During my teaching career in New York City’s Harlem, the area’s African American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell came to deliver a speech to our high school’s Black and Hispanic students. Powell was ushered in with an inept piano fanfare by a white music teacher. Early in his remarks, Powell constructed a harsh metaphor of the woman’s poor performance by suggesting she “learn to play on the black keys too.”
This was after what we term the Civil Rights Movement, but long before the contemporary thrust of what that movement was actually about — addressing the long U.S. history of systemic discrimination against people who are ethnically different, particularly the long practiced, calculated killing by some police of Black men.
In his recent You Tube entry “George Floyd and the Dominoes of Racial Injustice,” South African comedian and Daily Show host Trevor Noah struck a chord when he described an incident on May 28. Amy Cooper who, violating New York Central Park regulations, was walking her dog without a leash when a dark-skinned man, a bird watcher, asked it she would put the dog on a leash.
As Noah pointed out, this is a very significant incident because when, instead of leashing her dog, she called the police to say she was being threatened by a Black man, she was exercising the white authority over persons of color that began in this county 400 years ago — deep systemic racism.
When slavery began to be practiced here, it was necessary to have armed militias to prevent enslaved people from rebelling or running away. This was the reason for the Second Amendment — Constitution-wording to defend bearing arms that slave owners demanded before signing on. Militias filled the ranks of the American Revolution, the army of the Confederacy, and “knights” of the Ku Klux Klan. Police employment is the next career step for many of our veterans. Trained to subdue an enemy, those with white supremacist attitudes have often killed in our streets.
When lighter-skinned families gather and reflect on the past, their memories may center on college events, rafting at Yellowstone, a trip to Disneyland or to France. Not that economically disadvantaged families don’t sometimes manage such experiences too, but darker-skinned families have a host of threatening images that shadow their memories. African Americans have ancestors who experienced being bought and sold, of being marketed away from spouses and children. Their elders can tell stories of being given tests to qualify to vote – questions without answers, such as guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar.
It is only our parents of darker-skinned children who must carefully instruct their youth how to prevent being killed by police or some white vigilante.
It is no small matter that a great Civil War was required to set a people with darker skin free from bondage. It is our deeply disturbing history that the powerful, in the North as well as the South, allowed or arranged for former slaves to be kept in economic servitude as tenant farmers without legal rights, their children with limited schooling. Four thousand Backs were lynched as warning that lighter-skinned people ruled over them.
The term race — introduced into our language at the time of the conquest of the Americas to justify and carry forward totally unscientific classification of peoples with darker skin — generated throughout these continents a systemic rule of lighter-skinned (so-called, white) superiority and power.
We know Africans, captured and held for free labor, weren’t the only victims. Ninety percent of Native people failed to survive the conquest. Those who did were forced to give way to white immigrants who wanted their land and resources. Chinese were brought to the U.S. for the arduous labor of railroad building through mountains and deserts of the West, then persecuted. U.S. cavalry spent much of a century subduing Indians who resisted invasion.
Unlike German or Italian Americans, Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II — because they were ethnically different. Latin Americans provide the repellant labor of meat cutting and farm labor. The prosperity of the country has been built on crimes. At that, those riches are hoarded by the wealthy.
Lives, justice, equality, and the welfare of all — deeply matter. We are in a moment of national clarity and caring that must be seized.
Returning to Congressman Powell’s comment, the black keys on a piano guide the pianist’s hands and eyes to avoid discordant sound. Harmony is what good people in the U.S. must be after.
Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian currently at work on a re-examination and challenge to the “Americans narrative.”