A disturbing note at this season of goodwill. America’s social fabric has ripped.
The fear and rage smoldering for years in the African-American community surfaced recently in the protests against police behavior on Staten Island, in Cleveland and in Ferguson. Blacks experience police as oppressive, intensifying vulnerability blacks feel in their neighborhoods. Law enforcement assumes African-Americans are lawless. Blacks feel police unfairly target them. Both stereotype and neither trusts the other. It’s a volatile climate.
I came to Talbot County twenty-five years ago. There was a cross burning on Tilghman Island not far from where I live. To me, a naïve northerner, ironically from Staten Island, I didn’t realize how tenaciously racial divisions hold on.
My wife Jo and I became involved in establishing Habitat for Humanity in Talbot County. Pastors from a white and a black church, each with six lay members, began regular conversations about working together in St. Michaels. The conversation took at least a year. Habitat was established but not without tensions.
On the surface, initial talks seemed cordial, but among African- Americans it was apparent there existed chronic distrust of whites. “Even nice whites,” as one African-American put it to me, “talk a good game but we can’t depend they’ll deliver.”
Some of the architects of early Habitat efforts were white, privileged, but people of good will. We’d sometimes feel hurt or misunderstood when our efforts to provide affordable housing were treated with suspicion. We soon discovered, however, that in our desire to help, we had not sufficiently enlisted potential homeowners to tell us what they wanted. African Americans felt excluded from decision-making, powerless. Wanting to help is commendable – but recipients must have a voice the process. Respect and listening to each other were the key words.
We learned other things in the formative years of Habitat that might be useful in beginning a conversation in the present social controversy.
We learned that doing the right doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be trusted. Listening and understanding one another builds trust, and progress necessarily takes time. It will not happen overnight. Time and patience were critical factors.
Finally how habitat brought whites and blacks together was particularly instructive. Blacks and whites, disenfranchised and privileged, young and old, worked side by side– I mean literally side by side – with hammers, nails, saws, lumber, paint, insulation, brooms and roofing. Whites weren’t just throwing money at the task from a distance but working side by side with blacks to build houses, not only for their African-American neighbors, but for economically marginal whites as well.
What happened was simple and profound. We came to know each other by name. Strangers became acquaintances, and then colleagues while some became friends. I believe it was because of an identifiable mutual cause that the tide turned. While working together, we learned of each other’s families, shared our histories, expressed hopes, while we kept hitting our thumbs with hammers and dropping lumber on our toes. We now saw each other as human beings, not stereotypes.
In today’s troubled communities establishing mutually agreed-upon mechanisms for African-Americans and police to get to know each other would be a beginning to the healing.
Of course there’d be cynicism and suspicion at first. But a mutual commitment to the task of rebuilding trust could shift the tide. It’s important to remember that neither the black community nor law enforcement wants to continue living in fear of one another.
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