It was during the mid-sixties. Occasionally I worked for a church member who
owned a gas station in west Nashville, Tennessee where I grew up. His son was a friend of mine. We were responsible for pumping gas, washing
customers’ cars, changing wiper blades and other menial tasks. One Saturday my friend and I were in the next
bay changing the oil in a car while a notorious west Nashville local was
regaling the mechanic with tales of what he would do to civil rights protestors
if he got the chance. This was, of
course, at the height of the civil rights movement. Nashville and its major African-American
educational institutions, Tennessee A & I and Fisk College had been at the
center of the protest. After visiting murder and mayhem on the heads of the
protestors the man boasted that he had killed two black men in his time. “Of course,” he grumbled, “that was back when
it was still legal to kill a black man.”
He actually didn’t say “black man”.
He used an enduringly offensive term of diminishment and
opprobrium. I had always heard the
phrase “my blood ran cold” but I did not know what it meant until that moment.
This is not an incident I willingly
recall. But it came to mind when I heard
of the murder of Trayvon. In the south
of my youth young black men could be beaten and lynched for looking at a white
woman the wrong way. They could be
imprisoned for minor offenses and brutalized by prison guards. Thousands went to their deaths at the hands
of shotgun wielding “bulls” at hellholes like Louisiana’s Angola Prison. We are naïve if we imagine
that the fear and bile of those years has been drawn like poison out of our
system. When a young man is murdered and
the authorities react with reasoned indifference we are reminded of those days
in the South, and not only the South, when killing a black man or woman or
child was legal. And in different parts
of the country it could be Mexicans or Chinese or Native Americans who were brutalized
and murdered. And if a sheriff or police chief had the courage to charge a
murderer, juries routinely acquitted them.
In the giddy days after the
nomination and then election of President Obama there was a great deal of loose
talk about a “post racial society.” But
the vilification and misrepresentation of the President almost from day one
should have put the lie to such optimistic posturing. The attacks on President Obama have gone far
beyond ordinary political differences. To
this day people doubt his religious affiliation and his citizenship—among other
things. Contrary evidence has no impact
on the narrative they have constructed.
They see him as an alien, threatening presence, illegitimately occupying
the Oval Office. I do not say this to
support the President’s policies or his re-election. Those are separate matters. I say this rather to illustrate the deep-seated
antipathy to the “other” occupying the highest office in the land. President Obama is like Trayvon Martin—he is
in the “wrong neighborhood.” I know
there are many principled opponents of the President who on proper political
and ideological grounds oppose his administration. Fair enough.
In a democracy this is not only to be expected, but is required. But his election, I contend, rather than
signaling a post racial society, has stirred up some of the most fetid and ugly
parts of our national identity. This is what needs to be addressed with
repentance, tears, and frank condemnation.
Too many bullets have killed too many of our children. All of us, Democrats and Republicans,
citizens of the North and the South, African American, Asian, Hispanic, Native
American, and white (whatever that is), need to speak truth and pursue
justice. Wendell Berry called racism
America’s “hidden wound.” Today that
wound is festering openly for all to see.
God have mercy upon the family of Trayvon Martin. God have mercy on us all.
John
E. Phelan, Jr.
