I have always tried to make my arguments in these posts short and sweet, even if I regularly fail. This post was inspired by a short and impromptu rant by a young man with whom I work in my old job (not having posted anything recently, I just found an alternative full time job in Northampton, but I still work at the old job in West Side for around 20 hours a week because, if for no other reason, my friends down there are short handed and can still use my help). My young co-worker was complaining about how black players in the NFL were not really protesting about police brutality (because that was nonsense and police officers are not racist) but because they hate America. I don't like to laugh off or ignore those kinds of comments from anyone, even from a fifteen year old who obviously lacks the experience or the education to apply a more nuanced reading of the world than one that characteristically emerges from Fox News, conservative talk radio, or the tweets of our sitting President. A few other details about this young man are key, however. First, while he is going to be attending his second year of high school at my alma mater, West Springfield High, his primary education was exclusively at the hands of his mother, a very capable and intelligent young woman and sister in law of a former coworker at the store. He and his siblings are either currently being home schooled or have been home schooled. Having worked with his older brother intermittently for a couple of years, I would be inclined to say that their mom did an incredible job at diligently conveying the formal learning that her children would need to start off life and, likewise, raising serious, well disciplined youngsters. To some extent, the older brother is a much better representative for the argument in favor of home schooling. The bigger point that I would make here, however, is that I have tended to discount the political argument for home schooling in liberal Massachusetts, perhaps to a significant extent because I am a strong defender of educational diversity in pedagogy and curriculum. As such, I have to admit a degree of naivety in not imaging that home school families in Massachusetts are not pursuing the alternative because they adamantly despise the liberal institutions of public education and, for that matter, don't even trust the Catholic school that I attended for nine years to inculcate their children in a thoroughly conservative world vision! Combining the larger conclusion that these two young men have emerged from nine years of hyper-conservative primary education inside a thoroughly conservative household with the additional factuality that their grandfather holds a prominent position in a local police department, it seemed to me that I needed to offer some meaningful counterpoint, in the name of a legitimate alternative perspective that these boys have been conclusively educated to discount for their entire lives, regarding the relationship of African-Americans to the law enforcement community. To make a long story short, I didn't vocalize my opposition to his views, but I am hoping that the opportunity is going to come up again. Succinctly, what follows in this post will be my attempt at a rejoindre to my young colleague's comments, respecting his youth, the legitimacy of the education that his parents conveyed to him, and the basic reality that he is going to have to learn to live with a world that is very different and much more complex than he has otherwise been led to believe: I am not black. Neither are you. Neither of us grew up in a ghetto or in some delipatated public housing project or had to go to a public school that was underfunded and falling apart. When I went to your school, I could have counted the number of black students in my senior class with one hand. I never really got to learn how to get along with people who were really different from me until I went into the military. Over the course of my life, I have only had a handful of little run-ins with the police, mostly for speeding, but I can't remember ever having said a derrogatory thing toward a cop in my life, maybe because I know enough cops and I understand how difficult that must be to enforce the laws against people who either don't understand them or think they are somehow exempt from responsibility to obey them. And no one in this world is ever perfect, no matter how hard we all try, and it's really hard to be completely racially blind. When I got pulled over for a broken tail light a few years ago, I didn't give any thought to the idea that I might not emerge from that traffic stop alive. In a lot of circumstances, black people do. If I seriously asked myself whether there is a legitimately different possibility for a white or black civilian to be killed by a cop in that circumstance, I would have to say that I haven't the foggiest fucking idea! And I am not going to discount the validity of claims by black people that cops, white, black, or otherwise, are racist, because I don't know otherwise and because I didn't grow up with an expectation, nurtured by my parents or by any other authority figures, that the police should be regarded as a source of fear rather than of trust. You are a young man and you have a lot to learn about the world. I'm not going to blame you for how you look at something like the NFL player protests. But I am going to say that it displays a degree of ignorance of the lives of people who are very different from either you or I and who deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt on the world that they've experienced. I don't know if it will make any difference, but I hope that as you keep learning that you will keep an open mind toward people who are different than you and that you realize that the real world is more complicated than the one represented to you by many of the people that you have come to respect.
