What Ferguson has taught me to see

What Ferguson has helped me see?

Part One of a Two Part Blog

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            It seems that the charged scene around Ferguson Missouri is beginning to settle. I fear that as things settle our concerns (especially if you’re white like me) will drift away until the old normalcy returns. This week my thinking and my feelings regarding issues of race and social justice have been challenged and hopefully changed forever. I would not describe myself as having been a racist but I now realize so much more that I have been complacent about issues that matter and are affecting others in horrible ways. What has taken place in Ferguson is not a surrealistic suspension of normal reality, but the long contained pressure of simmering frustration at long last coming to the surface. The events in Ferguson this past week brought into view how divided we tend to be about racial matters. For some the newsworthiness of Ferguson was the community that felt that law enforcement treats them less equally than it treated others. For some, the story of Ferguson was how out of control the protesters must have been, since the protests led to riots and looting. But different photographs can show that not every suggested explanation should be quickly received as the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. A looted Quick Trip building can be used to suggest out of control protesters. But a group of protesters lined up in front of a store to stop masked men from entering the store suggests that there were times when it was the protesters who halted the advance of looting. I personally have a difficult time imagining that responsible commentators would try to paint the protesters and the looters as the same people with the same agenda. I am not trying to advance a conspiracy theory about who the looters were, but it seems to me that protesters were there to let their nation and community hear their concerns. The looters were likely thieves who realized that in the chaos of these events they might be able to get away with robbery. I imagine looters and protesters to be two different kinds of people with two very different agendas.

 

Looted Quick Trip (this suggests to some the sort of people protesting) (CBS Photograph)

 

CNN photograph - Protesters acted to block masked potential looters from entering the store

Is it really honest to describe looters as protesters or are they differing people with different agendas?

            I want for things to settle down in Ferguson. I want people to feel like they are returning to a normal way of life. But also I feel like I have learned lessons from following the protests in Ferguson that I want to never forget. I don’t want for my way of life and thinking and feeling to return to what I used to call normal before Ferguson.

            I grew up in a rural portion of Illinois populated almost exclusively by whites. For us diversity was the difference between White Anglo Saxon Protestants whose ancestors came mostly from the British Isles or Protestant portions of Germany, and the Roman Catholic immigrants recruited to work in mines and factories that came from Catholic portions of Germany, from Poland, Italy and Slavic portions of the former Hapsburg Empire. I was either sixteen or seventeen years old before I personally met someone who was black. What I knew of in my understanding of racism were theories and ideals generally agreed upon between white Protestants and white Catholics. I had no idea that people of color often faced a culture where they were treated significantly different than those of us who were white. While my experience of white bread culture may have been more isolated than that of many other whites, one of the things realized during the Ferguson events is that 75% of whites have no blacks or non-whites in their friendship and close relationship circles. Those friendship circles are the circles of people we choose to do something with when we aren’t working or going to church. They are the sort of people that we visit a museum with, or sit down for a conversation around food or drink and exchange ideas on a personal level. Seventy-five percent of us whites seldom have such personal times with non-whites. That is important. It goes a long way in explaining why there is such a divide among racial lines regarding some of our nation’s most important issues. There is a brief article in the Atlantic that describes our self-segregating life-styles and it can be viewed here. I hope many of you will take time to read that article because it does such a wonderful job of explaining why that matters.

            For me the primary lesson I have been learning as the Ferguson events have unfolded is that I personally have a need to work intentionally to build friendships with non-white people. I don’t believe I can understand people unless I am willing to spend some time sharing life with them.

            I don’t expect this to be an easy change to make in life. Most of us, at least I hope aren’t racists. But many of us have an awareness of race that causes us to fear that our relationships with other races may somehow blow up in our faces. Such fears are probably irrational but I think such fears often stand between us and getting to know our non-white neighbors on a personal level. Perhaps that thinking is what blocks many of us from being part of a movement of people seeking racial reconciliation. Perhaps our greatest need is to push through the barriers of our limited comfort zones. Our self-segregating lives have furthered our misunderstanding of one another. I suspect that much of what troubles American race relationships will not be primarily addressed in national policies or laws, although we should look for some solutions in such areas. But I suspect most advances will come when seventy-five percent of whites meet socially and have evenings out with black and non-white friends. That is where I imagine the most good will be done as we seek to see racial reconciliation. Don’t get me wrong, I also believe that all white police forces in cities that have a seventy percent black population is a problem also needing addressed. But until we are a nation that enjoys friendships, real friendships with people of other colors and ethnicities I can only see racial reconciliation attempts finding a plateau without any ability to move forward from that point.

            I will write one more part to this blog in which I describe changes I hope to make in my life to address what I have been learning because of Ferguson. I truly hope that those who have suffered so much might see someday how so many eyes were opened as some of us began to see what had always been there for us to see if we had only opened our blind eyes.