All Posts Tagged With: "race"

So a Republican state representative in Florida gets arrested for soliciting prostitution after he allegedly agreed to pay an undercover police officer $20 in exchange for being able to perform oral sex on the officer*. Not that big a deal. Maybe a little amusing if you’re in a sadistic mood, especially if you’re a liberal who gets a good chuckle when conservative hypocrisy is exposed.

But if you’re anything like me, that amusement turns quickly into a vague feeling of disgust as the story develops. After his arrest, state representative Bob Allen denied any wrongdoing to the police. His explanation? “This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park,” said Allen, adding that he feared he “was about to be a statistic” and would have said anything just to get away. And to top it off, when the officer exposed his badge and led him to a marked patrol car, Allen asked whether “it would help” if he was a state legislator.

Essentially what this means is that Allen, who has said he wants to run for re-election, believes it will be less politically damaging if the electorate thinks he is a racist than if it thinks he solicited oral sex from another man. And we all know he’s probably right.

Imagining this man’s shame and desperation when he was placed under arrest is almost enough to make me feel sorry for him in spite of his past hypocrisy and his subsequent cynicism, deception, and hopelessly blind ambition. Almost, but not quite.

*sentence updated for clarity

Last night I went to downtown Chicago to hang out with a sexy girl (pause) friend of mine. She lives in a beautiful apartment about 2 blocks from Lake Michigan where square feet are worth more than your own two. I left her apartment around 11:40pm to catch the train home.

I passed by the usual array of rich white faces walking their manicured dogs, sad & desolate black faces hustlin’ on the streets, and determined & methodical Hispanic faces (one was watering the flowers outside of a golden hotel). One 25 or so year old black guy came up to me and began trying to talk to me, I tried to avoid falling into his artful trap.

Then he asked me if I smoked any pot, he was courting clients for a dealer down the street. I told him that I did not but that I was curious about what it does to people’s minds. He spoke with eloquence and scientific understanding of its various forms and effects. He offered his hand and said that his name was Cody, I reluctantly shook his hand replying with “Billy.” His handshake was soft and sweaty, my right hand still feels dirty from it and I avoided touching my face on the train ride home (I was reading Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy,” he is my favorite historian). He followed me down the steps to the red line CTA. I notice that he walked with a bad limp in his left leg. I gave him about 75 cents and the advice to get a job because working must be easier than hustlin’. He explained that he was on the verge of getting hired and said with pride that it was an $8/hour janitorial job, but that he was near to losing the opportunity because he didn’t have the $20 necessary to buy a State I.D., which the employer required. He would only look me in the eyes every 20 seconds or so. He was likely stoned, but insisted that he did not do drugs. Cody told me that he never knew his mother and that his father died about a year ago, which forced him to drop out of college.

He cried as he told me the story. His eyes were red. He said with shame that his clothes and body were all dirty and “greasy.” All the while I evaluated him and his story, trying to decipher its degree of truth. He said that he prayed often at a nearby Catholic Church. I asked him if his story was true and he swore to God that it was, he raised his right hand and looked to the sky, though it was hidden by the cracked cement ceiling of the subway. We were alone in the stairwell for about 20 minutes. Sometimes he would pound the wall with his fist to express frustration about his life. He said that most of the people at the homeless shelter have a mental illness, as though to separate himself from them, trying to maintain some dignity. I could tell that he was smart, his mind was agile and quick; I told him that I thought so. When I finally tried to leave he reminded me that I had just a minute ago asked him if his story was true, and thus I implied that I was on the verge of helping him; I appreciated his tactical play and his perception. I couldn’t stop thinking that the twenty dollar bill in my wallet had a different number on it, depending on which one of us looked at it.

I decided to give him one of the five twenty dollar bills that were in my wallet. I figured that even the 10% chance that his story was true was enough for me to help him get to his current dream of becoming an eight dollar janitor. When I opened my wallet he shielded his eyes with his arms out of politeness for my privacy. I urged Cody many times to “please do good with it, whatever it is, just do good.” He promised that he would and requested my phone number so that he could check in with me on his progress. I didn’t even feel comfortable giving him my primary email address (which is shamefully listed for all the world on this site). I wrote my secondary email address on the back of a dirty receipt that he plucked off the ground. He admitted to not understanding how to contact me via email, but had heard once that he could get a free email account through the public library. As we parted, he offered an open palm while I simultaneously offered a closed fist, he conformed to my gesture and pounded my fist with his (I did this from conscious desire to not shake hands with him again. That’s how hypocritical I am.). I suspect that I’ll be checking that email account often for the next few months, until I give up hope.

Through the entire encounter, I do not remember him smiling until I gave him my email address, maybe he felt like he made friends with someone from a different world.

I had spent so much time with Cody that I could no longer take the CTA to make the 12:40am train on time, so I took a cab. The cab driver was a light-skinned black man of about fifty years old, although the hardness of the City could have added ten years to his appearance. I asked how he liked living in Chicago, he replied in a slow voice that it is the best city in the world. He said that he has lived here his entire life. At a stop light he flexed his fingers, I could tell that they pained him from so many years of clenching the wheel. He asked about me and I told him about law school, while also trying to hide being from the suburbs. He said that he knew a lot of lawyers and that as a lawyer in Chicago you can really “get over,” though I’m still not sure over what.

He then declared that this was his City and that he was “number one.” He said that he has lots of important and rich friends. He told me about some people who have in the past turned cab drivers to people of status in society, including former Mayor Harold Washington, who he also claimed was his father (interestingly, Washington beat Daley in the 1983 Democratic primary). He told me that you can have all the degrees in the world, but if you don’t know the right people and if you aren’t in the “Chicago clique” then you won’t be able to “get over.” He called himself a “professional man.” He told me about his plans for soon becoming rich. He told me the trick to it all was “PMA.” I smiled and asked him what “PMA” meant, he explained “Positive Mental Attitude.” We talked for about five minutes after the cab ride was over. Apparently he started some professional networking organization called “The People’s March Inc.” You can email him, Robert, at thepeoplesmarch23@yahoo.com. He explained that the number 23 has, even before Jordan, been a number leading people to success. He gave me a cheap looking business card and a flier explaining his business. He asked for my card and explained to me how to print up my own when I told him that I did not have one. I apologized for only being able to tip him a dollar on a $5.25 fare, because it was the only one dollar bill I had left. As I left the cab I shouted, “Stay in touch,” but I doubt we will.

Robert will probably never stop driving his cab and he will probably never be rich, but at least his dreams will occupy his mind during his lonely nights. Wisdom and delusion in one man, I liked him as much as I liked Cody. I would hire them both and pay them as much as I could.

A couple of hard, “tuff” looking white train conductors were complete assholes to me. I had a question so I approached them and said “Hey” in a friendly voice. He said “Hey?” with a scowl. I made a second attempt with, “How’s it going?” He retorted, “How about ‘excuse me sir’?” If Cody had such an easy, mindless job I think he would have instead replied with a smile, “Hey man, what’s up?”

Both Cody and Robert have a lot of talent, all humans do. We’re designed to do great things, and a few of us have, but most never will. How does a human being with all the dark caverns and catacombs of a powerful mind remain sane while working a job below his abilities? They are forced to either lose sanity or to forget about the mental potential that makes them human. “C” from A Bronx Tale said, “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.”

My night was not unusually eventful, that’s not why I’m sharing it. My night was significant precisely because it wasn’t eventful. There are millions all over Chicago doing the same hustlin’ and hopin’. Those hustlin’ will probably never stop hustlin’ and those hopin’ will probably never stop hopin’.

I tried to take a step in this article toward acknowledging my own prejudices and my ambitions for breaching my safe shell and eventually helping a whole lot of people. But this article wasn’t just about race, it was mostly about people and faith and hope and pain.

Don’t worry about me, now I’m back home in Schaumburg with my garden and $600,000 house, away from all those scary people.

There is a mildly irritating sentiment in our society which (though I have no evidence of this) seems to be growing healthily among even liberal members of my generation that stereotyping social groups is okay because most stereotypes generally hold some truth to them. “They are stereotypes for a reason,” after all. A new study coming out of the University of Chicago goes some way toward refuting that mentality.

Psychologists at the university gave female students a math test followed by a non-mathematical test. Some of the female students were casually reminded before they took the test that men consistently do better than women at standardized math tests, while some of the female students were not given such a reminder. The female students who were given the reminder did more poorly on not only the math test, but the non-math-related test afterward. This led the psychologists to some interesting conclusions about brain power, as they determined that the stereotype reminder didn’t simply reduce the women’s expectations for themselves, but rather took up valuable space in their brains that could have otherwise been used to process the test questions. Even women who did not buy into stereotypes performed more poorly because they were thinking too much about how they didn’t want to be one of the women to perform poorly and thus grant support to the stereotype.

This is another in a long line of studies which demonstrate that reminding students of negative stereotypes of groups to which they belong makes them perform more poorly on tests. Even just being asked to fill in a bubble saying what your race or gender is (which pretty much every standardized test on the planet does) causes blacks and women to perform more poorly. Another study asked students seemingly benign questions like whether they lived in co-ed or single-sex dorms, and even this triggered thoughts of gender stereotypes and affected the students’ performances. The principle can work the other way, too, as when students were asked why they chose to attend a private liberal arts college, activating what one psychologist called the students’ “snob schema,” making them think about how smart they are and thus causing them to perform better on the test.

None of this, of course, proves that there is no truth to stereotypes (though in many of these cases the performance gaps normally cited between genders or races are almost entirely eliminated by not triggering thoughts of stereotypes). It does, however, go a long way in demonstrating the way in which stereotypes are often times self-fulfilling prophecies, that whether they are accurate or not may not have all that much to do with the natural abilities of a given gender or race but rather with the way the stereotypes themselves have disadvantaged women and minorities. And this, of course, would lend support to the position that while stereotypes do not hold any great degree of truth, those who believe they do are in fact contributing to their damaging effects.

I think most people would agree with this conclusion when it comes to racism (I don’t know of many people who still argue that whites are the naturally superior race), though I suspect many do not adhere to it when it comes to gender. There are, of course, at least some minimal natural differences between men and women due to genetics and hormones, but I personally am of the belief that the wide gulf that has been created between the genders is almost entirely socially constructed. These studies are another reason to maintain that belief.

OK, so my DI column this week is not as confrontational as the title of this post. But it does tackle a sensitive subject: homophobia in the black community. My emphasis here is on homophobic black celebrities, whose comments can have a strong influence of millions of impressionable black youth, but it’s certainly a problem within the broader African American community as well.

Check it, and if you’re so inclined, wreck it.

Oh, and I spotted a comma error that was NOT in my original version. Just sayin’.

The article below was published in today’s edition of the State Journal Register. The author, Dave Bakke, is catching hell on the column’s comments page. I encourage you all to go post and back him up.

It’s not a day to forget our shame

Today, a black man will stand in downtown Springfield to declare for the presidency of the United States.

Ninety-nine years ago, less than one-half mile east of where Barack Obama potentially will make history this morning, another black man stood. Scott Burton stood there, that is, until a lynch mob put a rope around his neck and hanged him from a tree until he was dead. Continue reading…