A Time for Humility and Understanding

The Jefferson Davis statue was removed from Kentucky’s state capitol on Saturday. It’s symbolic, but symbolic moves matter, particularly this one. This is another sign of the extraordinary moment in which we are living. 

Trump’s former national security adviser basically said the president has committed a bunch of impeachable offenses. I know it’s now unsurprising when the president is accused and/or actually does something that it’s hard to imagine any of his predecessors doing. But it is still remarkable news that John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser for more than a year, has a book coming out that suggests the House Democrats’ impeachment of Trump was on too narrow of grounds. According to Bolton, there were many other potentially-impeachable offenses committed by Trump, beyond his conduct regarding Ukraine. 

Booker down 10 to McGrath, per a poll released by Booker’s campaign--The campaign of State Rep. Charles Booker put out an internal poll Saturday showing Amy McGrath at 49, Booker at 39, Mike Broihier at 5 percent and 6 percent undecided. The poll was conducted from June 8-12. (The U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Kentucky is on June 23, with the winner facing Mitch McConnell.) That result was among Kentuckians who had already voted and those who have not yet done so. I’m skeptical of internal polls, which tend to be, unsurprisingly, often more favorable to the candidate who released them than the final results are. 

Here’s why I think this information is at least semi-useful. First, we can be pretty confident that McGrath is winning this race right now---Charles Booker’s own campaign released a poll that has him losing to her. Secondly, the poll came from YouGov Blue, which is a reputable polling company. Just because YouGov Blue likely wants to maintain its own credibility, I doubt the company is juicing the results too much for Booker. He is probably going to get significantly more than say 13 percent in the final results. Finally, I suspect Booker’s campaign released these numbers in part to get Broihier to drop out and endorse Booker. Broihier is running on a fairly-liberal platform that is more like Booker’s than McGrath’s. So we’ll see if he decides to endorse Booker, which could help Booker a lot if this is a close race. 

A Time for Humility and Understanding 

On the Sunday before I went off to Yale for undergrad more than 20 years ago, the pastor at the church I attended then (he is also my uncle, Bradley) had me stand up and then talked for quite a while about how great of an accomplishment it was for someone from our church to be going to Yale. He then started passing around some object (I can’t recall what) for people in the church to put money in, to support me in my endeavor. I found this a bit awkward--our very small church (let’s say 40 people were there) was full of working and middle-class people who weren’t vacationing in the Hamptons or anywhere else most years. My parents weren’t making a ton of money either, but they were probably among the richer families there. 

I ended up with $700 extra for my first few weeks/months in New Haven. I thought of that moment earlier this week. I wrote for FiveThirtyEight about how most black people have a really strong sense of racial identity---they say that being black is core to who they are. For the story, I talked to a University of Michigan sociology professor named Karyn Lacy, who wrote a book about middle-class black families who live in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. 

“There is a lot of joy in being black,” Lacy said, describing the views of the people that she interviewed. “This is a really important point. Most of the media coverage of black people is negative. Scholars have spent a lot of time documenting the racial discrimination blacks experience. We do need to know about how and why discrimination persists. But there is very little attention to all the good things about being black.” 

“We’re left with the impression that black people wake up every morning thinking, ‘Ugh, I’ve got to be black today, and it’s going to be awful.’ None of the people I interviewed held that view,” Lacy added. “They take a lot of pride in being black and worry that their kids might not embrace being black with the same enthusiasm.” 

Her thoughts really resonated with me, because they reflected my own life. Maybe if I was a white person who went to a small white church there would have also been a collection to support me as I went off to Yale. I don’t know--that is not my life experience. But much of my experience of being black has not been about disparities or discrimination but about community and camaraderie. The members of my church, nearly all black, acted as if it were their kid who was going to Yale. (When I see them now, they still act like that.) From Yale to my jobs in my 20’s in Washington, I was in a kind of bubble. For the few black people in these spaces, race had not been a barrier--we had made it. Being black was a source of pride and a kind of common language. And there was a sense that barriers were coming down. 

The culmination of that feeling for me was on Sept. 30, 2008. I was a Washington Post political reporter then, on the campaign plane of the Democratic presidential nominee. Apparently, someone had told him it was my birthday. The reporters on the plane would all disembark before the candidate did, so he could get out, jump in the car and the presidential candidate motorcade would immediately roll forward. As I was getting off, he saw me, wished me a happy birthday and asked me what birthday it was. “28 is a great age,” he said. The soon-to-be president was black, and I--a black reporter--was covering his campaign for one of the leading news outlets in the country! How could this not make someone slightly out of touch with America’s racial realities? 

I say all of this not to brag (I have met a lot of politicians; they are people just like you and me, but usually better-looking, richer and taller, often not smarter) but to say that the events in Ferguson in 2014 were not just a kind of awakening for white people. I, a black Yale graduate who once directed the political coverage for a national black news website probably could have recited to you a bunch of statistics about the racial wealth gap or told you that the police disproportionately arrest black people. I wasn’t clueless. But I didn’t really feel that negative side of being black, in part because I didn’t live it and didn’t have to think about it. It wasn’t in the news that much--or nearly as much as it should have been. My ability to get into the Yale-Time Magazine-Washington Post bubble probably was enhanced by a little naivety---the actual odds of those things happening to a black man from Louisville were/are extremely low. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So to some extent I took at face value all the white people I worked with who assured me that they would be eager to hire more black people--just circumstances hadn’t worked out that way. I assumed I could thrive in that world--and often I did. I once wrote four front-page stories in the Washington Post in a single week. (That is bragging.) 

Since Ferguson, I have done the reading, so to speak. Less Malcolm Gladwell, more Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. I started following more and more black academics and journalists on Twitter---and a lot fewer of the members of the heavily-white DC/national political press corps that I was/am a part of. I went to the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, which has hundreds of steel monuments with names, dates and a county engraved in writing on each of them. It is a catalog of the thousands of black Americans who were killed in lynchings. I took a class at Simmons College, an HBCU in Louisville, that delved deeply into the city’s racial inequality. I started listening more to experts on racial discrimination and racial injustice who are paid to tell it like it is (William Barber, Sherrilyn Ifill) and less to black politicians who are paid to tell it like we wish it were (Cory Booker, Barack Obama.) I started listening to black voices who weren’t in the bubble I had been in. More broadly, I just started listening a lot more. 

Here’s why I’m telling you all of this. From what my white friends tell me, I gather that there is a fair amount of woke-shaming happening right now, from white people to other white people in particular. (”What do you mean you’re not going to a protest? ” “No, it’s totally the officer’s fault, how could you think it is the black person’s fault at all?”) People who learned the term anti-racist in say 2017 are now very eager to invoke it when criticizing/lecturing their not-quite-fully-anti-racist brother/aunt/uncle/grandparent. 

But I think this moment calls for humility and understanding, not judgment. I think a lot of people are rethinking their assumptions, in ways that I generally think are positive. Some people still have questions---and I think we should answer them, without a lot of judgment. I, a black Yale graduate who has worked at some of the most prestigious news institutions in America, until recently had never really considered the idea that police department budgets might be overly high and cutting those budgets might be important to reducing police violence against black people. I, until 2017, did not know many Confederate monuments were erected not right after the Civil War, but during the mid 20th century, as symbols of active opposition to civil rights advances. 

If I have a lot to learn, I suspect many other people do too. 

So I hope you don’t spend too much time lecturing your friends based on your new knowledge from reading Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi. In part, that’s because I want you to give them a break--we are all on a journey on these issues. But mainly that’s because I think your judgment and perhaps anger would be better directed towards the elected officials in your community. It is their job to have done the reading and created good policies and if not, to adjust and change them now. 

I say this all the time, but the message is never more important than now--figure out what is happening locally. We are having real debates in cities all over the country about their policies about policing but really about how they treat black people on a range of issues. Trump’s poll numbers do not go down every minute you watch MSNBC, nor do Biden’s if you watch Fox. I promise. If you live here in Louisville, here is: 1. a form you can fill out from the mayor’s office telling him what kind of police chief you want to replace the one who was recently dismissed, and how policing should change in the city; 2. a link to some police reform ideas from Black Lives Matter activists here; 3. a map where you can figure out who your city council representative  is; and 4. three Facebook pages you can follow for lots of local news. 

Thanks for reading. 

This is an occasional newsletter focusing on government and elections but really power in Louisville and Kentucky, helping explore who has it, who is gaining it, who is losing it and why. You can subscribe here. 

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