America Is Burning

"A riot is the language of the unheard."

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I grew up hearing stories of the 1967 Detroit riots from my paternal grandmother. Like so many white people in South-Eastern Michigan segments of my family were counted amongst the multitudes who participated in “White Flight” following the riots.

My grandma was a great grandmother, but like so many of her generation, she had that old-timey racism. She’d tell me not to be a racist and then talk about her black neighbors and how she suspected they were selling drugs. In her later years, grandma lived in the city of Inkster. If you’re from the Detroit Metro area, you know. The people of Inkster are impoverished, predominately black, and live in a city plagued by crime.

As a teenager, I would mow grandma’s lawn every week. I never feared being in Inkster, and I walked to the corner store for a pop every time. The people were always friendly and never treated me like I didn’t belong. This is not a “They were the good kind of black people” statement. This is a, they were good people who treated a guy that didn’t live there like a neighbor.

Long story short. Even though I grew up Detroit adjacent, I never feared a person because they were black. I have to give my mother and grandmother the lion’s share of the credit on that one. My grandmother's first husband was, and I’m sure still is, an old school Appalachian racist.

Despite being raised by a man who openly said any black man who dated a white woman deserved… let’s just say mob justice (I heard that with my own ears), she is one of the least racist people I’ve ever known. Mom raised me to try and see all people as equal.

I’m not saying I’ve never felt the pull of casual racism.

Despite feeling safe in a minority city that’s considered dangerous, I have felt irrational fear. When at the mall, when I was at school, and when I was just walking down the street in my hometown, I’d sometimes move as far away from black teenagers as I could. It didn’t matter what they were doing. I’d just sometimes feel irrational fear.

I feel great shame for feeling that way.

When I was a kid, I grew up for the most part in areas with a racial mix more or less consistent with the national average. Because I’m not going to talk about lily-white Saline and West Carrolton. I like to think that helped me see things in a more realistic light.

It wasn’t until 1992, and the City of Angels exploded that I, and a lot of white people of my generation, started to see things in a brighter light

I remember the night of the riots in detail. I’d just gotten home from work, I work at an Arab owned corner grocery store, and was only interested in dinner and bed. I sat down with the leftover spaghetti the rest of my family had for dinner and turned on the TV just in time for the eleven o’clock news. Channel 7 in Detroit, home of the most acerbic anchor ever, Bill Bonds.

I watched in horror as the city consumed itself on live television.

I admit, at the time, I blamed the rioters. I couldn’t see how the riots helped their cause. I thought they should show more self-control. Even though I’d been as outraged as I could be as a white kid, about the video of Rodney King being beaten by the LAPD. I wasn’t able to wrap my head around how enraged the black population of Los Angeles was.

Again, I’m a bit ashamed of that.

In the years following the LA riots, I learned more. Once I went online, 1998 was the first time I had fulltime home access to the internet, and my mind was opened. I participate in a lot of online forums and several Bulletin Boards (remember Usenet?). Slowly, as I interacted with a more diverse cross-section of humanity, the more I saw.

Then September 11 happened, and America changed, most likely for forever.

In the days, weeks, and months following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, America turned on its Muslim citizens. The stories of assault on Middle Eastern citizens, regardless of their faith, and brown people, in general, filled TV news and nascent online news sources.

I worked for the small city I lived in at the time as a seasonal (Spring to Fall) employee. It was the reactions of my fellow employees that made it all click in my head. Many of these men and women I’d worked with, eaten with, and spent my off time with turned out to filled with old school hate. The talk of lynching’s, stripping Americans of citizenship whether they were born here or not, and the unofficial ban’s on patronizing a local store owned and run by Arabs. Before 9/11, we’d gone there for lunch at the small grill inside almost every day. These actions shook me. I’d worked for Arabs and lived in the area with the highest percentage of Arab Americans in the country. I knew these were good people, but these men and women who were supposed to be my friends hated them.

Then they revealed their real views.

Following 9/11, everyone who wasn’t a straight white Christian was a target. Please forgive me, but I’m about to use a ton of slurs. We had a lesbian member of management in the city, and everyone started referring to her as a “Dyke Whore.” There were many conversations regarding who might or might not be a “Little Faggot.” The words spike, beaner, kike, and gook were tossed around regarding may of the members of the Recreation Center we worked at.

You know what’s coming next.

We had the best court in the area, and it attracted a lot of people from Dayton’s west side, where most of the black population lived. There was a bus that ran from the west side and had a stop right at the rec center. Many of the employees referred to it as *Cringe* “The Ni@*er Bus.” (I thought about using the word because I believe it is essential to show how bad things are, but I couldn’t do it. Sorry).

There was an employee of the rec center who unofficially ran the basketball program. He was a nice guy who loved to talk about sports and old movies. They didn’t refer to him with slurs. Instead, they said he was “One of the good ones.” One woman said he was ok because he was a clean black man.

It all made me sick and was one of the reasons I didn’t return the next summer.

In the years between them and now things got worse. Not worse for the black community. I’ve been assured by black people I know that things were always this bad, but white people were either ignorant or purposely ignored it.

Thanks to the internet, white America has been forced to see the truth.

We’ve watched video after video of black Americans, mostly male, murdered by police officers. Maybe even worse, we’ve watched as the police who did the killing were never charged and retained their jobs. There have been a few cases where token charges were brought against the officers. Still, they are almost always acquitted or given extremely light sentences. In the cases where the officers are fired, they almost always get a job with another police department.

In the years following the LA riots, there have been many protests. In the case of a few, Ferguson, Missouri, immediately jumps to mind. There have been contained and short-lived riots. These riots and protests served to keep the desire, the need, for change fresh, the embers of uprising orange and smoldering. All America needed was for those embers to have some fuel added, and the fire would blaze bright and hot.

On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis Minnesota police murdered Georges Floyd, an African American resident of the city

Now America is burning.

As I write this (05/31/2020), we are rolling into our sixth day of protest and riots. Dozens of cities across the country, including my home city of Detroit, Michigan, and my current city of Dayton, Ohio, are in the grasps of the rage and pain. These emotions, fueled by months, years, decades, and centuries of oppression and violence toward the American black community, has split the nation.

What started as relatively peaceful protests soon erupted into full-fledged riots. Burning, looting, and indiscriminate property damage dominate the news coverage. Not surprisingly, it seems many, if not most, of the rioting, has been instigated by outside groups coming to the cities to egg everyone one. In the last couple of days, credible evidence of police and white supremacist groups being behind the beginnings of the violence has surfaced.

Police responded with swift violence.

Police officers, looking and acting more like soldiers occupying American cities than peace officers, march down the streets of major American cities. Shooting rubber bullets, paintballs, pepper balls, and canisters into peaceful and rioting groups of protestors at seemingly random moments. In New York City, police officers drive SUV’s into crowds of demonstrators. And everywhere you look, Police officers spray mace onto people just for the hell of it. A person kneeling on the ground, a person standing peacefully still, a child on their father's shoulders, and actual rioters are all just as likely to receive a face full of mace.

Instead of de-escalating the chaos, the police continue to feed the fire

Except for a small percentage, America seems polarized and split into two factions.

One faction doesn’t seem to, or flat says the don’t care about the history of blacks in America. They feel that the current generation of African Americans are complaining just to complain. They seem to think the black community is using the death of George Floyd as an excuse to loot and seek vengeance on white people.

The other, and I hope more significant, faction of Americans sympathize with the people who’ve been under the boot of the “Justice System” more than any other segment of the American population. For the entire history of our country, blacks have shouldered a burden none of us can adequately appreciate and never truly understand.

No white person, no matter how much they stand with black Americas, can EVER know what they’ve have gone through in the past and still go through every day. We can see it, hear it, and internalize it, but we'll never understand it.

That's not an indictment of the white community. Well, let me be honest for a second, it is an indictment of some of the white population, but not most. It's just a fact that whites dominate America and have a history of stepping on the black community.

We can be allies.

We can feel our own version of pain and anger.

We can feel justified shame for the actions of our community.

We can, and MUST, stand with our fellow Americans, the ones of color.

These are good things. But we have to stop acting like we can put the pain and anger of the Black Community in a box we can shelve and forget about until the next inferno.

Be an ally.

Try to be empathetic.

Stand up and fight with our brothers and sisters of color.

But under no circumstance, tell them how they should feel. You can't truly understand how Black Americans feel because you've never experienced what they've been through.

- Josh Hilden (05/31/2020)