-- he will have a major opportunity to tell
yet another truth on race to an audience that may
find it difficult to hear. I'm talking specifically
about young black male criminals. I don't mean he's
going to be talking to the criminals. But I do mean
that in this the 7th blackest state in the nation
(after the 5 states of the Deep South and Maryland),
with an African-American population-proportion almost
double the national average, he will need to spend
some time inspiring the base. And the base needs some
talking to -- not just about the violence among our youth
in general, but specifically, about
Eve Carson.
I shouldn't really say "when" (he is here today,
at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville in the morning for
a major address on national security to military
families, and in Charlotte in the afternoon for a
sold-out town hall) -- but I will, because the campaign
won't begin in earnest here until after Pennsylvania
is over. White America's fear and resentment about the
criminal threat they face from young black men is very
timely here&now today, in North Carolina, though,
since UNC had to wait for students to return from
Spring break before finally having a proper memorial
service (yesterday) for their fallen student body president.
Here are some before&after photos
relating to the arrest of the current suspects in this murder.
Yes, they are young black men. Yes, gang affiliation
is expected to be relevant. Yes, at least one of them
is believed to have killed not only the UNC student body
president but a Duke graduate student as well, earlier.
My point here is simply that Eve Carson, in addition to being
a decent human being, had actually volunteered in Ecuador,
Egypt, and Ghana. That's right, west Africa, where most
African-Americans' African ancestors came from. Eve Carson
was a brilliant young white activist who was trying to help cure
the kinds of evil racist conditions in America that left young
men like her alleged killers believing that gang-banging was a
meaningful alternative to graduation.
As black man (and a person whose whole family basically went here --
my father got a J.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1957, and was one of
the first half-dozen black people to manage that -- I have an M.S. and
all 3 of my sisters, though they have advanced degrees from other places,
got their bachelor's degrees there), I am sick about this.
OK, youthinks I doth protest too much. Black people in general
had ample opportunity to get sick all the way back in 1994, when
an actual young black man beat and robbed Rosa Parks, of all people.
But back then, we did not have a viable black presidential candidate.
We did not have a leader strong enough to say both that he understood
white fear of our young men (straight from his own grandmother) and
that he would not disown a black friend for having vented, in his
(and our) justifiable anger, "God damn America". When white people
tut-tutted at how far we had fallen if one of our youth could do this
to one of our heroines, we could look them in the eye with a straight
cace and swear that black-on-black crime in general was white
America's fault: Black people did not consign themSELVES to ghettos.
But after 15 more years of that "stalemate" in attitudes about this
situation, I personally am at a breaking point over this. A lot of
our white opponents would think the "God damn America" should be a
breaking point, but that was righteous indignation. This is just
an intolerable waste of humanity. Even if white America never pays
another cent toward undoing the economic damage it has done to us
over centuries, I for one personally will STILL feel that WE owe
some sort of reparations to somebody for the loss of Eve Carson.
This isn't just crocodile tears -- it's also entirely pragmatic:
if 2 or 3 more of these happen then there will never be hope,
not EVEN with Barack Obama leading the reconciliation attempt,
of getting most white people to think of us as even potentially
civilizable. They will always think that decent black people are
the exceptional overcomers. They will never be able to think of us
as people who just normally grow up to be decent, like they do.
It bears further stressing that these murders occurred in the same
metropolitan area that was racially poisoned by the Duke lacrosse
case two years ago. The final resolution of that was that a black
woman had either gone crazy or just made up some shit trying to
score a payday vs. Duke; that very much tilted the future playing
field around THESE parts AGAINST claims of racial injustice, real
or made-up.
My point is that Barack Obama has some standing to try to do something
about this. I don't. Eve Carson's family and neighbors and community
in Athens are already richer than mine and much richer than the
black community here out of which this violence grew. We can't
contribute that way. But we can do something to make sure
that things like this stop happening around here. And Barack Obama,
unlike the right-wing bigots who would've told us to clean up our
OWN house after Rosa Parks in 1994, does have the stature and
standing in the African-American community to make concrete suggestions
about what we could actually do, and see some people get to work on
implementing them.
My point is that we as black people have got to own this issue!
I am reminded of what should've been the most effective campaign
tactic of this entire season, when John Edwards traveled New Hampshire
with the parents of a girl WHO HAD DIED because of inappropriate delay
by her insurance company in covering needed medical care. CAN YOU
IMAGINE what is going to happen here if some REPUBLICAN politician
starts touring North Carolina and Georgia (where Carson was from) with
HER parents insisting that WHITE people have GOT TO DO something
about young black men??? I don't know that we're at THAT tipping
point yet, but I can FEEL things tilting toward that. I think
Barack Obama may be just the kind of person who can help prevent it,
and I think addressing this could also give him a chance to say
something about "the domestic analogue" of national security -- "law
and order" -- withOUT having to endorse any repression of domestic
civil liberties are harsher sentences or anything like that. He
could just say that we as black people are sorry, we own our own half
of the responsibility for the problem, this is what we are going to
try to do to address it, and this is what we also hope white people
will do (toward their half) in CO-OPERATION WITH us in order to lessen
the future likelihood of such senseless tragedies. YES WE CAN give
young black men an alternative to gang-banging. YES WE CAN give
ourSELVES an alternative to fear of them. Obama would surely score
white votes just for being seen to be telling black people to work
on it ourselves.