ISSUES RELATED to race were at the center of my growing political consciousness when I was an undergraduate in the 1990s. Two were especially impactful: racism in the criminal justice system and racism in cultural representation.
The Rodney King beating happened when I was in high school, and there was almost nothing said about it in the largely white, professional, middle-class suburb where I grew up. In fact, the remarks that I do remember were sympathetic to the police.
The crew I ran with in college changed all that. They raised questions such as: Do you think if the officers were black and the person being beaten was white that the national conversation would be the same? Do you think that the continuous portrayals of black people as criminals had nothing to do with the acquittal of the police officers?
Those kinds of questions shifted my worldview—for the better, I believe. Given that, it should come as no surprise that the news stories I paid the most attention to in 2015 were about issues of race, the criminal justice system, and cultural representation. Basically, I was consumed with #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite.
And there was a lot to follow in those stories. Not only was 2015 the year that Freddie Gray was killed by police officers in Baltimore, it was also the year that a grand jury cleared a white police officer who shot and killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy carrying a pellet gun. Do I even have to say that Tamir was black?
I could not help but connect these black deaths with the #OscarsSoWhite movement. As in the past, the nominees for Academy Awards were almost all white, this in a year where Ava DuVernay’s remarkable film Selma was eligible.
Every morning I would wake up and check in on the latest twists and turns of these two related stories, #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite.
Then one morning, I read an article on a study done by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The focus was on middle-age, working-class white Americans, and the key finding was that their death rates were rising, not falling. The causes? Suicide, alcoholism, and opioids. I had to read the article three times before it registered.
Slowly, I realized that these kinds of things don’t happen overnight. The spike in the mortality rate was just the most dramatic consequence of a set of trends that had been occurring for decades—the move from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, the renaissance of cities and the decline of rural America. These were trends that benefited people like me but devastated others. I had viewed my own success as both earned and inevitable, and I hadn’t even thought of this other group at all.
The Case/Deaton study was just the beginning, of course—the election of Donald Trump was a much bigger wakeup call.
I feel as if I had lived in a bunker that I thought was the world, and now I have wandered out and see that while the various concerns of my own bunker are entirely justified (I certainly don’t think #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarsSoWhite are any less important than I did before), the landscape is full of different bunkers, each with its own set of justified concerns and its own inclination to view itself as the world.
I believe the role of the bridgebuilder during these times is to expand his/her own set of sympathies to encompass more bunkers and encourage relationships among various tribes that call their bunkers the world.
This is easier said than done. When I reach out to those who are clearly not in my bunker, I hear people shout, “Go away, alien.” And when people in my own bunker see me reaching out, I hear them yell, “You are no longer one of us, traitor.”
Am I the only one? Will it always be like this?
Eboo Patel (@EbooPatel), founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, writes about social justice from his perspective as a Muslim American of Indian heritage.
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