YAWKEY WAY NO MORE

Two weeks ago Boston’s Public Improvement Commission voted to change the name of Yawkey Way back to its original name, Jersey Street. The offensive signs that became an ever present reminder of the Red Sox racist past under its now-deceased past owner, Tom Yawkey, were removed and replaced on the morning of May 3, 2018. What a pleasant relief. As you may recall, Tom Yawkey and his top staff were bigots who made the Boston Red Sox the last team to hire a Black player. They even rejected the great Jackie Robinson after a truncated tryout in which it is alleged, when seeing Robinson and another player on Fenway Park playing field, Yawkey yelled “Get those niggers off the field.” For years under Yawkey, Fenway Park was a hostile environment for African American fans and Black players on opposing teams. Under the current owner and his staff, who fought for the name change against substantial resistance, things have dramatically changed. African Americans are welcomed at Red Sox games, Black players are treated with respect and offending White antagonists are immediately removed from the stadium. The symbolism of the street name change is significant and is the final step in erasing past failings.  

DEVAL, YOU SHOULD HAVE STAYED OUT OF IT

It’s really sad to watch a prominent Black guy like Deval Patrick endorse a White candidate for Congress over a Black woman who has a real chance of becoming the first Black woman to enter Congress from Massachusetts. By all accounts, Black Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley is qualified and she also supported Deval Patrick for governor. Patrick’s claim that he endorsed the White incumbent, Michael Capuano, because “He believed in me when few others would take a chance on a novice candidate, and stuck with me as a consistent ally to meet the needs of our citizens…” (Boston Herald, May 4, 2018), reeks of hypocrisy. His edge to victory came from a solid statewide Black vote and from the active support of Black folks like Ayanna Pressley and the least he could have done, rather than do the wrong thing, would have been to stay out of the race.  (Ditto John Lewis and the Congressional Black Caucus.)

WELL, IT’S ABOUT TIME!

“FPI Management, a property company in California, wants to hire dozens of people. Factories from New Hampshire to Michigan need workers. Hotels in Las Vegas are desperate to fill jobs….Those employers and many others are quietly taking what once would have been a radical step: They’re dropping marijuana from the drug tests they require of prospective employees. Marijuana testing – a fixture at large American employers for at least 30 years – excludes too many potential workers, experts say, at a time when filling jobs is more challenging than it’s been in nearly two decades.” (Boston Herald, March 3, 2018) 

BUT A BIT LATE FOR SOME

“A decade ago, an undercover police officer approached Mr. (Vincent) Winslow, a homeless black man, and asked for help buying marijuana. Mr. Winslow desperately needed the money, so he helped the officer buy two dime bags for a $5 profit. For that, he is serving life without parole for distribution of marijuana in the infamous Angola prison.” “While the majority of Americans now support legalization of marijuana, the problem is with race. As white people exploit the changing tide on marijuana, the racism that drove its prohibition is ignored. So are the consequences for black communities, where the war on drugs is most heavily waged.”  “In 2010, black people were nearly four times as likely to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession as whites, even though they use the drug at about the same rate….Legalization has barely made a dent in those disparities. As of 2014 in Colorado, the marijuana arrest rate for Black people was almost three times that of whites. In New York City, the marijuana arrest rate for black people in New York City was over four times that of whites; the Bronx has one of the country’s highest rates of marijuana arrest. Meanwhile, black people make up an estimated 1 percent of marijuana dispensary owners, owning less than three dozen of the 3,000 or so retail shops nationwide.” “Cannabis profiteers and customers should also push their lawmakers to emulate Massachusetts (We shall see.), Pennsylvania, Florida and the city of Oakland, Calif., each of which has enacted policies, in some cases described as “marijuana reparations,” that encourage and give priority on retail licenses to people of color and those who have been disproportionately harmed by marijuana prohibition and enforcement.” All of the comments above and much more were printed in an article by Vincent M. Southerland and Johanna B. Steinberg in a New York Times article (April 20, 2018). It is a very good article that only touches on the hypocrisy of America’s drug policies. The war on Opioids is the most current hypocrisy in which Black folks are watching White folks galvanize a non-punitive war on the drug to save their own while recollecting the punitive response to the drug problems in Black communities.   The authors wrote in their conclusion: “More white people should …publicly announce their support of sensible marijuana policy. They should draw on their own experiences to undermine the racialized stigma the drug was long tagged with. The reality is that when a problem has a white face, the government and law enforcement agencies are more likely to react sensibly to that problem.” And they added a nice closing note: “As white people make money from marijuana, black people languish in jail for smoking it.” What a sorry state of affairs.

VISITING STARBUCKS WHILE BLACK

It recently occurred to me why so many well-meaning White folks seem skeptical when hearing stories about some of the racial horrors to which Black Americans are subjected to on a daily basis. So many of the horrors are simply “unbelievable” to the uninitiated. Really! Who would have believed that two unassuming Black men would walk into a Starbucks, sit down to wait for their third party, ask to use the bathroom, be ordered by the manager to leave and be arrested when they politely protested? And who would have believed that the police would have arrested them even after the White man they were waiting for arrived and vouched for them. What happened to Starbucks’ storied hospitality and what was the crime and what happened to the judgment of the police who arrested two unresisting Black customers who had done what Starbucks customers do all of the time? Black people – Black men especially – encounter these types of crazy variations on the same theme regularly. And many of the variations result in death but all of them are extremely humiliating and death could well have been the case with the two at Starbucks if they had reacted differently as they certainly had a right to do but the wisdom not to do.  

FLASHBACKS

I didn’t only get angry when I heard the Starbucks story, I had flashbacks as I know many other Black folks did. I thought about the time I was in the courtroom before a racist White judge who was determined to rake me over the coals and destroy my case while giving every bit of assistance to my very young, White opposing counsel. He succeeded in raking me over the coals because he had all the power and I politely told him so. But, to his great and demonstrable displeasure, I won the case and when I informed him that I would be seeking attorney’s fees, he abruptly stood up, directed a look of extreme petulance toward me and left the courtroom without a word. And while all of the White folks in the courtroom seemed shocked, they said nothing while this White man humiliated me, distorted the law to the jury to make it almost impossible for me to win the case and, later, did some things that I won’t mention here but which, if he ever is up for a promotion to a higher court, I will relate in detail to the Governor’s Council that will decide if he is worthy of promotion. My only point is that Black folks encounter racial horrors that even well-meaning White folks rarely have the experiential capacity to “believe.”   Renee Graham put it nicely: “Driving while black. Walking while Black.  Shopping while Black. Selling CDs while Black. Listening to music in a car while Black. Asking for directions while black. Sitting in Starbucks while Black (Defending one’s client while Black)….To be Black is to always be in the wrong place at the wrong time because, in America, there is never a right place for Black people.”  (The Boston Globe, April 15, 2018)

JAMES CONE FOUNDER OF LIBERATION THEOLOGY DIED

Rev. James Cone died. You may recall “Liberation Theology” from the hysteria generated by the White media in response to the discovery that presidential candidate Barack Obama was a member of a church run by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. who embraced the black liberation theology which was first introduced in 1969 by Rev. James Cone in his book “Black Theology & Black Power.” White folks never got comfortable with Black Power, which Malcolm X personified and Stokely Carmichael popularized, and the Black Panthers realized through their community activism before they were destroyed by the FBI. White folks still prefer to overemphasize the tenderness of Martin Luther King’s passive resistance message and even today stand ready to explain Black History without the major role played by Black Power advocates like Rev. Cone and the other aforementioned and regular people like me. Rev. Cone was quoted as saying: “You might say we took our Christianity from Martin (Luther King Jr.) and our emphasis on blackness from Malcolm (X).”   He said something else that a lot of Black folks in places like Springfield may have forgotten: “I realized that for black people to be free, they must first love their blackness.”  ■