Opinion : Thoughts on Martin Luther King Day, from the whitest part of America

Throughout my 22 or so years in this job, I have written about almost every holiday: Christmas. New Year’s Day. Memorial Day. Veterans Day. Mother’s Day. Father’s Day. Thanksgiving.

Even holidays we as a nation have forgotten, like the original Patriot’s Day (April 19, 1775) and holidays most of us have never heard of have appeared in my columns. One of my favorite is National Newspaper Columnist Day (April 18, the date of the death of the famous Ernie Pyle as he covered U.S. Troops fighting their way to Japan on a dot in the Pacific called Ie Island).

Yet one holiday has received, from me, nothing but silence – until today: Martin Luther King Day.

My excuse for my extended silence has been my lack of experience. I have always lived in places with an overwhelmingly white citizenry. During the November election, I worked the polls for our rural Vinton townships, and I do not remember one single non-white signing in to vote.

I can say I have never seen anyone mistreated because of their race. That’s because I have seen virtually nobody of any other race but white in the cities where I lived.

When we live long enough in that kind of Caucasian uniformity, we start to think of our experience as normal; it begins to seem strange to live in a place where everyone does not need to put on sun block every time they walk to the mail box.

Statistically, I have lived in places where the census numbers define 98 percent or more of us as "Caucasian."

I, however, lived in a place that was even more white than that.

And just exactly how white was the part of Iowa where I grew up?

This white: My paternal grandfather was part Native American. His skin was darker than most of his neighbors.’ I inherited that trait from him. As I grew older, I was surprised to find that people who were as white as my parents thought I was anything but Caucasian.

At about age 10, I bought a winter coat, tan and dark brown. "This will match your complexion," said the clerk.

In one very entertaining incident, I was once famously identified as a Mexican. A few years before this, after our daughter Lydia was born, looking dark like me, the doctor asked my wife: “What nationality is the father?” Years earlier, my most loyal bully, Brad Burnell – a blond-haired, blue-eyed ninth grade classmate in Independence – seemed to thoroughly enjoy labeling me as an “Aborigine.”

But – with the exception of many rural Midwest regions – most of our country is not like that.

Vinton is, statistically speaking 98 percent white. That’s about 25 percent higher than the national average. Go just about anywhere outside of the rural Midwest, and you are likely to see more non-whites in one day than you will all year in Vinton.

Our whiteness affects our view of the world – and especially it affects our view of the parts of the world that are significantly less white than we are.

Well, while I can't speak for you, it's clear to me that my whiteness affects me, and my view of many current events.

When I hear that a teen was shot by a policeman, my first response is to assume that the suspect was at least partially responsible for his demise. Whether the suspect was black or white is not my first question. What I wanted to know is: What did he do to force the cop to shoot him?

When I stayed up late at the newspaper office in Oelwein in June of 1994, watching the infamous slow speed chase and waiting for the latest AP update on O.J. Simpson’s arrest for the murder of his ex-wife and her friend, I didn’t expect it to become the racial divide that it did. Looking back, perhaps if we had focused on making the Nicole Simpson murder an issue of violence against women issue instead of the racial issue it became, perhaps we could have initiated a culture change in the NFL 20 years sooner.

So, when I first heard about Michael Brown, I wanted to know what happened to lead up to Brown’s death.

Recent events, however, indicate that for many people, the question of race is the very first they ask. Once some of those people learned that Brown was black, they seemed to assume the guilt for his death was the officer's.

And at times, a few evil police officers have given those people reasons to bring it up. The name Abner Louima still makes people cringe as they recall the unspeakable abuse he suffered at the hands of police in NYC. Too many others have been abused by someone hiding behind a badge – way too many.

But on the other hand…and there is always another hand:

I believed from the first time I heard the name of Michael Brown that his death was most likely the result of his actions. After reviewing many of the witness statements presented to the grand jury, I still do.

When you are walking illegally down the street, blocking traffic, and a police officer says, “Hey man, get on the sidewalk,” you say, “Oops, my bad,” and you get on the sidewalk. You don’t – regardless of your skin color, or the officer’s – lean in the car and start beating down on him.

At least, I wouldn’t.

But on the other hand, many other intelligent people saw the story in the news, reviewed all of the same testimony and evidence that I looked at, and their first response was, “You don’t shoot a kid for just walking down the street.”

This is true, too.

As a white guy in a white state, I have never experienced or seen the impact of racism on a person’s opportunity for work or college or their right to vote.

But lots of people in a lot of states have experienced it, or seen it. One of my favorite baseball players of all time was kept out of Major League Baseball until he had reached the age at which most players retire, 42. And when they finally gave Satchel Paige a tiny bit of the honor he deserved by creating a space in the Hall of Fame for Paige and other Negro League stars, Paige said: "The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal."

I was shocked to learn in school of the laws that were used to require segregation. But when I was born, Congress still had several members who had won election with the campaign slogan, “Segregation Forever.”

But on the other hand, again:

I am also concerned about those black leaders who lamented “open season on young black men,” without acknowledging that “young black men” are often the ones holding the murder weapons.

At about the same time that Ferguson was sizzling with protests, on the other end of Missouri’s portion of I-70, another unarmed black youth was being mourned. But you did not hear any black leaders mention the name of Angel Hooper, age 6. The two suspects charged in her death were young black men. Police say they opened fire in the general direction of a convenience store parking lot. Angel, who was simply going inside to buy a pack of gum, died of gunshot wounds.

"Criminals are no longer just killing each other - they are killing our children. This nonsense must end," KC Mayor Sly James said in a statement after Angel’s murder.

In St. Louis, a week before Michael Brown’s death, a 46-year-old grandmother, Juliette Cleveland-Davis,was shot to death while protecting her grandchildren from a similar shooting. She, too, was black – as were the two young men arrested for shooting her to death.

While there were some small protests and memorials for each of these murder victims, the loudest leaders of the black community were totally silent about each of these needless deaths. Nobody labeled it “open season” on black children or grandmothers.

Because I have always lived in 98 Percent White America, I have to rely on what I read in the news, and the insight of a handful of friends who live in places where racial diversity is a way of life and racial tensions often rules the day.

One of those friends is Ruth Coots Intokefer. The sister of Dave Coots, who owns the local quarry, Ruth eventually went from Mount Auburn to the St. Louis area, not far from the Ferguson protests last summer and fall.

Ruth told me how living close to those areas is difficult at times.

“It gets taxing on your mind,” she said. “Ferguson is all that has been on all the local news, regardless of what's going on. Violence in north St. Louis is nothing new as there are shootings every night.”

Another man, one week before the brown Brown incident, was sitting on his porch when someone in a stolen car lost control, hit a fire hydrant, and the car flew up and hit the guy and killed him, Ruth told me.

“Those are areas we would not go into in the day time, let alone night,” she said. “My younger brother was in North County earlier this spring and called to ask me how to get somewhere else. He told me where he was and I couldn't tell him quick enough to get out of there.”
Ruth also said she was displeased with how the media seemed to handle the Brown incident.

“Any guest comments seemed to always be from the Brown perspective. I feel no support for law enforcement and their families,” she said. “It has been sickening. And one thing that really burns me is when the protesters fly the American flag upside down. Words cannot describe that disgust. I just want to get this part over with.”

But on the other hand – and there is always another hand, another side, another viewpoint and reality to consider – racism still is an issue in way too many parts of our country. There are, in some places, those who still think that America belongs to the fair-skinned. There are places where men in uniform have done unimaginable things to members of minorities.

And phrases like racial profiling and “Driving While Black” are a reality in too many places.

Rick Reilly famously wrote about Driving While Black (DWB) in a column for Sports Illustrated in 2002, mentioning several athletes who have been stopped by police who were suspicious because they saw a black man driving a nice vehicle. Some of those officers then furthered the insult by then asking for an autograph once they realize the man is a famous athlete.

Reilly quoted comedian Chris Rock, who too was stopped for DWB: “I was so scared I thought I really had stolen my car,” said Rock.

Another one of my city-dwelling friends is a white lady named Chanel, who has lived in several ethnically diverse places, and now resides in a suburb of Los Angeles. Although her skin is lighter than mine, she has grown up in a community that is largely black. Her children are bi-racial; her boyfriend and best friends are black.

Like the athletes in Reilly’s column, Chanel has witnessed first-hand the phenomenon of DWB.

“There is nothing quite like being pulled over for riding in a nice car when your boyfriend is black and have to explain why you are riding in said car,” she told me as we discussed the aftermath of the Ferguson protests. “And then the humiliation of watching your successful black boyfriend explain how and why he can afford the car without provoking the police so they don't whoop his ass.”

I can understand why Chanel says, “It’s difficult for me to have a positive attitude toward police.”

And the comedian, Rock, responded to his experience with a hilarious but insightful comedy video in which he advises that the best way to not get beat by police is to obey the law, pull over when officers turn on their lights behind you, and be polite.

Chanel has a valid point. Ruth has a valid point, as well, although their initial gut reactions to the Ferguson events would differ significantly.

But even after long conversations with my big-city friends, and hours of pondering a variety of news stories and commentaries, I still realize that my opinions are all lacking in experience.

From my all-white township, I see reports of way too much black crime. And I see reports of racism and racial profiling.

It seems that most all of us, whatever race we are, whatever our opinion about O.J. Simpson, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin or Ray Rice – from the loudest speakers chanting “open season on young black men” and “hands up, don’t shoot!” to the small-town white village columnists who waited too long to address those issues – have a ways to go until we help achieve the dream of Martin Luther of a nation are not “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

And as we mark another Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, is see that we as a nation have a long, long way to go before we can fully achieve that dream.

In Kansas City, where mourners still remember Angel Hooper, Mayor Sly suitably summarized one major solution: “Really what needs to change is we need more relationships with people who aren’t like us.”

Yeah, we do.

But that’s difficult in a society where we can count the “people not like us” on one hand.