Traveling in Place

America's Wound of Racism

Today, even as I look forward to the Thanksgiving holiday, my thoughts are with Natalie DuBois, a single black mother of two and owner of Natalie’s Cakes and More, a bakery in downtown Ferguson, Missouri. Natalie opened her shop in June. Business was brisk for the first couple of months. Then, when 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by officer Darren Wilson, touching off a series of protests in Ferguson, sales dried up.

But all was not lost. A St. Louis radio station interviewed her for a story about the protests, bringing public attention to her plight. To Natalie’s great surprise, people began flocking to her bakery. By the middle of this month, she was rushing to meet orders for Thanksgiving.

Yet her troubles were not over. On the night when a Missouri Grand Jury failed to indict officer Wilson, violence engulfed Ferguson. DuBois’ shop was one of six that was vandalized. Rioters smashed her front windows and destroyed her baking equipment.

The good news is that her neighbors have raised $76,000 through an Internet campaign to save the bakery. But even if Natalie’s business – and the rest of downtown Ferguson – manages to survive the destruction of this week, larger questions remain about the deep wound of racism in America and about how constructive change takes place.

First Snowfall

There’s just something about the first snowfall of the year.

No matter how many times you say to your neighbor during autumn rains, “Well, at least it’s not snow” – no matter that you groan inwardly about the leaves underneath the snow that still need to be raked – when flurries turn to honest-to-goodness snowflakes – those big, clumpy, wet ones that only come in the late fall and early spring – you can’t stop your heart from skipping a beat. You feel, just for a moment, like a little kid.

I was eating lunch at home when the lake effect snow band settled right over us. I watched out the bay window of my living room as the snowfall got heavier by the minute. There was no wind. The fat flakes were falling gently downward. The lawns were blanketed quickly. “Wow,” I said to myself, “Hollywood can’t make snow as beautiful as this.”

One of my earliest memories is of a snowfall. For a few years, my parents and I lived in Milledgeville, Georgia, where my Dad taught at the local college. Central Georgia hardly ever gets measurable snow. But one winter while we were there, the whole world seemed to stop while everybody peered out their windows and watched as the white stuff fell dreamily from the sky. It was probably the first snow I had ever seen. It lasted for several hours – long enough to leave a thick blanket. When it ended, my Dad exclaimed, “There’s enough to build a snowman!” He and I put on our winter jackets and caps and went outside. I remember being both stunned and a little scared. Was it OK to walk in? Daddy answered my question by bounding right out into the middle of it. “C’mon!” he called to me. “Let’s start rolling it up!”

Resisting the "Big Sort"

Regardless of how you feel about the results, you’ve got to be relieved that the mid-term elections are over. We should be free of misleading campaign rhetoric for, oh, at least a few months.

This year’s congressional mid-term races cost $4 billion. That’s a record – one likely to be broken in the next mid-term cycle. About two-thirds of that money was spent on negative advertising which depresses voter turnout by discouraging centrist, independent-minded people from showing up at the polls. The result is that elections are increasingly left to the most ideological voters, further tightening partisan gridlock. (By the way, there is cause for a glimmer of hope. While the post-election pledges of bi-partisanship may be as ephemeral as the morning dew, it is a fact that, since the 1980’s, the federal government has been most productive when one party controlled the White House and the other controlled both houses of Congress. We’ll see.)

The growing phenomenon of increasingly polarized politics reflects a societal trend that should give us pause. Bill Bishop, in his book The Big Sort, documents how the United States is both more diverse and more segregated than ever. Increased choice in where we live and what information we access has led to politically homogeneous neighborhoods, social circles, and churches. The explosion in broadcast and digital media has resulted in people gathering news only from sources that confirm their own biases, leading to mutually exclusive versions of reality. Since we spend all our time with people who think like we do, our own perspectives are never seriously challenged, and we become harshly dismissive of those who see the world differently.

Waiting in Silence

“For God alone my soul waits in silence.” – Psalm 62:1

Last month during one of my class sessions at LeMoyne, I posed a provocative question for discussion. We were about three weeks into the semester, and I was discouraged by how much resistance the students seemed to be exhibiting toward the subject matter. Earlier attempts at generating conversation had failed miserably. But this time, I was determined to spark some dialogue.

After presenting my carefully worded question, I looked around the room. Some students were looking down at their notebooks. Some began writing furiously, hoping I would see that they were simply too busy to stop. Some actually put down their pens, sat back in their chairs and folded their arms, determined to wait out this uncomfortable moment, certain I would eventually give up and move on. Some held their heads in their hands as though they were in pain. Every bit of body language was designed to send me the same message: “We’re not talking and you can’t make us.”

On earlier occasions like this one, I felt disappointed and a little perplexed. Very rarely do I find myself standing in front of an entire class of students who don’t want to talk. Nearly always, there are two or three who look forward to the opportunity to share their thoughts. And most of the time, one of those talkers will say something that triggers a reaction from someone else. But this class seemed to suffer from a complete absence of such students.