#Whiteprivilege, San Francisco Style (Not Big Things, Just Wrong Anyway)

The Street In Question
The Street In Question

It happened three times in one week; things that would have happened very differently to people of color.  First came a real, seriously sizable pack – yes pack – of teenage boys running down California Street after dark, screaming and cursing — looking maybe like all of them were chasing the first one.  Except for the dog and me, nobody seemed to care.  No one yelled “slow down” or “quiet down” in this family-rich neighborhood.  No one called the police to report a dangerous group of boys intent on making, if not trouble, at least way too much noise — and on a school night!  Did I mention that they were white?

Mt Lake trail 1
The Trail in Question

This morning, for the zillionth time, a very large off-leash dog came at our very large, protective, on-leash one. He feels helpless when he’s on a leash and approaching dogs aren’t, and gets very agitated.  When I called to the owners to please call their dog back toward them, they yelled at me!  Why does this matter?  The park trail is strictly for dogs on a leash.  Almost no one follows the rules. When we moved here, I asked our dog walker about it; she smiled indulgently and told me to “just turn around and go the other way.”  Each culprit, it seems, sees this particular infraction as ok – for them, and raising the issue would do no good.  Did I mention that they were white?

Night time crosswalk edited
One of the Crosswalks in Question

Finally, there’s this: California law requires drivers to stop for pedestrians at crosswalks.  Our non-commercial street is pretty busy despite being almost totally residential.   At least one in four drivers rush right through even when pedestrians are already into the street.  At night it’s more than that, and since they don’t see people as quickly in the dark, far more dangerous.  Did I mention that many of them are white?

We live in this neighborhood because it is diverse.  Signs in the library are posted in three languages (see below) and we hear more than that on the street, including Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Russian.  Even so, the people involved in this law-breaking  —  did I mention that they are all white?

The Library in Question
The Library in Question

For months I have had the privilege of listening to sisters of color speak and write among themselves and to the rest of us of the moment after moment, incident after incident, that are part of their lives.  Many are desperately terrifying or heartbreaking, or both.  Like the ones described here though, they are automatic assumptions of white privilege, of the right to break an inconvenient law without consequence and to censure people of color for similar infractions.  As  small as these examples are, or maybe because they are, they teach us how much we all presume, how automatically we assume it’s ok for us to break the law or the social contract.  What they haven’t taught us yet – horrible huge assault or small presumption, is how much each one diminishes us all.

 

 

CAROLYN GOODMAN, WITH GRATITUDE

 

Ben Chaney stood to the side
watching mourners fill a grave with the New York soil that gave Carolyn
Goodman her eternal blanket.

It is Jewish custom for family and friends to bury the dead
themselves, instead of leaving the task to hired hands. In life, Dr.
Goodman was hardly an observant Jew. But on Sunday at Mount Judah
Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens, she exited this world in traditional
style.

Ben Chaney was there to say farewell. “God put his angels here at
the right moment,” he said as clumps of earth thudded across the plain
pine coffin.

The “angels” were his mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, and Carolyn
Goodman, women whose lives might never have converged had it not been
for a brutal June night in 1964 in Neshoba County in Mississippi.
Each lost a son that night. James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20,
disappeared, along with Michael Schwerner, 24. Six weeks later, their
bullet-scarred bodies were found in an earthen dam.

The three civil rights workers.

That’s how they came to be linked for eternity — two white boys from
New York, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner, and a black kid from
Mississippi, killed for daring to affirm the right of black
Mississippians to vote freely. That right was not universally accepted
in the “freedom summer” of 1964. The deaths of the young men at the
hands of Ku Klux Klan members proved a pivotal moment for the civil rights movement.

Now, life has run its unrelenting course for their parents. Mr.
Schwerner’s mother and father died years ago. Fannie Lee Chaney died in
May at 84. On Friday, time ran out for Carolyn Goodman. She was 91.

“It’s been a rough summer,” said Ben Chaney, who was 12 when his big brother, James, was murdered.

Yes, he repeated: “God put his angels here. They carried a hell of a
burden for a long time. A hell of a burden — knowing that your sons
were murdered and the murderers were out on the streets going free.”

Seven Klan members, convicted of federal civil rights violations,
served but a few years in prison. Decades later, in 2005, an eighth
man, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of manslaughter by a state jury
in Mississippi, and is serving a 60-year term.

“Strong women,” Mr. Chaney said. “They were able to endure, and
continued to have faith. They never lost faith. My mother didn’t, and
neither did Carolyn.”

Dr. Goodman, a clinical psychologist who lived on the Upper West
Side, did many things in her long life. With politics that fell
decidedly leftward, she had taken on liberal causes well before Andrew,
the second of her three sons, was killed. But perhaps inevitably, it is
as Andrew’s mother, a civil rights symbol, that many know her.

There she lay on Sunday, beside her first husband, Robert Goodman,
and in front of a long, swooping headstone marking Andrew’s grave.
Robert Goodman, a civil engineer, died five years after his son’s
murder.

“Everybody says Bobby died of a broken heart,” said Judith Johnson, a family friend.

On Andrew’s headstone, three sets of arms reach toward one another,
above words borrowed from a Stephen Spender poem: “He traveled a short
while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with his honor.”

MANY of the 65 people who stood over Dr. Goodman’s grave took turns
remembering her. She was caring but tough, they said. She would hear
out opponents, they said, but not hesitate to speak her mind.

Jane Mark, a relative, told of getting a phone call from Dr. Goodman
in 1999, during the protests and mass arrests over the police killing
of the unarmed Amadou Diallo. “Jane, we’re going to get arrested tomorrow,” Ms. Mark recalled Dr. Goodman as saying.

“On the spur of the moment, she could decide to get arrested,” Ms. Mark said. “But she wanted to have friends with her.”

Stanley Dearman, a former editor and publisher of The Neshoba
Democrat, a Mississippi newspaper that called for justice in the
murders, said Dr. Goodman felt no hatred for the killers. “She was too
fine a person for that,” he said. That point was reinforced by Kalman
Goodman, a grandson of Dr. Goodman.

One day, a man who spoke in a Southern accent went to her apartment
and said he had played a role in Andrew Goodman’s death. He was now
asking for forgiveness.

His grandmother, Mr. Goodman said, told the man: “If you want my
forgiveness, work in your community and help other people. That way
lies forgiveness.”

As far as he knows, the grandson said, the man went home and did just that.

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