race Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Black wheelchair-bound veteran shot

GoFundMe

This week, I saw on Steve Bissette’s Facebook feed a story about a Black wheelchair-bound veteran shot in broad daylight on Seattle, WA’s waterfront on July 31. Harold Powell, Sr., was shot in the chest in front of dozens of witnesses. Gregory Timm, 32, is a white man who accused Powell, a 14-year Navy vet, of “stolen valour” and demanded the veteran “show his ID” to prove his veteran status. (The Sun City song, Let Me See Your I.D., about apartheid South Africa, immediately came to mind.)

Powell is recovering, and his family has started a GoFundMe campaign. It notes: “His injuries are serious, and the cost of emergency care, surgery, physical therapy, and long-term recovery is overwhelming.”

It would be easy to dismiss this as an act of one knucklehead. But my brain goes back to history.

The first thing to pop up was the Red Summer of 1919. Black people, especially the black veterans who were proud to wear the uniform when they got back to the States, were targeted for assault and murder. Going back to the Revolutionary War, Black people in the US were eager to prove themselves ‘worthy” of full citizenship by going to battle.

Other black veterans have been killed, not in battle, but in the fight for democracy and human rights.

Ignorance is NOT bliss.

So, I’ve been distressed by the federal so-called DEI cuts, which are based on the theory that the institutions targeted are too “woke.” Under the microscope, per Executive Order 14253, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, is the Smithsonian, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The museums are now to “celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.” Just this week, FOTUS groused, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

I should note that I was a charter member of the African American History and Culture Museum and contributed monetarily to it before it was even built, though I did not get there until August 2024, when I spent two days there. The FOTUS assessment is incorrect. There is plenty about success and joy, but he misses the facility’s point. History should be an honest, warts-and-all portrayal.

As a librarian, I was upset by the firing of Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. The rationale was BS. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “There were quite concerning things that she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of DEI and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” Except that the Library of Congress is a research library, and books are used only on the premises by members of the public. Anyone age 16 and older may use the collections. She was fired for being a black woman, just as General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was canned for being a black guy.

Add to this the attacks on universities, media outlets, etc., not to mention the seemingly random and cruel ICE raids, and I become increasingly distressed. Let’s not Make America More Stupid Again (MEMSA).

July 29: A Day In The Life

“May I ask you a question?”

A periodic feature: Tuesday, July 29: A Day In The Life.

It was very hot and humid waiting for the bus downtown to the Washington Avenue branch of the Albany Public Library. I met a guy I’d seen for years at a local business. If I think of Pink Floyd, his favorite band, I’ll remember his name, David, and he will remember mine.

2 pm: Stephen Weinberg, PhD, health economist at the NYS Department of Health, reviewed Caroline Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. We allocate resources to everything from economic development to public policy. However, not much data takes gender into account.

Men are considered the default, and women are considered atypical. This touches on everything from medical dosing to voice recognition software. Failure to account for the differences can be anything from inconvenient (bathroom queues) to fatal (recognizing heart attacks). The book seemed to be thorough but possibly overwhelming.

Coincidentally, I came across a recent CBS article titled “Can female crash test dummies improve safety? A bipartisan group of senators pushes for equality in testing.” It’s not just a matter of differences in height and weight.

Traffic

I took the bus to the Delaware Avenue branch of the APL, reading until it was time to attend the 4:10 showing of the new Fantastic Four movie. My pet peeve: I always hate it when cars come very close to me when I’m crossing the street legally. They stop about a car length as though you are in their way. I crossed Delaware Avenue at the crosswalk, and a car hovered impatiently.

I am more than halfway across when a motorcycle heading north decides to pass in front of me. Naturally, I stop and scream, “Are you out of your freaking mind?” Meanwhile, the impatient car inches even closer. I finish crossing while the vehicle behind the motorcycle keeps coming, and the two cars almost have a collision right behind me.

I saw the movie and liked it. Then I walked to Holland Ave. to catch the bus to Western and Quail. While waiting for the next bus, I hear this woman yelling at someone. Two cars go through the intersection, stop, and then one of the cars makes a U-turn to park on the other side. The woman continues her diatribe when suddenly, about a dozen people come out of nowhere running to this woman’s “defense.” I was worried that the person in the other car was in trouble, and I was about to call the cops. But then, about three minutes later, the crowd dissipates.

A little more conversation

I took the bus down to Western and Allen to pick up something to eat. I crossed Madison Avenue at the same time this young woman, probably in her twenties, did, and we made some passing pleasantry about not wanting to get killed. Yes, we proceeded in the crosswalk.

The young woman looked thoughtful. “May I ask you a question?” I’ve always said yes, but I’m not required to answer. Often, the question is whether I have 50 cents or five bucks to buy something to eat. Or maybe it’s something irritating.

She asked, “Are you mixed race?” Hmm. This seemed to be a genuine inquiry. I explained in some hopefully brief detail how, as Henry Louis Gates’ Finding Your Roots would note, almost all black Americans are mixed race of some sort. I also stated that I had vitiligo and my skin was lighter now than 25 years ago.

I asked her if she was of mixed race, and she noted that she was partly Asian. Although I didn’t ask her specifically, she appeared part white.

This led to a whole conversation about race and genealogy. I told her I wrote about genealogy in my blog, and she said, “Of course, you have a blog.”

I had Emmett Till on my mind (see the 7/28/2025: The photograph of Emmett Till post here). She knew who he was.

Cowboys and…

I mentioned what Heather Cox Richardson said about a person wanting to change the Washington Commanders’ name. The chat lasted about ten minutes, then she had to go, and I needed to pick up my takeout. It was a spontaneously significant human interaction! I guess I’m approachable enough.

So that was my July 29. BTW, what HCR wrote on July 20, which I did not know: “At the turn of the last century, those worried that industrialization was destroying masculinity encouraged sports to give men an arena for manly combat. Sports teams dominated by Euro-Americans often took names that invoked Indigenous Americans because those names seemed to them to harness the idea of ‘savagery’ in the safe space of a playing field.”

The Civil War is not over

163 years and counting

The Civil War is not over. I’ve known this for a while, but something triggered this reaction. Doug, the Weekly Sift guy, gave a sermon at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois on May 5, 2024, titled Hope, Denial, and Healthy Relationship with the News.

I related to this part particularly. “Today… I’m talking about an experience that I know is personal, but I’m only guessing about its universality… The experience is an intense spiraling downward that gets triggered not by anything in my personal life, but from my interaction with the news. I hear about something in the outside world, the public world that we all share, and then the walls come tumbling down.”

Frank’s trigger was Robert Hur’s investigation of “President Biden’s unauthorized retention of classified documents.” While he “found nothing that would justify pressing charges,… along the way, he took a swipe at Biden’s mental competence,” and others piled on.

“And that’s when the bottom fell out of my mood. The effect lasted for several days. I would seem to be coming out of it, but then something would remind me and I’d sink back down again… that experience, that sudden mood collapse touched off by something in the news. The something doesn’t have to relate to politics or elections. It could be about climate change, the Supreme Court or what corporate capitalism is doing to our culture or whatever else you happen to worry about.

“One minute, you’re sailing along calmly, thinking, ‘Yeah, there are problems, but we’ll be OK.’ And then you hear or see something…
And in an instant, the bottom falls out… I experience this as depression and despair, but I know other people for whom it manifests as anger: How can so many people be so stupid, self-centered, or short-sighted?”

Mine

For me, it was something that, in the grander scheme of things, isn’t desperately consequential. But it hit me. A Virginia school board votes to restore Confederate names to two schools.

There had been an acknowledgment that the war was fought over the issue of slavery. And oh, and by the way, slavery was BAD, despite the attempt of some to put lipstick on a pig; “They learned marketable skills!”

But the “school board members who voted to restore the Confederate names said the previous board ignored popular sentiment and due process when the names were stripped.” Yeah, their “heritage” was intruded upon.

So that war which killed over six hundred thousand Americans, the deadliest military conflict in US history, is still being litigated. In the Gettysburg Address, Abe Lincoln noted, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Shortly after that awful war, Memorial Day was established, “honoring and mourning the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.”

As we relitigate voting rights and other issues of once-settled policy, it makes me feel what Doug feels, “depression and despair.” The mourning isn’t for the dead per se as much as it is a feeling that in some substantial way that I would not have expected twenty years ago, the fight continues.

Lydster: two decades

cleaning the wound

This is the second part of the daughter at two decades extravaganza.

One of the mild life frustrations I’ve had is that my daughter didn’t get to know my birth family nearly as well as she related to my wife’s family. My father died in 2000 before she was born. While she did meet my mother a few times, most recently in 2009, she didn’t get to know her well. She had seen her cousin Rebecca on the TV show Wipeout but never in person until my mother’s funeral in 2011. In part, that’s why she and I went to Carnegie Hall in 2022 to see my sister Leslie sing, before which we experienced an … interesting… taxi ride.

But it’s nice that she has seen my wife’s family regularly. Though my wife’s brother John died in 2002, my daughter has gotten to know her grandparents before her grandpa Richard Powell died in 2020. I think my daughter “supported” John McCain in 2008 for President because he vaguely looked like Richard. Her grandmother now lives in Albany County.

She knows her mother’s other two brothers, their wives, and their three daughters. One family, with twin girls, lives in Catskill, about an hour away, though one of the daughters is now in NYC. The other family lived in Massachusetts, but now in southeastern Pennsylvania, a fair distance but a lot closer than Charlotte, NC, and San Diego, CA. She’s attended several Olin family reunions.

Self-advocating

She became more confident in many areas. It used to be that when we went to a restaurant, she wanted one of her parents to tell the server that she had a peanut and tree nut allergy. Then, about five years ago, she insisted on doing it herself.

During COVID, she would spend hours in her room. It was difficult to ascertain whether this was a function of the pandemic, the phase of being a teenager, or both. This eventually passed.

Early on, I wondered how to introduce issues of national and world events to her. As it turned out when she was about nine, I’d be watching the TV news in the living room; she was paying attention while in the dining room.

Her parents talk with her a LOT about whatever she asks, including issues of race. It’s impossible to protect one’s child from bigotry. When there were vigils after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, she organized a regular event in our neighborhood for about two months; as it was her gig, I only went once or twice.

Column A or Column B

There is a loose demarcation of what she will ask which parent. Her mother tends to get questions about cooking, cleaning, and first aid. Indeed, when one of her friends was mildly injured at college, she used tips her mother taught her to clean the wound.

I tend to get the music, movies, and politics questions. Also, because I am a librarian, she asks me college-related questions about finding citations, attribution, and the like. Both of us might field questions, such as relationship issues and money, though I tend to be more available as a retiree.

In her first year in college, she’d call or text now and then. This year, she phones more often. She called just to talk recently, and we were on the phone for an hour and a half.

We tell her we love her, and she reciprocates, which is very nice.

“America is Not a Racist Country”

“It took America a while to get that right.”

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is quoted several times as saying, “America is Not a Racist Country.” I’m inclined to believe that what she says is sincere. So, I read this THR interview with her with great interest.

She notes that she spent much time discussing race relations in a recent interview with Charlemagne. “What I said was, I’m not denying that there is racism in America.” She noted, “We should stomp it out every time we see it, and I did that as governor, and I did it as UN ambassador, and I will do that in everything I ever do.”

Here’s her nuance on the topic. “I said America is not a racist country, and my reasoning for that is I don’t think that America was intended to be a racist country. All men were supposed to be created equal with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It took America a while to get that right.”

Ah, that’s an interesting take on the Founders. My rhetorical question: And when was the point she believed that the goal was achieved? I’m not trying to be pedantic here. Was it after the Civil War, maybe with the Civil War amendments? (And BTW, I didn’t care much about her muddled comment about whether slavery was the cause of the Civil War.) Or perhaps a century later? Or 2008?

The discussion is relevant about how we see our nation and what we should address if there are things to fix. Unfortunately, that question was not asked. But I think we’re dealing with definitional differences.

Try that in a small town.

She noted, “As a brown girl who grew up in a small rural town, if my parents had told me that ‘you were born into a racist country,’ I would’ve always felt like I was disadvantaged. Instead, my parents always said, ‘You may encounter racism, but there’s nothing you can’t do, and you should work twice as hard to prove to everybody that you deserve to be in the room.'” Hmm. That sounded like the message that black kids of my generation always heard. So, she experienced individual racism.

In The Breakfast Club discussion, she stated that the division of the people over race started with Barack Obama because he used executive orders extensively. Since the Tea Party and its ilk arose, the Republicans failed to compromise or work with him. They wanted to make him a one-term president.

My take is more in keeping with what William Spivey suggested, that Obama’s election sparked the “fourth wave of white supremacy.”

“The general election [of 2008] removed any pretense that race was not a factor. Surrogates for John McCain depicted Barack and Michelle as monkeys. Obama faced birtherism charges of being born in Nigeria, Kenya, or maybe both, led by Donald Trump. Racist memes flooded the Internet… One might think things would have calmed down [after he was elected], but there were outbreaks of racism and race-based attacks throughout the country well before Obama took his oath of office.”

I give Nikki Haley props for “removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House following the racially charged murder of nine Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel Church” in 2015, after defending the flag as part of the state’s “heritage” five years earlier. But I find her thoughts on race in America less compelling than I had hoped.