“Why Should I Weep?”
The Republican National Convention circus has packed up and moved to…Kenosha. Trump-on-the-Stump is fanning the flames of racial injustice lie-by-lie, tweet-by-tweet. His behaviors merit shame, not votes. He follows his basest instincts knowing nothing of leadership.
One of the final chapters in Max DePree’s early book on leadership was entitled, “Why Should I Weep?” Max, a venerated leader, believed leaders cry. Over what? Among other things: “lack of dignity, injustice, arrogance, betrayal of principles, the inability to tell the difference between heroes and celebrities.” Were he alive and in Kenosha this week, Max would be weeping.
While watching Trump defile all I hold sacred about America, I’ve wanted to cry. Instead, I’ve been reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. In grammar and syntax, it’s an easy read. In content and message, it’s staggering. Wilkerson traces in stomach-turning detail the devices by which Black Americans have been branded, brutalized, deprived and demeaned to keep them “in their place” below Whites for more than 400 years.
I’m stunned by Wilkerson’s reports of systemic cruelty admired by Nazis who studied America’s torture of Blacks to make Germany’s murder of Jews more economically useful.
And I’m shocked by my own ignorance. How could I have entered my 70s without knowing the systems of continuing brutalities so familiar to my Black fellow Americans?
From our home in the ’60s we could see the smoke rising over Detroit’s riots. My father told me not to worry, “it has nothing to do with you.” It’s not true. Black rage has everything to do with me, a White woman of privilege. Despite my belief in equality and my self-definition as a caring, loving, non-racist person, I’ve somehow stayed ignorant. It was easy: I’m White.
If you’re White and American, read Wilkerson’s book. I dare you. Accept the fact that “African-Americans were mutilated and hanged from poplars and sycamores and burned at the courthouse square, a lynching every three or four days in the first four decades of the twentieth century.” Then I was born, white and Jewish and destined to be ignorant until now.
Trump is incapable of truth-telling and embarrassment. But I’m not. I can feel the bite of the whip and know that the systems of injustice have not ended.
I take Wilkerson seriously when she writes, “Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing.”
As a member of the dominant caste, I can, and I should, feel shame. I should weep. But it’s not enough. I need to dry my tears, get off my privilege, speak out and take action. Brand systemic racism for the evil it is. Work and vote for justice. Now.
