“There will never be a n** SAE. You can hang him from a tree, but he'll never sign with me. There will never be a n** SAE…”
It’s been argued that you can legislate how people behave, but not how they feel. Never have we seen a better example of that statement than in the unfolding of events this
past week.*
The despicable fraternity chant, repeated as if it were a fight song at the University of Oklahoma, underscores how little influence rules have over the hearts and minds of America’s youth where irrational hate is concerned.
Set against the emotional backdrop of the 50th Anniversary of the historic Selma to Montgomery March for voting rights, the news story of SAE's hateful chant drove home just how backward America really is in our management of race relations.
For even as news teams shared the disturbing story nationwide, their “Casablanca-shock” was palpable. There were of course the requisite disapproving frowns during its delivery, but underneath lay a surprising lack of...surprise.
Now it could be argued that a group of obnoxious frat boys from a university not especially known for its enlightened attitudes do not speak for the nation as a whole.
But therein lies the rub.
Just as Russians with their samovars, America for the last century has been polishing its image as a global “melting pot”—a nation not unlike fondue (a Swiss delicacy achieved by mixing many ingredients with a binding agent and then heating until bubbly to achieve homogeneity.)
Much like fondue, America’s melting pot image is temporary, because molecules in flux that appear blended while hot generally separate during the cooling process, proving they were never really blended at all, merely held in a state of suspended animation.
Such is the case with race politics in America. For 50-odd years the imposition of civil rights on White America has seen race relations devolving from a hoped-for integration into legislated domestic détente.
For every heralded 20th Century Civil Rights triumph—the integration of schools, enforcement of voting rights, equal wages, opportunity in the workplace, housing, healthcare, credit, and in a million other places large and small that White America takes for granted—there are just as many painful reminders that for communities of color these social justice advances—if they exist at all in certain parts of the country—all hang by a slender legal thread.
The thoughtful among us want to believe that we’re living in a post-racial society; that the horrors of America’s shameful past are not eternal harbingers of its future.
But the question remains: can a nation borne of violent colonialism, and reared on the slavery of its present citizens’ ancestors, ever transcend its tarnished legacy?
How can we—in the age of Google searches and Ancestry.com—pretend that the America of Ellis Island with its welcoming arms promising equality for all who enter, is little more than a sunny fiction we’ve created for ourselves, like Santa Claus and the Norman Rockwell images of Americana that have graced so many Saturday Evening Post covers?
Several years ago I was fortunate to interview one of my literary heroes, the author William Styron. The Virginia-born Styron told me that he had been bedeviled for much of his adult life by issues of race, inequality, and the inhumanity that seemed inextricably connected to the two. (These themes informed the bulk of his work, including the celebrated novel “Sophie’s Choice.”)
Throughout his career Styron had enjoyed a collegial friendship with fellow writer James Baldwin, and the two often considered how a post-racial America might look. What Styron said he realized was that America could not move forward without first confronting its painful past. His contribution to the effort was “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” a fictional first-person account of America’s only attempted slave rebellion, as told by the man who led it.
Though he’d begun the book years before, it wasn’t published until 1967—two years after Selma. In the 1960s—often called “the angry decade”—something was in the air. Perhaps touched off by Harper Lee’s tour de force “To Kill a Mockingbird”— published in 1960 and made into a film two years later—an unofficial movement for racial equality sprung up among the literati that left an indelible mark on latter 20th Century consciousness. The themes would come alive again nearly 40 years later in John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill.”
That suffering and death are the prices exacted for equality in America—even in the 21st Century—appear an accepted given. Still, people of conscience crave justice. They march for it. They petition for it. They fight to legislate special punishment for “hate crimes” as a way to satisfy the public's outcry for it.
But has any of this helped—really? Saying so may draw criticism, but I think...not so much. I suspect it’s because we’re going about it all wrong.
Aside from differentiating between an intentional killing and an accidental one, how can modern society punish two people who’ve committed the exact crime differently, based on what was in their minds at the time? Are we now Orwell’s “thought police?”
More important, is the torture-slaying of a child any less horrific if committed by a serial killer than if committed as an act of religious, racial or gender-based hatred?
In a civil court the injured may be able to exact damages for mental anguish, but that’s not how the criminal justice system is supposed to work. And from where I’m sitting, adding that feature to sentencing has done nothing to quell hate-related crimes.
We know we cannot legislate individual conscience. So what can we do?
We can try to extract the roots of hate from our present reality. We can explore paths for teaching empathy to our children. And we can work to free one modern casualty of the race wars, former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, whose story echoes that of many other civil rights warriors and is shared in the documentary“Killing Atticus Finch.”
It will take a monumental effort for a nation that grew up drunk on white power to sober up to the inescapable reality of a changing world. I recommend a 12-Step program toward redemption that includes, among other things, the all-important step of righting the wrongs.
How can we do it? One day at a time.
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*Author's note: this blog was originally published just after the story broke, removed briefly, then republished. The latest date is the one that appears.