Why This Man Is Not Smiling

Goshen, New York is a small town sixty miles north of Manhattan. It is known by sports fans as the Cradle of the Trotter. The Harness Racing Museum is located here. It is the home town of two legendary men, the artist Horace Pippin and jazz pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith - both of whom, by the way, were African American. With a few minor exceptions, it is a generally agreeable place to live. It is also the town in which I was born and raised. After years of living all over the United States and a brief stint in Toronto, I moved back here a number of years ago.

Green Street is a half mile stretch of road that runs from South Street (where I grew up) on its south east side to Greenwich Avenue on the north west. When I was growing up, the Erie Rail Road line which snaked its way through the village, cut Green Street in two - smack dab in its center. One side of the tracks was exclusively white, the other side exclusively black. When I moved back to Goshen in the early nineties, I was pleasantly surprised to find some white families living "on the other side of the tracks" as it were. Surely, I thought, this was a positive sign. This must mean that Goshen's neighborhoods were starting to diversify. As it turns out, I would later learn that the South Street side of the tracks was still all white - as are most of the neighborhoods in town. There are no black faces to be found in Briarwood, the apartment complex at the edge of the village where I live. You see, in recent years living in the Land of Goshen has gotten to be a fairly expensive proposition. All of the African American families I knew as a little boy - the Greens, the Hasbroukes, the Colemans, the Cooks, the Charles', the Prices - have all moved away. Only the DeWitts and one or two other families remain. Bill Baker's Bar and Grille, which was owned and operated by the father of my long dead, beloved pal Jay Baker, was torn down years ago. It was the only place in town that had a prohibition on profanity. If some misguided soul dared to let loose with an expletive, he had to make a twenty-five cent contribution to the "Cuss Jug" (Fifty cents if the "F" word was used). The proceeds went to charity. A fire house stands in its place today.

For reasons I can't quite figure out, Barack Obama's address the other day in which he eloquently defended his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, had me thinking about Green Street and the backward sociological slide African American families have experienced since the dawn of the Reagan era almost three decades ago.

It is unspeakably sad, even outrageous, that so many people in the media ("Pundits" they're called) seem hell-bent on defining a career that spans half a century based solely on a fifty to sixty second bite of sound. What so many White commentators just don't get, and what Senator Obama bluntly pointed out, is the inescapable fact that Reverend Wright's rage is not the result of mental illness, nor can it be fairly described as some kind of anti American rant. What we need to come face to face with is the nasty reality that Jeremiah Wright's anger is borne of years of hard and bitter experience. The tangible progress that his people made throughout the fifties, sixties and seventies came to a dead stop on January 20, 1981. Throughout the Reagan administration and the subsequent Gingrich Revolution, black people in this country suffered terribly. The good Reverend was merely venting his outrage - an outrage that is rightfully shared by millions of men and women of his generation. You'd be angry too!

While white people, for obvious reasons, are unable to empathize with their black brothers and sisters, they - we - should make every effort to sympathize with their anger. Think about it for a moment or two: the Reverend Wright will be sixty-seven this September. He has a clear, conscious memory of legalized segregation! In his youth, he was probably called a nigger to his face too many times to count. Think of the emotional and psychological scars something like that must leave behind! When I was in the second grade, little Rhonda Bende called me Rabbit Face and I'm still dealin' with it! The man grew to maturity with White America telling him (in not too subtle ways) that he was worthless; that he didn't belong; that he should "know is place" in lily-white society; THAT HE WASN'T EVEN HUMAN, FOR PETE'S SAKE! Again, you'd be pissed off too, Bubbah!

Much has been made of Reverend Wright's comments on September 16, 2001, less than a week after the hideous attacks that killed over three-thousand American citizens. Borrowing a phrase Malcolm X had used following the assassination of President Kennedy, he proclaimed that "the chickens have come home to roost." In their righteous indignation, the critics of Wright and Senator Obama have chosen to ignore the undeniable fact that he was speaking the unvarnished truth. Although to some minds he seemed to be implying that the poor people who perished that day got exactly what they deserved, when examined in context, it is perfectly clear he was speaking to decades of atrocious foreign policy and American interference in the affairs of sovereign governments. When George W. Bush tells us that we were attacked that day because "the terrorists hate our freedoms", he is lying. We were attacked because for too many years, our government has been enabling the Saudi Royal Family, one of the most corrupt and despotic regimes in the world. That explains why all but four of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi born. (Oh, and by the way, not one of them were natives of Iraq. Oops!) This is certainly not meant to justify the despicable act of mass murder committed on that horrible day. It is merely to point out the undeniable: The chickens did indeed come home to roost on September 11, 2001.

The hardest irony of all to come to terms with is the almost certain fact that Senator Obama's "glorious quest" for the presidency has been irreparably damaged by what I can only describe as a non incident. Guilt by association, you know what I mean? Once again, the ugly subject of race has managed to polarize the citizens of this sick and troubled country. The people who made public the videotape of Jeremiah White's explosive oration did not do so in order to educate and enlighten the clueless American people. Their only intent was to frighten and divide them. Sadly, they appear to have succeeded.

An Obama administration might very well have meant the dawn of America's healing. The tragic spectre of slavery has hung around our national neck like the proverbial albatross for over two centuries now. The election of President Barack Obama could have sent America in a new direction. Maybe it can still happen. Perhaps a miracle will occur. I am still idealistic enough (call it "naive" if you must) to believe that we can take America back.

On second thought, I've got a better idea: Don't call it "naivete". Call it the audacity of hope!

Tom Degan
Goshen, NY
tomdegan@frontiernet.net

SUGGESTED READING:
Parting the Waters
by Taylor Branch

AFTERTHOUGHT:
Max Isaacs and Adam Goebler are two college students who have just started a new political blog called Source Junk that comments intelligently on affairs of state - such a rare thing these days! Here's a link to their site:

http://www.sourcejunk.blogspot.com/