The Rutland Herald (Vt.), Dec. 10:
Deep fissures have always divided America, like tectonic plates grinding their hard edges against one another, propelled by powerful geological forces. Every once in a while there are worrisome tremors or even a destructive earthquake.
The principal fissure has been race, and the tremors felt in recent months suggest the tectonic plates are feeling new pressures. Slavery has been called America’s original sin, and the legacy of slavery has perpetuated injustices that make it hard for white people to see beyond their own protected and privileged position.
The nation has been rocked by a series of killings perpetrated by police with no seeming justification. One of the officers in Baltimore implicated in the killing of Freddie Gray in the back of a police wagon is now on trial, and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders this week toured the neighborhood where Gray had lived.
For many Americans, police are now facing persecution for trying to do their jobs in dangerous neighborhoods. For many others, the long history of oppression by police is now becoming visible because of cellphone videos. The plates are grinding together.
Vermonters live in one of the whitest states in the nation and so their experience in confronting the reality of racial conflict is limited by comparison with other states. And yet racism rears its head here. The presence of a few black drug dealers in Vermont has presented Vermonters with the same challenge that Americans face when confronted with Muslim terrorists. Bigotry toward neither Muslims nor blacks is warranted by the crimes of the few. If it were, we would be bigoted mostly against whites, who fill our jails.
Writers black and white have been laboring to convey the notion of white privilege so white people will understand it without becoming resentful or aggrieved. Consider the ordinary middle-class white family whose children go to college and then accept middle class jobs at ordinary, stable companies. Those children have worked hard to earn their gains. Where is the privilege?
The fact that the family was middle-class to begin with is partly due to privilege. Neighborhoods where white people are able to buy houses have often been closed to blacks, which means that black families have not been able to amass the wealth that could establish them in the middle class or attend the good schools that would help them attain the middle class. Instead, they are relegated to neighborhoods from which prosperous businesses have fled and property values have eroded. They are subject to capricious arrest and imprisonment and poor schools put their children at a disadvantage.
Some talented black people work their way out of poverty, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, the writer who grew up on the mean streets of Baltimore, lost a friend to police violence among other indignities and losses, and continues to write eloquently about these tensions. But the tensions remain— partly because white people don’t want to believe that advantages for whites are built into the system and that the other side of the same coin is disadvantage for blacks.
The recent hysteria about Muslims following the massacre in San Bernardino grows out of a similar divide— the fearful attitude taken by many Americans toward those who could be described as “other.” When the shock of fear takes hold, it is easy to make scapegoats of people. And yet as one American Muslim spokeswoman said, millions of Muslims in America are descendants of Africans who were Muslim when the slave traders brought them here. They are not others. They are a part of the fabric of America as integral as Irish Catholics or Polish Jews.
Vermont has an important place in the history of the race question, participating in large numbers in the war to end slavery and then backing the party that saved the union and freed the slaves. It is important, though, to recognize that Vermonters occupy a privileged position in the scheme of things. It’s a tough place to earn a living, and Vermonters have to work hard to get ahead, but the struggle required to live in Vermont ought to make us appreciate all the more the struggles of those facing obstacles even more intractable than rocky soil or icy winters.
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