...IN AMERICA

A front page “news” story in the LA Time this morning declares that OBAMA AVOIDS FULL-ON RACIAL DEBATE.  Even before I read the piece which ran long from page one onto page nine, my first response was “What the ….. are they talking about.”  I’ve been paying attention, and my impression is that President Obama has been very clear in his pronouncements about the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, specifically and about the continuing problems of racism in America generally.  The writers of the news story, Christi Parsons and Kathleen Hennessey, quote the President.  “Ferguson laid bare a problem that is not unique to St. Louis or that area, and is not unique to our time, and that is a simmering distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.”  Perhaps the two reporters and many Americans are disappointed that the black president didn’t come to Ferguson to give them and the nation T.V. images of a tearful meeting with Michael Brown’s parents to “color” the impression of what he is doing about the problem of bigotry and race… something that provides entertainment value like Matt Lauer’s prolonged interviews with Janey and Ray Rice around the sensational subjects of domestic violence and NFL contracts. 

I give the President credit for not going to Ferguson.  Sending the world’s most famous medical doctor, whoever that might be, to Liberia for a short visit would do little to erase ebola from Africa.  Diseases aren’t cured quickly and easily.  President Obama is smart enough to know that a presidential visit to Ferguson would not cure an American culture contaminated by indigenous racism.  Picking at the scab of a sickened culture’s illness might get people to watch TV news coverage, but the problem is an old sickness that continues to cripple our nation. 

Until the 1940s Ferguson, like many American towns, was once a 100% white town situated next to a 100% black town, like the town of Kinloch.  There was a gate on the road between the two towns, and that gate was closed every day at sundown.  The black people who worked for the white folks in Ferguson had to be out of town by sundown.  Even though the sundown law ended in the 1940s, a white’s only rule was strictly followed until the 1960s.  In 1968 a house in Ferguson was sold to a black family.  Everything changed quickly in the 1980s when Kinloch Airfield became the St. Louis airport.  Land was needed for expansion, and the black families of Kinlock got good money for their properties, so with real estate agents no longer able legally to refuse to sell to black people more black families moved next door to Ferguson causing the typical “white flight” that has left the present town of Ferguson with governing boards made up of  mostly white supervisors and police and fire departments with a population of Ferguson now 80 percent black.

It may come as a surprise to some Americans to learn that into the last decades of the Nineteenth Century native Americans were hunted like animals and killed.  Up in Feather River Canyon out of Oroville, California, in 1865, 17 white men surrounded and massacred fifty Yahi Indians, men, women and children, while the Yahi slept in their beds.  I have native American ancestors (My great grandmother was Cherokee), and it startles and shocks me whenever I remember that in 1864 a Colorado Territory militia attacked and destroyed a village of friendly Cheyenne and Arapaho encamped in southeastern Territory, killing and mutilating  an estimated 70-163 Indians, about two-thirds of whom were women and children.

https://www.facebook.com/indigenouspeoplesissues/photos/a.378473232975.160482.318668727975/10151988132107976/?type=1&fref=nf&pnref=story.

The contagion that sickens America like a viral illness subsides and cools for awhile only to come back fresh with surprising intensity.  What happened in Ferguson is a symptom of a sickness that has been there all along. Think shingles and chicken pox.  There may have been no infection and pain for many years between the chicken pox episode and a shingles attack, but the potential is always there.