An Open Letter to President Barack Obama Mr. President, I’ve read the speech you gave about the social context through which the African-American community perceives and interprets the Zimmerman verdict. As always, you are a capable and eloquent speaker, and your words were quite moving. My words might not be as well chosen, but I believe you might benefit from hearing my perspective. I’m a white male, six feet tall, around 195 pounds. That’s slightly larger and taller than average, but I wouldn’t say I’m an imposing figure. I have a college education. I’m a former software engineer and educator. I was raised in the state of Maine, which is one of the most racially and culturally homogeneous states in the Union: non-whites accounted for less than 5% of the population in 2010. All said, I’m about as far away from the Trayvon Martin or the You of 35 Years Ago as I can be. And yet, as I heard you going down through the checklist of events that are part of the “African-American experience”, I couldn’t help notice that they sounded all-too familiar. You said, “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they are shopping at a department store. And that includes me.” Really? That includes me too. I’ve never shoplifted, but I have been stopped by security, who then demanded to rifle through my bags, checking each item against my receipt, with no apology when all was found to be in order. Why? No reason, other than I was a single male in a department store. You said, “There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off.” Really? That’s happened to me as well! I didn’t attribute it to the color of my skin, however. I attributed it to simple physiology. Men are, on average, 15-20% larger than women, 40-50% stronger, with greater muscle mass. An untrained male’s grip strength generally equals or surpasses that of a trained female athlete. With all due respect to the African-American experience, I think ladies in elevators everywhere are very wise to clutch their purses tighter when a strange male of ANY race gets on board; most of us have more than enough raw physical power to take it from them, should we so choose. Care to review the statistics on violent crime? The overwhelming percentage of those are committed by males as well. You said, “There are very few African- American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars.” Yep, check that one off for me as well. In fact, while we’re on the topic, I’ve also had people cross the road to avoid passing me on the sidewalk. That last one’s common enough that when I approach a single woman walking alone on the same side of the street, I’ll usually cross the road to avoid making her feel uncomfortable. It’s nothing I have to do, but since one woman out of five will be a victim of rape in her lifetime, I view it as a courtesy. Have I received ‘courtesy checks’ from the police and local security because my presence after hours was deemed ‘suspicious’? You bet. Several times. It’s hard for me to feel the racial outrage from those events, however; the officers involved were all as white as I am. To be fair, I can’t say I ever started a physical altercation for being asked what I was doing out in the middle of the night. Perhaps that would’ve colored my perception of those events. You neglected to mention whether your experiences ever ended in physical confrontations like Trayvon Martin’s, but since you seem to have passed the background check for your current job, I’m assuming they didn’t. I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those are the sets of experience that inform ME how to interpret what happened one night in Florida. It’s just as inescapable for ME to bring my own experiences to bear. Sometimes, Mr. President, it’s not about race. Sometimes it’s just about being a man in a world where some men do bad things. -Gregory D. Commeau
Posted on: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 17:57:52 +0000
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