Conversation worth having

President Barack Obama wants the nation to engage in community-based conversations about race. That sounds like my 1990s.

First the paper sent me to the DeGray Lodge for an Our Town retreat on race relations put on by what was then the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Now it’s called the National Conference for Community Justice.

I delved into the exercise vigorously and signed up for home-based conversations with smaller interracial groups.

Then I graduated to a smaller, more intensive session put on by New Orleans-based sensitivity trainers.

A man challenged me to lift myself by my bootstraps. I said I wasn’t wearing any boots. He said it didn’t matter. He said no one could do it.

I recall that we finished our two-day session in late afternoon, and that I walked back to the office and learned of the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial.

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So here we sit in 2013, and we’ve endured another racially charged, racially divisive criminal trial.

A president who was supposed to lead us into a post-race society is saying we need to talk about race issues among ourselves locally because a president can’t transform things from Washington.

Based on my previous experience, I thought I’d offer to start-or restart-the discussion.

I was instructed nearly 20 years ago that it really doesn’t matter much any more what our racial attitudes are individually. Whatever they are, they accrue only to our personal credit or shame.

Race prejudice is but a personal problem.

Racism, the real societal cancer, is race prejudice plus power.

That concept-prejudice plus the power to impose prejudice generally-invokes a kind of institutional racism through law, politics, economics and business practice.

There are many examples, but here’s one: Trouble comes to innercities. People with economic power-meaning in the middle-class and up, and mainly white-can afford to flee, and do.

Maybe they’re prejudiced personally; maybe not. That’s not the issue.

The issue is that business investment goes with them, leaving behind little more than liquor stores and illegal drugs.

Some white people blame black people for their troubled condition a half-century after civil rights and well after affirmative action. But opportunity remains scant when poverty is isolated and perpetuated-when opportunity goes to those, personally prejudiced or not, with the power to flee.

It’s not racism that has an individual white person fleeing. At worst, that’s mere personal prejudice.

What is racism is a system, a generally permitted order of things, by which whites can and do flee en masse and blacks can’t get out and are left abandoned to streets of poverty and crime.

Let’s move to the case at hand.

It’s not so important to black people what George Zimmerman had in his heart. What matters is that someone with that heart held power bestowed by the community to keep order.

It’s that this man could walk free from a courtroom where a jury had the power to condone whatever unseen action he took.

It’s not actually the verdict that is at issue. It’s that Jim Crow lives through another time and by a more subtle imposition.

Why did so many black people rejoice over O.J. Simpson’s acquittal nearly two decades ago? It’s because the verdict showed majority white show it felt to be on the seemingly unjust losing side of institutionally empowered and imposed racism.

Now for one fresher topic for our conversation: There have been celebrations, or happy exultations, by white people about the Trayvon Martin verdict.

I’ve heard them. I’ve read them on social media.

I don’t dispute the verdict.

I don’t know what happened that night. No one except Zimmerman does. Our system of justice must thrive if ever-imperfectly by the workable standard of reasonable doubt.

But my question is as follows: What, exactly, is there to celebrate? To be happy about? To be buoyed by? To be anything but distressed about?

Why the happy face? Why the high-five?

Is it that a private security cop got away with profiling a black youth? That a private security cop got away with killing a black youth?

That the outcome validates the supposed logic and fairness of suspecting the next black male you see of criminal conduct?

That’s pure racial bigotry.

Cheering over the Zimmerman-Martin affair will poison our conversation, just as rage and violence will do the same.

Next: If this conversation actually takes place fruitfully, we might move in this space to the second phase.

That is black responsibility in the “age of backlash,” as one white women called it-in a whispered aside-at the Our Town retreat nearly two decades ago.

A worthy conversation would lift whispered asides to a broadly audible state.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 11 on 07/23/2013

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