.

Meredith had become something of an American hero when four years earlier, he was the first Black person to be admitted to the University of Mississippi.

He had organized the one-man voter-registration “March Against Fear” from Memphis to Jackson. On his second day, on June 6, 1966, he was blithely shot down by a man in the bushes by the side of the road as if shooting uppity Black citizens was relatively acceptable behavior. Meredith survived three blasts of buckshot, and the shooter served 18 months.

“That’s just Mississippi,” I thought, “same place where Medgar Evers was shot to death carrying civil rights literature into his own house. This country is big, and it’s not like that in most places.”

In August of that year, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a fair housing march starting in Chicago’s Marquette Park. The photos of the crowds showed some of the ugliest hate-filled faces I have ever seen in my life. King said later it was worse than anything he had ever seen in the South. He had almost immediately been brought to his knees by a rock thrown to his head.

“That’s just Marquette Park,” I said. “That’s not emblematic of where I live. I don’t know anyone who acts like that.”

A few months later, I was an elementary school patrol boy, sent to a different corner each morning to fill in when other crossing guards called in sick. When I was finished one morning in an unfamiliar neighborhood, some kid volunteered to show me how to get to the school from there.

On our way, we saw a Black man in his 30s approach, wearing a suit and carrying an attache case. The boy pulled a penny from his pocket and wound up dramatically, then sent it spinning at the man’s feet. 

“Somebody's going to get a whupping,” I thought. Then I looked at the man’s face. He was furious, but I could see that he didn’t dare say a cross word to any abusing white person, even a boy.

“It’s Niles,” I thought. “This isn’t like Rogers Park, where we used to live. 

“I hope.”

That same summer, in July, police and young Blacks clashed on Chicago’s West Side after, it was said, illicitly opening hydrants for recreation was allowed in white neighborhoods but not in Black ones.

The disturbance burgeoned into three days of police-youth pitched battles and full-scale rioting. The Illinois National Guard quelled the violence on the fourth day.

King, who was in town, condemned the rioting but blamed it on Chicago institutional racism, and suggested reasonable and easy starts at remedies. The city responded to the situation by erecting two dozen portable swimming pools, making the whole thing seem a little silly.

But the following summer, it was apparent that there was something serious going on almost everywhere. Coast to coast, over 150 cities saw rioting.

Chicago was spared. The next year, King was assassinated in Memphis, and nothing stopped the reaction.

But there were people in Chicago who were already finding ways to turn anger into progress. A charismatic activist from suburban Maywood named Fred Hampton, 21, had brought together his Chicago Black Panthers and black, brown and white youth groups and created the Rainbow Coalition, an effective organization for social change. He was even reaching out to street gangs.

But the FBI was deeply suspicious of the “radical black leader.” Cook County State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan was at furious loggerheads with the young genius activist. At 4:30 a.m., Dec. 4, 1969, cops hired by Hanrahan invaded Hampton’s home at 2337 W. Monroe St., Chicago, killed associate Mark Clark near the door, and went on to assassinate Hampton in his bed. Others in the house were shot, then beaten, and dragged into the street.

Hanrahan and the cops told many lies to justify what had been done. The Chicago Tribune initially backed their version.

Stubborn legal maneuvering delayed the indictment of Hanrahan and his cops, who subsequently escaped conviction. A substantial civil rights settlement was made, however -- 13 years later.

Investigations revealed that J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI had undermined -- often violently -- the Black Panther Party wherever it existed in the nation, effectively destroying it. 

The horror on West Monroe Street led to evicting Hanrahan at his next election, after he completely lost the Black vote. Before that, he was seen as the front-runner to eventually succeed Mayor Richard J. Daley.

Shortly after the settlement was announced, Chicago finally elected a Black mayor, Harold Washington. 

For me, the Hampton assassination, as part of Hoover’s national scheme to suppress Black political leadership, was the last page I needed to read to tell me what was happening racially in the United States. I think a lot of other Chicagoans, and people all over the country, got it by then, too. 

Progress in a “post-racial” America proceeded slowly, but structural racism shored itself up behind the scenes, and, sometimes, right out front. 

George Wallace. David Duke. Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy. George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton. 

But the days of upfront political racism were largely over. “Dog whistle” codewords came into use, such as “states’ rights,” “welfare,” “war on drugs,” “food stamps” and even “fiscal conservatism.”

Later, cell phone video brought so much of what was hidden into the open. We have left our worst proclivities to the police to carry out, and that’s easy to see now. 

When we behave as racist “Karens,” that’s easy to see, too. 

New code words and the relative safety of the Internet has allowed white supremacy to thrive unapologetically.

But I don’t think more racism exists than did before. We can just see it better. And if we can just keep our hands and weapons off each other, that’s actually a very good thing.

After all, there would be no post-apartheid peace at all in South Africa if there hadn’t been truth and reconciliation efforts afterward. 

Knowing who we are, who we have always been, is necessary if we’re going to be something better. 

It’s like reconciling with a spouse who has behaved terribly. If you love someone -- just as many of us profess to love our nation -- it is necessary to painfully confront mutual behaviors, wrongs and rights. It does no good to mess around with Band-Aids when we have deep wounds.

If we love our country, even when we feel like hating it, we must try to at least  understand those who live in it with us. We must be able to come to grips with our own parts in the relationship, too.  

James Baldwin, America’s greatest social justice writer, wrote two brilliantly simple sentences 58 years ago. They’re more true now than ever.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed.

“But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 

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