It is a sweet thing to see the way dogs can love one another. Gus adores Fate. In the first few weeks that he was here, she tortured Gus relentlessly, stealing his food, his toys, growling at him. He persisted, and the two began to play. Now they are inseparable, they love one another and Gus loves to curl up with Fate when he can and go to sleep.
Fate would never have trusted any other dog, including Red, to get this close to her. At night, Fate sleeps downstairs, by the front door, in case work comes his way. Gus sleeps in his crate until we let him out early in the morning, then he comes up into bed. This morning, Fate came up to visit and Gus was in bed, he moved over to sleep with Red.
Gus is a very loving creature, but he especially loves Fate, and to our surprise, she loves him back. I love trying to capture the way dogs love one another.
Sometimes I think the difference between being black and white in America is so vast it is unbridgeable. I have lived in cities for most of my life, I was always living near and worked with African-Americans. Living in the country near, where there are very few black people.
It’s easy to swim comfortably and sometimes obliviously in this different stream and watch the great racial divide from afar.
I miss seeing blacks in my life, I miss their culture, humor and worldview, it was always healthy for me to be around it, even though I was always somewhat removed from it.
It is almost impossible to talk about race without lapsing either into knee-jerk rhetoric or bigotry, conscious or otherwise. I have no interest in joining the eternal argument that is race and America. Or to talk about white entitlement. I am not ever going to apologize for who I am.
I am still very much drawn to the subject – it is the defining social issue of my life – and books like those written by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between The World And Me) , James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time) , Evicted by Matthew Desmond, remind me in powerful ways that being black in America is so very different in almost every way from being white.
It is in many ways a completely different world, and our country is big enough and blind enough that we can choose to live completely apart from it, exact for the occasional iconic tragedies and explosions on the news that remind us that it is there, and still ugly, tragic and unresolved.
Like many others, I never imagined Nazi’s and KKK members parading in an American city so openly with their torches and hateful signs. I know what this feels like as a Jew, I can only imagine what it feels like to be black.
Sadly, the lives of non-white people have become increasingly remote to me, apart from the Mexican farm workers around her now living in terror and anger. There are only a handful of African-Americans in my town, and I rarely see them.
To be truthful, I don’t I think I have much to add to the never-ending dialogue that has not been said before about race. There is little reason to write about it on my farm and in my town.
I was a police reporter for more than a decade, I am humbled to say that the wrenching police videos that seem to pop up every other week have been a great shock and awakening to me. I have never feared the police, I have good friends who are police officers and I admire and respect them. I always think of them as people who will rush to help me if I need help. Few black Americans see the police in the same way. That is a huge problem for all of us.
I should also say that living in the country has also awakened me to the awful plight of so many white Americans, suffering through an epidemic of suicide, joblessness, hopelessness and drug addiction, although there are few books about them and until recently, most politicians ignored them. I fantasize that struggling whites and struggling African-Americans will one day see that they are on the same side, and team up to force the real change they both want so badly.
Even thinking about race seems to draw hatred and misunderstanding.
Whites are still so frightened by African-Americans that politicians can feast on their fear and gain great power from it. Charlottesville was another dramatic reminder to me that the Civil War has never really ended and our great racial divisions have not really healed.
I will say, to be honest, that reading these books and watching the news in the past year helps me to understand the movement called Black Lives Matter. They are not a surprise to me. The African-Americans I am still in touch with or read about or too rarely speak to do not believe that most of white America believes that their lives do matter. That alone is a good reason for this movement to exist, and they are grateful for it.
Why am I writing about this now? Last night, Maria and I went to see a powerful and quite uplifting movie called Step, directed by Amanda Lipitz, an independent film shown in very few big theater chains. It is a powerful film, heart-soaring really, I was in tears for about a third of it.
It chronicles the lives of some young African-American women in a Baltimore charter school devoted to getting all of its students into college. Some of these women started a step dancing program to foster discipline,and community and leadership. The movie chronicles the Step team’s march towards the state finals, but also brings us into their homes and details the staggering hurdles and obstacles they face that people like me, even in working class homes, never had.
The movie is beautifully written and shot. The dancing itself was wonderful and inspiring, but I found myself rooting for these girls from the opening credits. Baltimore is a menacing background to the story, its poverty and despair always looming in the background and conveyed subtly but brilliantly.
In race discussions, it is always a mistake to generalize, and I know the rise of the black middle class is a huge and uncovered story in America, (as is the suffering of so many young white men and women). Baltimore, with its impoverished neighborhoods, is still recovering from the awful riots of 2015 that followed the death in police custody of a prisoner named Freddy Gray.
There is not just one story about blacks, or one story about rice. Our media culture is not strong on nuance.
The death of Gray and its aftermath loom over the lives of these young women, and radicalize them in a surprisingly positive way: they don’t hate the system, they are committed to conquering it. They are determined to have better lives than their parents and get out of Baltimore. In the movie, every single one of these young women gets into college, thanks in part to the ferocious dedication of the school’s counselors and administrators and their beleaguered parents (most mothers, there are not a lot of men at home.)
They struggle with their homework in homes whose power has been cut off, whose refrigerators are often empty (or repossessed), whose parents can’t find work, whose own culture distracts them and pulls them away from their own best interests. These women are strong, even heroic in their determination to pull themselves up.
There is a great sense of aloneness in the lives of most of these girls, they live on the edge of a cliff called poverty, they face overwhelming odds as they try to dance to a better life, with little or no help for the outside world. Their greatest strength is so often in their humor and the power of dancing to make them feel strong. Creativity is a strong sword sometimes.
They all know the stakes, the consequences of failure, they are all around them. At one point, a counselor is pleading for a college administrator to admit a struggling pupil, and she bursts into tears. “If we don’t help her,” she says, “she won’t make it.”
One of the many nice things about the movie, is that she does. I am glad to be inspired to think about race in my sometimes cloistered life. And I loved this movie.
“Step” is really about empathy, the moral imperative to stand in the shoes of others rather than to condemn and persecute them. I recommend it highly. For me, empathy is our highest moral aspiration.
