ME? RACIST???

A nineteen year old neighbourhood favourite was shot dead the other day in downtown Toronto, a few blocks from where I live. Today there is a small shrine – the usual flowers piled up at the site of the shooting. The neighbours remember the boy as always smiling and loving to dance and play basketball. There were the usual comments about “too many guns on the street.” So we mourn again. Trouble is – we lay blame in the wrong place.

Bill Clinton said it best a few years ago. Referring to racial tensions in America, he said (and I paraphrase) that it is not a question of race, but a question of class. Giving the lie to the red-neck notion that somehow race is an element inherent in a certain kind of behaviour. In grotesque studies like “eugenics” there have been so-called scientists who have examined certain kinds of aberrant behaviour and its correlation to race. Everything from sexual promiscuity to testosterone gunplay. In fact, and I don’t remember who said it but it was an prominent and respected social scientist, that the most dangerous animal on Earth was a nineteen year old inner city black man. And he did not mean that colour had anything to do with it. He was just making a statistical comment about the realities if life in America.

But I believe Clinton nailed it when he set aside the idea of trace-based behaviour. So did Studs Terkel in his book “Race” which was all about the racial divide in Chicago.

It becomes cultural, economic, and environmental – none of which are in any way genetic.

Sadly, some of the black population will be predictably up in arms, claiming racial profiling or something like that. The police will run for cover and insist that they do not do that, and except for increased vigilance in dangerous areas, are not making racial judgments.

The election of Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a new day of tolerance and understanding, and perhaps most important, a new age of black self-esteem in America.

But nothing changes. In cultures where gangs prevail, where drugs are rampant, where guns are a phallic extension of testosterone, someone will be shot. I am no sociologist so I do not pretend to understand the dynamic of the disenfranchised, or the marginal. The fact still is, that for whatever reason (some of them sadly racially motivated) we marginalize certain groups. Those groups are characterized as below average in school, lacking vocational skills, and not having the right to what the general population conceives as fulfillable aspirations. Whew – that’s a long psycho-babble.

Remember too that many of the families living in Toronto today have come from another geographic culture where the gun was power, and where your chances of being unemployed were high, and being under-employed even higher.

My greatest concern is for the blacks who personally, often privately, cringe when they read of a street crime, hoping that it will not involve any of them. But it does. Like the person who is supposed to have seen the shooting and will be in horrible fear that he, only because of what he saw, could be next.

I have no idea what to say or what to do. I am, because I am white, suspect. And sadly, because I am also a Jew, I hear the kind of smug “I-climbed-out-of-the-ghetto-why-can’t-they?” utterances from many of my own people. I am privileged. The “others” are not. It has nothing to do with my ability to climb out of whatever hole I may have been in. It has to do with having been marginalized myself, but outgrowing the problem, I have had my own measure of success and it has been free of any kind of lawlessness.

The answers can’t come from me, or our well-meaning but in this case, impotent mayor, who says there are larger social problems to be dealt with. Of course there are. But where do we go from the “mea culpa” admission of our own complicity?

Enough. I am sorry. We all are sorry. It should not happen in a civil society.