I Hate the Race Card

"I disagree with the whole thing" Senseehray said after reading the essay below. She is my first and best interlocutor on this painful subject. She is a strong black matriarch, with a lifetime of street experience. She manages Mary's Place, one of our homes. I admire her, trust her, love her. I took a deep breath and a voice inside said quietly: "Relax. Listen carefully." She continued. She was not arguing with my argument;  she was ruminating, sadly, peacefully, deeply. "You are not like everyone else. You were raised in a family where you learned values and virtues. The rest of the world is not like that. The world is color-coded and you cannot know what it is like unless you are black." We were sitting in the shadow of the excruciating abuse of George Floyd. She and her entire family are constructed like that gentle giant.  "If you tell me you are color-blind I will tell you that you are not seeing me. My color makes up who I am: how I think, what I eat, the things I love and hate. It is so sad." She repeated these four words like a refrain as she continued to say what I am paraphrasing.."It is so sad. There are no black fathers. There simply are no black fathers. It is so sad: when I walk down the street and see a group of black male teenagers I cross the street because I don't know what they are up to. If I see a group of young whites I continue on serenely without a thought. It is so sad. It is sad that we have to carefully train our young men how to act if stopped by police because of the danger. We, our family, are all afraid for my 17-year-old, 6'6'' gentle giant of a grandson: we don't want him to get a license because he might be stopped, intimidate the police by his size and become a victim. I have no use for the sexual freedoms that are rampant; they are the cause of so many problems. It is all so twisted and confused: it is class and culture but it is also skin color." Much of what she said actually agreed with my thought. But her core experience: to be black is to be hurt, anxious, vulnerable. And so she renounced, not specific points, but an implication and a tone of the essay. My psychologist daughter has warned me that my ever-positive attitude can be dismissive of real pain and anxiety and therefor hurtful. This concerns me. So: what follows is not to dismiss the agony of the black community contemplating that 8-minute crucifixion of an innocent. This pain, vulnerability, anxiety and anger...is race associated. And it is real. Black suffering of violence and vulnerability in a host of ways is pervasive, perpetual, profound and systemic as a confluence of deep, powerful, inexorable forces. I argue here that it is not, in the whole, a result of conscious or unconscious white hatred or fear of blacks and is not a system of practices, policies and protocols that could be undermined in the swift, effective manner the civil rights movement dismantled such institutions in the 1960s and afterwards. To assert this narrative is not only a mistaken diagnosis of a complex, dense, confusing tragedy, but itself becomes a contributing  cause. It is like a doctor who sees an illness but misdiagnoses and makes it worse. We have a pathological pandemic of violence against blacks; we need to get the precise diagnosis and prescribe accordingly.

For 50 years I have exercised authority, at the ground level, as UPS supervisor, Catholic school teacher and boarding home director, in the racially-ethnically diverse world of Jersey City and northern NJ. There is nothing I hate more than the race card! Imagine you are corrected by the boss: stop talking in class, get to work on time, lower your radio which is bothering other residents. You have two choices. You may say "you are right, I am wrong and it won't happen again." Or, you attack the boss. The sharpest sword in your sheath is the race card:  "I don't see you telling your white friends to lower their radios!" Even as I type this my blood pressure is rising!

The worlds I have ever inhabited...family, Church, union, UPS, schools, Jersey City...are free of systematic racism so I do not buy the racist narrative that haunts the liberal mind. The current case of the black bird-watcher and the white female dog-walker verifies my view: the nasty, stupid woman in her rage reverted to a narrative that would have worked perfectly in Alabama 60 years ago. But in USA 2020 what happened? She lost dog, job and reputation and is despised as a bigot; he is revered as a calm, bird-watching, rule-obeying, gentleman of Afro-American descent. This is not systemic racism.

It is not that I myself am color-blind; rather, I delight in racial/ethnic variety. Sincerely! (Full disclosure: I harbor admiration for Jews, affection for Latinos, and attraction to Italian brunettes. This is not necessarily a good thing, it just is what it is.) Deliberately we have lived and raised our family in a tough, diverse section of a working class, east coast city. We never considered moving to a suburb. Our neighborhood, parochial school and backyard basketball court mirrored the demography of Jersey City, the most ethnically diverse city in America. I come by it honestly: from my family. As it changed, my parents stayed in the  white, working class neighborhood in Orange NJ where I was raised. My mother would welcome black kids and help with their homework. Some years later my father, walking down the street crossed over as he saw a group of half dozen tall, strong black teen men at the corner. As he crossed over he was recognized: "Hey Mr. Laracy! Hi! Remember us? How is Mrs. Laracy?" Happily my own children caught this attitude. Walking through the snow after a winter blizzard we exchanged pleasantries with a warm, older black man; my 4-year-old Margaret Rose looked up to me sweetly and said with enthusiasm: "Daddy! Isn't it something how all black men are so nice!" My son Paul was about 12 when he was mugged on his paper route by a black boy; a neighbor intervened. Paul was a tough (but tender) kid accustomed to those city streets and didn't seem fazed by the mugging but told me with distaste and surprise: "Dad, Mr. Dugan is really racist!" My basketball-playing Clare, at age 13, adopted a "ghetto" manner of speech for a period. It didn't bother me as I knew it would be counterproductive to resist a temporary phase and there was a humorous tone to my already Ingrid-Bergman-esque Clare talking like a rapper!

The intensifying racial polarization, markedly throughout the Obama (!!!) years, is the tragic consequence of a lie:  the liberal, black-as-victim narrative that is fueled by the media, secular elites, and political Democrat apparatus.

Purification Ritual: Political Self-Righteousness as Absolution

This race narrative is intensifying even as things are getting better for blacks because it functions as a purification ceremony for seculars. Liberals are sinners just like the rest of us; no worse; actually, the ones I know are better than most. I think of my sisters and my college-seminary classmates: they (politically liberal but not secular)  are strikingly compassionate, generous, open-minded, curious, intelligent, energetic and free of malice, hatred, and fear. Good people! Maybe because of their virtue they don't feel the need to confess. Deep down we are all sinful; but seculars don't believe in confession of sin and absolution by a priest. All cultures/religions have purification rituals. Seculars have two: therapy and political correctness. Having liberated the libido from meaning, purpose, fidelity and fecundity, they are loaded with unconscious guilt but have nowhere to go; so they double-down on political righteousness. Think Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein: promiscuous men are the most militant advocates of "morally righteous causes" like reproduction rights, gay liberation and black victimization. They look at the medic shot in her bed, the large man helpless under the knee of a cop and the poor bird watcher: they shake their head in moral indignation: "Murderers! Hang them!"

Structural Class Injustice: Quarantining of the Privileged

Structural injustice and systemic violence in our society are class/culture, not race based. The "over-class" cloisters itself...by residence, education, career, recreation...out of contact with the "contagion" of the deplorables: the elderly are shuttered in nursing homes, the dysfunctional in group and boarding homes, the demanding little ones in day care, and the inconvenient are aborted and euthanized.  The core disease of the secular liberal is: fear of death. Disbelieving in the transcendent and eternal, they are trapped in the limits of the present; and desperate about death in all its forms. Thus: our "throw away culture!" The senile, the psychotic, the criminal, the infected, the contagious...these must be avoided at all costs. They smell of death!

In that world, it is fashionable, even glamorous, to include a smattering of blacks and ethnics: the Obama daughters will go to the best schools and can live wherever the want. It is even better to welcome LGBTQs because as transgressive such epitomize the sexual liberation the liberal values above all else. But many of my Jersey City friends..."low lifes" and "trailer trash"...would not do well in those neighborhoods. In Jersey City I have never seen those "We Welcome Everyone" and "Love is the Answer" signs. I find those in lily-white, affluent neighborhoods where the affluent signal their righteousness even as they would be disgusted by a redneck, evangelical or a biker family. From an invincible position of isolation, exclusion, comfort and security they parade their altruism.

Subconsciously, the over-class is aware that in the cosmic sea of human suffering, they indulge themselves on an island of comfort, safety and affluence. They know it is insecure; that it is unjust!Their conscience, hearts and souls are tormented, below the cognitive/deliberative level, by double guilt: that of sexual license and that of material indulgence in a world of suffering. Lacking faith, they have no transcendent horizon of meaning and Hope. They know not how to absolve themselves. Their double load of guilt finds false relief in a double treatment: in the therapeutic and in political correctness. The therapeutic culture of narcissism affirms their feelings; indulges their cravings; prohibits any moral judgments about sex or consumption; and dissolves, secretly, bonds of obligation, loyalty, sacrifice, accountability, discipline and virtue. To compensate, an ethos of cultural correctness condemns a contrived racism as well as residuals of Judaeo-Christian morality. Identification with a bogus-victim provides, falsely,  a sense of self-righteousness and moral superiority.

Legacy of the 60s

The Great Paradox of our time: the co-mingling in the 1960s of the Civil Rights Movement and the Sexual Revolution. The first is the singular moral victory of the last 75 years; the later is the defining spiritual catastrophe of our time. And the two were inextricably co-mingled in an adulterous union. Just as the black community was unbound from a system of servitude and degradation, it fell (in a critical mass, and along with poor whites) into a deeper slavery: sexual license. MLK and his lieutenants like Jesse Jackson and JFK along with his family and collaborators were cutting the chains of segregation even as they were spreading their seed promiscuously. Their legacy: the perverse polity of the Clintons and the predatory privacy of Trump, Epstein, and Weinstein.

My friend and mentor recalled that growing up during the 1940s-50s in working class Philadelphia the Catholic, Jewish and Black neighborhoods mirrored each other in their stability, safety, and tranquility. Family and community structures were solid. There was not this awareness of police brutality. Granted: it might have been there in the black community but invisible and hidden to him. Nevertheless, real structures of racial injustice reigned at that time; the black family, despite the wounds of slavery and discrimination, was stronger than it is today. The Cultural Revolution had not yet struck.

By 1970 racism as an underlying structure had collapsed. Happy Day! But something worse took over: Cultural Liberalism. This eroded the bonds of marriage and family; trivialized, sterilized and desacralized sexuality; destroyed the powerless; and desecrated authority, femininity and virility. It broke with tradition and with a fertile future and imprisoned us in a claustrophobic present. It colluded with meritocracy, technocracy, global capitalism and the mega-state to destroy mediating institutions and atomize the individual. In doing so, it robed itself in a costume of righteousness as it identified with and championed bogus victims: the black, the homosexual, and the woman. Welcome to the dreary world of intersectionality!

The Deplorables and the Privileged 

I was raised to prefer the underdog. In 1955 that was the working man, the Negro, the Third World. In 2020 that is the Trump base. The Democratic Party transmuted, again 1970, into the party of the affluent, the powerful, the indulgent, and the arrogant. I am not a member, but I like the Trump base. They are not so much ignorant, racist, misogynist,  unhinged.They are anxious and angry. They are reactive against the elite in their affluence, education, status, superiority, condescension, and righteousness.  As they cling to their guns and religion they are down-to-earth, unpretentious, faith-filled, liberty-loving, and patriotic. They are not perfect! The deeper sadness is that of the secular liberal: deplorable-hating,  Trump-obsessing, guilt-ridden, shrill, self-righteous, superior, self-sterilizing and quietly despairing.

Subcultures of Racism

To be sure: there are subcultures of racism across the nation. But they are outliers, alien to the foundational structures and power dynamics of our hegemonic technological, state-and-market, meritocratic, sexually liberated culture. My nephew was driving through Texas with his fiancé, a striking young woman of mixed ancestry, Afro-American and Indian. They were stopped randomly and senselessly by a state trooper who eyed them suspiciously and spoke to them contemptuously.  As they continued on their way, she called her father who is in the army. He called the Governor of Texas. The take-away? The trooper is almost certainly a racist. I wouldn't be shocked if some of his fishing buddies and cousins are the same. BUT, he may be in trouble. He could get away with that, and worse, in 1960. But in 2020, many blacks have confidence, connections, intelligence and initiative. The mega-system doesn't tolerate that nonsense. The mega-narrative of underlying, pervasive racism is itself nonsense, dangerous nonsense. Racist subcultures resemble polygamous Mormons, cock-fighting and dog-fighting minorities, or the Shakers, of happy memory (last one died in 2017). Racists are remnants of another world and time; probably most interesting to anthropologists and abnormal psychologists.  (Sidebar: What I especially enjoyed about that nephew's wedding was sitting with a handful of the bride's father's army friends. They were of a kind: large, strong, virile, loud, confident, funny, fun, affectionate, religious, warm. Delightful and interesting! My army son knew the type well: he said they monopolize the upper ranks of the non-commissioned officers.I was glad to know our army is in such hands. One could wonder: Is this systematic racism that the low-income, no-opportunity down-South whites can't have their own kind as bosses in the army? I think NOT!)

Police Brutality 

The primary causes of police violence:
1. Mistakes are made in the heat of violence, threat and chaos. The most expert, virtuous and heroic police will make them. I admire them and am grateful for their service. I could not do their job!
2. Sadists and sociopaths are a critical mass (Is it 10%? Could be much higher at places.) of our police. They  self-choose the career so they can hurt people. I was on a jury that found a policeman guilty of brutality. I later learned he was infamous for beating up street kids. He did not discriminate; sadism is inclusive of all.
3. The infamous "blue code" is the bond of loyalty shared by groups of men who face danger together. Within boundaries it is necessary,  wholesome and noble; tragically, it too often bursts those moral limits. A black policeman would likely shield his white partner who mistakenly shoots a black youth: it is not racism, it is disordered loyalty.
4. Adolescent and young adult males commit almost all of our violent crime. It is the nature of things. Cops and male teens are like dogs and cats. It myself, a real altar boy, was harassed twice by police in my early years. I was infuriated.
5. Black youths are even more prone to crime as so many are victims of a culture of deprivation, abuse, neglect, lack of opportunity and...above all...fatherlessness!

Crisis of Authority and Paternity

At least 50% of black teenagers have been abandoned by their fathers. How could they not carry an explosive rage against father, which is to say, authority, figures. Before he even meets a cop, he is destined to hate him. So the unfortunate officer on the block has to engage with the abyss of hurt, abandonment, and rage the youth understandably harbors as victim of a universe of destructive vectors. Yes, a history of racism is one of them. Male promiscuity and infidelity is another. The complex, dense "Culture of Poverty" is a catch-all. The cultural revolution, with the distrust of authority, is at the heart of it all. The youth is victim, so is the police officer.

The initial phrase in this essay is about my own exercise of authority. Authority...father and mother, teacher, priest, coach, President, priest...is the sacred trust given by God to protect, provide, nurture, instruct, correct, encourage and inspire those who are young and dependent in any way. The abuse of authority is the plague of our time: priest, President, police.

Intertwined is the loss of trust in authority. This is the legacy of the Cultural Revolution; it aligns itself with the desecration of sexuality and the decimation of the powerless as a trinity-from-hell. The loss of trust in God leads to suspicion of authority in all its forms. This becomes anxiety, rage, and conflict.

The "systemic racism" narrative is a result of and a development of this fundamental crisis in authority, filial trust and paternal care. This story line fosters helplessness, victimhood, impotence, distrust, anger and the mimetic contagion of violence that is today sweeping our cities.

This being the Vigil of Pentecost, I invoke the Holy Spirit!

Comfort and console the families violated by such police violence:    Come Holy Spirit!

Bring peace and safety to all our communities:  Come Holy Spirit!

Bless our police with wisdom, patience, courage, gentleness!  Come Holy Spirit!

Inspire all fathers to tend and care for their children and their mothers!   Come Holy Spirit!

Inspire those in authority to gentle strength in tending the young and vulnerable!  Come Holy Spirit!

Postscript. When I consider the George Floyd tragedy, I don't identify with him. I identify with the police. Oldest brother in a family of nine, I have always been in positions of authority. Low authority, but authority. I am like the lowest level knight in the medieval world or the bottom rung of the commissioned officers; basement of the hierarchy. This doesn't make me a bad person, except in the world of "intersectionality." What would I have done with this powerful man, accused of forgery, who won't get into the car? It is a big problem. Good idea:  relax, get off his neck, call for backup, for a higher level officer. But if it was up to me: assuming my anxiety level was modulated after invoking the Holy Spirit, assuming I had the self-confidence I lacked most of my adult life and the clout to pull it off, I would have walked George to the precinct. I hate to drive and love to walk. Sweet, gentle, genuine, generous soul that he is, we would have befriended each other immediately. Regarding the alleged $20 forgery (which he might not have done, or he may have done in error mistaking his monopoly money for his real money): it is a crime and not a nothing, but it is so itsy-bitsy, tiny-weeny that it is virtually a nothing so I may have given the store owner the $20. I would have violated police protocol, would be disciplined if not fired, and ridiculed by other officers. That is why I am not a cop.