Recognizing racism shouldn’t be hard

[ad_1]

I want to start with a confession. I have never been black. I’ve never been a WASP either. I am not a descendant of a founding father or Chuck Grassley, who I believe was their contemporary. But I lived a long time in all our country. I walked around with my eyes open. I looked past my white nose. In a bloody spasm of democracy, we abolished slavery, but today I see a shameful racist society. Not everyone agrees with me.

When pollsters recently asked, “Is America racist?” 38% of respondents said no. My reaction is a question. Are you crazy, are you blind, can you read? Can you walk and chew gum at the same time? You shouldn’t have to be black to recognize the obvious truth that 58% of us understand.

The reason they do this is because it’s obvious to anyone who isn’t bigoted. Black Americans make up 13% of our population. On any misery index, they rank higher than other groups. Start with police bullets in the back. Check incarceration, barriers to buying a home, homelessness. At the Olympic Games of Misery, black Americans are gold medalists.

If you don’t acknowledge that a problem exists, it is unlikely to go away or even get better. Blacks and browns don’t have as good a life as whites. Millions do not share the American Dream. In 2021, 72.7% of white Americans owned their homes; only 44% of black Americans do. The disparity is neither new nor surprising. Blacks were forced to live in ghettos. Banks did not lend them money to buy, real estate agents, even if they wanted to, could not be seen with a colored couple in many places.

The black prison population is larger than it should be because they are targeted, tracked and arrested when a white person would not be. Police killings span the color, brown, black and white front, but black Americans are dying more frequently than their population would predict.

It’s hard to believe that there’s only one who believes there’s no racism here who’s going to vote for Joe Biden with Kamala Harris as the candidate and a possible president. I think they’re all Donald Trump voters, Marjorie Taylor Green, Ron DeSantis. I’d rather lose than have one of them with us.

I haven’t been able to find the circumstances of the whites killed by the police, so I can’t compare the lives of the blacks snuffed out. But the racial biases are indisputable: a child under 10 with a toy gun fired multiple times, an unarmed woman arguing at home, to a bipolar person acting strangely. In Sacramento, the district attorney declined to press charges against a cop, but the county settled a case brought by the family for $2.7 million. Innocence is expensive, I guess.

Most cops are good cops, doing hard work that makes our white lives safer and better. But there are also bad cops, bullies with a bullet as part of a racist society. Denying their presence is a crime in itself, but a natural part of a racist society.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and is the author of a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”

[ad_2]