35. BLM, the NBA, and White fear

With the shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha, Wisconsin cop, Covid-19 and BLM are now shining their light on professional sports. The Milwaukee Bucks cancelled a playoff game with an elegant plea that the state they play in and for “take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.” 

Other NBA teams and the league followed. Coach Doc Rivers of the LA Clippers was elegant: “We’re the ones getting killed. We’re the ones getting shot. We’re the ones that were denied to live in certain communities. We’ve been hung. We’ve been shot. And all you do is keep hearing about fear.” He—a successful, rich, Black athlete and coach whose father was a cop—ridicules White fear while acknowledging the legitimacy of continuing Black fears.  

Rivers nailed it. The scene today is one of White fear: the fear of statistics—that in ten or twenty years Whites in the country will be outnumbered by Black and Brown people; the fear, stoked by some in politics and media, that Black thugs will loot stores and harm the police that have been harming them.

And the fear that African Americans are in fact superior athletes, and now, having conquered professional sports and established themselves strongly in music and entertainment, White fear that their children have been infected with adoration for Black prowess. 

I’ve watched professional sports go from all-white to majority black in one lifetime—Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball; Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan and Stephan Curry dominating basketball; and Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters wedging Black into elite tennis.

But what must most gall the middle-aged White men and a growing chorus of younger White males is the students in small rural schools like ours in Wallowa County—or, I imagine, rural Wisconsin—where basketball players high five and chest bump, wear long shorts and blast rap music during warm-ups. 

Despite Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee on the football field, Whites couldn’t stay away, drawn like moths to a flame they fear. And White Milwaukee, now less than half the population in a racially divided city, worship and fear the Black players on their Milwaukee Bucks. 

At least, as Covid-19 makes clear, Whites are still way ahead in wealth and health.

# # #

30. Parallels--with 1918

 America’s Forgotten Pandemic: the Influenza of 1918, by Alfred Crosby, was first published in 1976. A second edition was published in 2003, and I imagine the book has been given new life by the advent of Covid-19.

What seems certain from his account is that the 1918 flu got tangled up with WW I. The disease was carried back and forth across the seas with Navy ships and soldiers. It shared headlines—and often took a back seat to War news. The demand for troops was so high that military brass said that the deaths of soldiers in transit was a small price to pay when halting troop shipments might be seen as weakness by the Germans (who were dealing with the Pandemic themselves). 

Finally, General Pershing’s call for more troops could not be met; the draft call for 142,000 men in October, 1918 was cancelled, because the bases to which men would have to report were quarantined. Fortunately, the war ended and the country gave way to joy and celebration--which of course exacerbated the spread of disease. 

As war ground down in the fall of 1918, San Francisco was a hot spot, and Dr. William Hassler, Chief of the city’s Board of Health, was able to impose quarantines and a facemask ordinance on the population. In December, with war's end and incidences of disease dropping dramatically, the facemask ordinance was dropped and the City celebrated the end of the War and the holidays… and the flu raged again. 

This time the population, including city officials, the Christian Scientists, and many doctors, railed against re-imposition. Businesses were looking for holiday sales. Someone sent Hassler a bomb. He didn’t get his masks— “the dollar sign is exalted above the health sign,” he said. For reasons not much understood at the time, the Pandemic wound down on its own.

There are parallels here, with War and Pandemic linked in time and space, just as Pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and the election co-exist in a gnarly braid in our own time. 

And there are great hopes—maybe expectations?—for such a miraculous disappearance of our mysterious coronavirus.

# # #

23. Covid-BLM lens on Women

Some men friends will object, but this Covid-BLM lens has, for me, shown brightly on the way we—White men—have kept women down, at least in the life of this Republic. We haven’t lynched them or kept them as slaves, and the beatings and rapes we’ve inflicted are seen as aberrations, punishable under the law if properly reported and subjected to judicial scrutiny.

We have not cracked their heads open with police batons as we did John Lewis’s. Bull Conner didn’t turn dogs loose on them because they were women. Our police have not used chokeholds or kneeled on a woman’s neck in front of Apple phone cams.

But unarmed Breonna Taylor was shot at least eight times by police in her Louisville apartment, and a Black woman died in a Texas jail, arrested for failing to use her turn signal! There’s a Black #SayHerName movement—quieter than BLM, but growing, which was started by three Black women.

And reports are that Covid-19 has all women doing more of the housework and home schooling, and giving up or reducing their online hours more than their male partners. It should not surprise.

From the beginning, our forbearers were making a country for the convenience of, and to be ruled by White—Anglo White—men. The Declaration declared that “all men are created equal,” and it meant men. It actually meant White men who owned property. White did not include Italians, Slavs, and the Irish, because they were not part of the founding cabal.

The founders sliced and diced the numbers of Black slaves who could be counted for purposes of establishing Congressional numbers while not allowing them the vote—women too were counted but couldn’t vote.

When women got college educations, they got jobs as “fact checkers,” rarely as writers. Women did write the programs that fed the computer that made the atom bomb. Women who served in WW II were labeled civilian employees and denied the GI Bill. Rosie the Riveter went home, the boys went to college and took up programming (women were not good at math).

This week, “mothers formed a wall” against Federal agents in Portland.

# # #

15. Two Minnesotas

I was born in small town Lutheran Minnesota in 1942, and lived there until I was ten. There were years of visits to favorite uncles, aunts, and lakes, and from that time on, from homes in California and Oregon, I have followed Minnesota, proud of her sports teams and historic and liberal support of the arts, proud of her acceptance of refugees from Vietnam and Somalia.

But…  as I began my own journey in American Indian history, another Minnesota appeared. Most dramatically, there was the 1862 Mankato Hanging of 38 Indians fighting for food and freedom. More systemically, I began to reflect and read about the Indians and their reservations near my hometown. I hadn’t known a Minnesota Indian by name. I read David Treuer, whose Ojibwa roots are on the nearby Leach Lake Reservation, and Louise Erdrich, further away on North Dakota’s Turtle Mountain Reservation. Their world—of boarding schools, allotments, Termination, and Relocation was and is not the Minnesota I knew.

Then George Floyd. And on a recent day on public radio a story about Calvin Griffith, who moved the Washington Senators to Minnesota and changed their name to the Twins because he found out there were “only 15,000 blacks [in Minneapolis-St. Paul]… We came here because you’ve got good, hardworking, white people here.”

There was another NPR story that same day about Hmong Chef Yia Vang, whose family came to Minnesota from a Thai refugee camp when he was a child, because Minnesotans were passionate sponsors of refugees. And there is news of the Minnesota Freedom Fund and herculean efforts to get rid of the bail system.

So now I see two Minnesotas from this Oregon distance—and maybe that’s not so odd. Maybe the Covid and BLM lenses are helping us all see more of worlds we thought we knew.

# # #