Traveling While Black: The Quest for Racial Justice

Recently Ray Blue, an internationally renowned jazz saxophonist, posted a comment on his Facebook page that caught my attention. I’ve known Ray for over 20 years and he also happens to be featured on my latest album. In temperament, he is typically unflappable and affable and he is also a reserved, well-traveled businessman. Ray came of age in Westchester County, New York, and has returned home after having lived in Germany for more than 20 years as a respected Jazz musician throughout Europe. He has seen both nations’ systems of dealing or not dealing with their past social injustices and atrocities and the differences in national resolve to address those languishing problems of institutionalized anti-Semitism and racism in Germany, and slavery, racism, and institutionalized white supremacy at home in America.

So when Ray wrote the following comment, it prompted my response. Here is what Ray reported from Germany in March:

“Upon arrival in Berlin this morning, I took a taxi from Tegel airport to the flat where I am staying. I instructed the driver, a non-German from Eastern Europe, to take the shortest route. He chose to ignore my request and took a long scenic route through the middle of the city in order to boost the fare. When I informed him that I used to live here and know the route that he should have taken, he immediately got loud and defensive. At the same time, he started making clear and distinct racial remarks about Africans and American Blacks. I wanted to knock his ass out!!! But… words did go back and forth while he drove me to my destination. I was totally pissed, got out of the car and immediately created a small scene to draw the attention of the police. Of course, they came quickly and I told them what had happened. The two police officers apologized to me for the disrespectful and racially fueled situation. They assured me that the taxi driver’s behavior is neither allowed nor tolerated in Germany. Since they did not hear the remarks, no legal judgment could be made on the spot. However, they instructed me to pay him, then to call the taxi central office, make a complaint and give his taxi number. I did as instructed, got an apology from the Taxi Centrum and learned that he had already been suspended from their company. Based on my complaint, he will be held accountable for how he spoke to me and will lose taxi license. Justice is served!!! Why can’t we get this justice and satisfaction in America? Wrong is wrong no matter what!!!”

My thoughts after reading about Ray’s experience evoked a visceral response that I posted to Facebook:

My brother Ray Blue, thank you for sharing this important experience. As Americans we need to understand that countries like Germany and South Africa have made major strides to try to atone for their respective nations’ failure to correct racist acts and, in Germany’s case, anti-Semitic social systems.

Germany’s lessons from history with the holocaust – the annihilation of over six million Jewish citizens consumed by one of the most evil, deranged acts ever devised in human history – have not been lost on the German people. The Nazi’s hatred of “the other;” Jews, gypsies, Blacks, and non-Aryans has left post-WWII Germany as a nation coming to terms with its complicity and guilt. This has taken nearly three-quarters of a century. Over the decades Germany has made deliberate steps to ensure that bigotry and racial prejudice are kept at bay by using open street markers, signage, historical sites, cultural institutions, public forums, and “true history” education to bolster the German people’s resolve for dealing in earnest with national atonement.

South Africa’s Commission on Truth and Reconciliation similarly sought to create open inter-racial discourse in the post-Apartheid era. Our country has long been in denial regarding the degree to which racism and racial injustice permeates so much of American society. It’s not until civil unrest, social conflict, and confrontations over repressive symbols like confederate monuments that commemorate the “lost cause” of the Confederacy to sustain Black enslavement are publicly under attack that honest dialogue about slavery’s aftermath is even mentioned.

Many Germans for the most part are committed to “never again” as a national ethos, although there are many fascistic Neo-Nazis worldwide, hell-bent on installing and sustaining white supremacy. Still, the Germans have wisely used historical markers, along with active institutional memory taught by employing true history as a means of keeping Germany on course toward becoming a truly diverse and open democracy. Everything is not perfect, and as long as the powers that be in America sweep the nation’s true racial history and effects of slavery under the rug, problems will persist. I respect the manner in which your situation was handled, Ray. Sadly, it could easily have turned out quite differently had it occurred right here at home in many places as you and I well know. I’m glad you’re OK and grateful justice was served. All best my friend, get home safe, Dennis Day

Ray’s Facebook post connected for me with themes written in the book Honest Patriots by Dr. Donald W. Shriver, President Emeritus of Union Theological Seminary. The book’s treatise explores three nations: Germany, South Africa, and the U.S, all with histories framed within a human context of racial subjugation and ethnic oppression. Germany continues to emerge resiliently from the barbarism and human devastation wrought by Hitler’s Third Reich and the Holocaust’s annihilation of over six million Jews in Europe. Apartheid in South Africa sought to construct a permanent class of disenfranchised indigenous Africans by constructing a racial caste and color system designed to institutionalize White supremacy and Black subservience in perpetuity. Apartheid ended in 1994 after decades of terrorist attacks and racial tumult in that nation.

The United States, nearly 160 years after the civil war, continues to struggle with reconciling the social ill effects and stigma of Black enslavement, along with lingering racial bias steeped in the notion of White privilege and the deliberately constructed idea of Black inferiority sustained to perpetuate and undergird a lucrative slave labor-based economy for over 300 years.

 

Shriver’s book seeks to contextualize the racially repressive histories and commonalities among these three democracies. Arguing that nations, like humans, make egregious mistakes, immoral decisions, and have at times in the history of civilization implemented evil plans, systems, and policies. As an ordained clergy and scholarly researcher, he avoids sermonizing and approaches the axis of evil with a dispassionate rigorous empirical and intellectual disposition. One senses his deep and genuine empathetic impulse and resolve for his nation, the U.S., to find a way to reconcile its racist past by coming to terms with White supremacy and its entrenched economic self-interests in contrast to the grander humanist ideals upon which our U.S Constitution is based.

The common thread in Shriver’s volume is the need for national honesty and earnest discourse when attempting to confront a nation’s demons that have proved flagrant, faulty, and antithetical to the core teachings of our Abrahamic faith traditions’ Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic Scriptures. Germany has struggled with enacting stringent societal norms, laws, and markers designed to reinforce the idea that never again shall its people acquiesce to the evil of anti- Semitism and racism. South Africa’s implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a national directive purposed to encourage honest dialogue, confession, and discourse among and between the indigenous South African people groups and the Afrikaners and those who over decades upheld Apartheid’s rigid segregation and racially imperious caste, colorist, and class regime.

In the United States, despite enduring a Civil War that tore the nation asunder and exacted a toll of more deaths than any other American war or incursion in history, the nation has yet to resolve the residual effects of its own racist past. Shriver argues America’s tendency to avoid confronting its own past history is partly to blame. Denial of the underlying causes of the Civil War and the ensuing doctrine of the “Lost Cause” have been slow to gain currency among the American populous. The Lost Cause, is “an American pseudo-historical,^[1][2] negationist ideology that contends that the cause of the Confederacy during the American Civil War was a just and noble one. The ideology subscribes to the believed virtues of the antebellum South, perceiving the war as a struggle primarily to save the Southern way of life,^[3] or to defend “States’ Rights,” in the face of overwhelming “Northern Aggression.” At the same time, the Lost Cause minimizes or denies outright the central role of slavery in the buildup to and outbreak of the war.

True patriotism as inferred in Shriver’s construction must begin with honest discourse and accurate historical consensus. Both Germany and South Africa have made notable efforts and progress to confront their nations’ indulgence of terror and Germany has worked to address its acquiescence to Hitler’s initiation of Jewish genocide. In America, post slavery, ensued a failed Reconstruction Era and the reinstitution of Jim Crow racist societal normative behaviors that have never been wholly adequately addressed as a priority for racial reconciliation and healing in this country.

Historical markers, institutional programs aimed at educating the American populous, revised K-12 school curricula are all part and parcel of what Dr. Shriver views as remediation for developing future generations of true American patriots. Know the truth and the truth shall set you free.