Yesterday morning, in my hometown of Fort Worth, a young black woman was shot and killed inside her family’s home.
Details are still sketchy. It appears that a concerned neighbor called a non-emergency police line around 2 am, asking them to check on the home since he noticed the door open.
The police arrived and searched the property. The woman was then fatally shot through a window by a responding officer.
This is the 7th local police shooting involving a civilian since June.
Cue up the immediate, poisonous back and forth on cable news, Facebook walls and Twitter feeds. You know the progression. Statements. Arguments. Insults. Threats.
The familiar topics emerge. Gun control. Police officer training. Racism.
At this pace, our community will begin to rip at the seams.
If we don’t find a new approach, we’ll be stuck going nowhere, forever.
So I’d like to make a case for empathy. Let’s start here:
"You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates." (Mize, 2004, p. 279)
Black men, women and children suffered through 250 of years of slavery. Then 100 more years of Jim Crow discrimination. And all without any significant redress or reparations. The wounds are still fresh.
Latino men, women and children are currently in the crossfire of a contentious debate. These wounds are still being opened, fueled by the rhetoric coming from both sides in Washington.
As Italian immigrants, my grandparents were discriminated against in the early 1900’s as they adjusted to their new lives in America.
Ever wonder why black and Italian musicians played so often together in the 40s and 50s? That’s because few others would get near them. I am fortunate to have missed that half-century of prejudice, and owe my grandparents a debt of gratitude for what they endured.
Frank Sinatra, one of the few non-mafia (debatable) respected Italians, grew so tired of seeing this racism firsthand, he began refusing to play at hotels that wouldn’t rent a room to fellow Rat Pack icon Sammy Davis Jr. The casinos caved and slowly, the tide began to shift.
We are deadlocked in a political and moral standstill. What was once “both sides of the aisle” has become “polar opposite ends of the spectrum.”
Call it what you want – xenophobia, prejudice, secure borders, subconscious bias, racism, drunks who will run over your children - we are seeing the worst in ourselves.
If we continue to let the TV shouting matches set the tone, keep engaging in spiteful and endless dialogue on social media, and pretending we do not have a race relations problem centered around equity, our community will continue to fail.
We are in dire need of civil, dignified, face to face conversations. And because these conversations are uncomfortable, they are avoided by the ones who need them the most.
Without these conversations, we will never build trust. We will avoid each other’s neighborhoods. We will recruit fellow board members and elect officials who look and think just like we do.
Businesses won’t want to relocate here. Would-be entrepreneurs of color will convince themselves it’s not worth the risk. Parents will lose confidence in our public education system.
Every once in a while, we pick up the ball and move it a few yards downfield. And then something happens to put us back in our own end zone.
So how do we move forward?
I’ll heed the words of President Dwight Eisenhower, when in 1956 he said, “just bring people together and the rest will take care if itself.”
1) Bring together a microcosm of students from around the city. Put them in the same room, and in 1 hour they will have begun to bond through music, video games, sports, art , dance, etc. Friendship is the first step towards empathy, which cannot be learned through a case study. (long term)
2) Bring people together, starting now. (short term)
These conversations can be a vehicle to something bigger – walking away with a better understanding of someone who doesn’t look or think like you.
Call it whatever you want – race relations, equity, empathy, etc., these efforts will take time to produce meaningful results.
When are we going to pick up the ball and continue to march downfield?
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Here are two documents to continue the conversation.
Community Health Needs Assessment - United Way of Tarrant County