John McCain shows common decency
Back in the late 1990s, I wrote a column about an experience I’d had on a street near downtown Uniontown that, for me, was perplexing.
I’d completed some research at Uniontown Public Library, and I began walking home to the East End. While standing on a Fayette Street corner, I saw a man leap across his car seat and lock his passenger-side door.
It was, I wrote, “a perfect performance.” He’d spotted a 50-year-old black man carrying a notebook, and a library book, so he felt compelled to secure his safety by performing a swan dive inside of his car. Who knows, I may have attacked him with a bookmark.
I’d seen that sort of thing since I was a teenager. It was, and still is, the fear some white people have of black people (especially black men) — but for no apparent reason. That man didn’t know that I wasn’t paying any attention to him until I spotted him jumping to “safety.”
The purpose of that column was to let readers know how devastating it is to be the unwitting victims of other people’s misperceptions.
I’ve never attempted a carjacking. Nobody I know has either. I don’t desire to commandeer another person’s property. And I don’t appreciate being treated like I do.
Soon after that column appeared, a woman wrote a letter to the editor, which informed me about how uninformed some people can be. She’d ignored the central point of that column. That it’s important to judge people for who they are, not who you think they are — or, not to judge them at all. That a middle-aged black man aspiring to do nothing more harmful than to cross the street, armed only with knowledge, probably isn’t a good candidate for state prison. Instead, the woman allowed as to how the insides of some books have been known to have been carved-out, so that guns could be placed inside of them.
That woman’s response was both humorous and sad. She felt so comfortable with her stereotype, she reinforced it by drawing the ridiculous conclusion that white people have good reasons to fear all black men.
So, when President Obama talked about having experiences not unlike the ones I’ve had over the years, I expected some people would respond the same way as my little letter-to-the-editor writer had. I was right.
Obama hadn’t questioned the verdict of the Trayvon Martin trial. He’d only claimed he understood the reactions of the people who were unsettled by that verdict, because they felt the victim had been wrongly portrayed as a “thug.”
He, too, had heard the car door “clunks” and had been perceived as a potential thief while he walked through department stores. He, too, had been made to feel like a criminal by people who had no idea that he had the potential to become the most powerful man on earth.
Obama gave a heartfelt assessment of a country that’s still, largely, divided by race, despite the talk about being a “post-racial” America. He’d hardly stepped away from the podium before he was accused of “race-baiting” and playing politics. It was the usual suspects (Republicans) who attacked — but thankfully, the president found support from a few unlikely quarters.
Obama claimed that he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago. Fox News’ Sean Hannity said that meant Obama would have been treated the same way as Martin, because teenaged Obama had smoked pot. And Martin had supposedly indulged in pot smoking the night he’d been killed. Predictably, Hannity ignored the president’s broader point, that even without a marijuana joint hanging from his mouth, he’d been the source of unreasonably “low expectations.”
John McCain, though, Obama’s old adversary, clearly related to the president’s words about the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin case. “Events like this highlight and emphasize that we have a long way to go. The president very appropriately highlighted a lot of that yesterday, as only the president can,” McCain told CNN”s Candy Crowley.
I never thought I’d ever say this, but, maybe we need more John McCains.
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20 year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net