2/21/23

 Tuesday, February 21. 2023

In bed at 11, up at 6:50, after 5 pss, CPP.  Winter Storm Watch was issued for tomorrow & Thursday.  Currently, 20℉, wind NNW at 20 mph, wind chill at 4℉, wind speeds up to 23 mph today and gusts near 40 mph. Today's wintery mix will e .3 inch, .45 expected in the next 24 hrs.  Sunrise at 6:39, the sun beat me up again, sunset at 5:30, 10+50.

Back to Ta-Nahisi Coates; The 1619 Project.  We watched Nicole Hannah-Jones in Hulu's The 1619 Project last week and I am still reading Between the World and Me.  My attention was caught by a sentence in Coates' book relating that when he was his son's age, 15, everyone he knew was Black and all of them were afraid. With one exception, the same was true for me, substituting White for Black.  After the War, the Englewood district in Chicago was White.  Many Irish, Germans, Italians, what have you, but all White. Correction: there was one Black family on May Street, between 73rd and 74th, with a girl who was a friend of my cousin Christine's.  The pastor of our Catholic parish, St. Leo the Great, was Monsignor Patrick J. Malloy, who each Sunday at Mass would urge his flock to "keep the undesirables out," referring as all knew to the ever-southward incursion of Blacks into  "our" neighborhoods.  Whites were afraid of Blacks.  They were thought of as lesser creatures, dangerous, and contaminating.  Real estate 'block busters' were active trying to get any White property owner to sell to a Black buyer, knowing that once some Blacks moved onto a block, mass evacuation by Whites would follow.  And it happened with my family too.  I don't remember the timing of our race-based retreat and perhaps I am fooling myself about being confused by the perceived need for it, but my recollection was that I was confused, though I surely knew, as Coates did, that Blacks and Whites don't mix and that each was afraid of the other.  "We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, Je n'y crois pas, mais je les crains,—"I don't believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless".  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.  The reason I suspect that my memory about being confused is accurate is that my beloved little sister and I did know one Black person when we were young.  His name was Moses and he was a security guard (I used the term loosely, night watchman' is probably more accurate) in a construction shack across from our basement apartment when our street was torn up for the installation of a new sewer line.  I have no recollection of how old Moses was, but he was a 'grown up' and Kitty and I were children, youngsters.  There was a 55-gallon drum in Moses' shack and coke was burned in it to provide some warmth, so it must have been during the cold months of the year that Kitty and I would visit with Moses in his shack each night after dinner and Moses would read the Bible to us and tell us Bible stories.  He was soft-spoken, gentle, and kind and Kitty and I liked him a lot, I daresay we loved him and knew that he liked us a lot, that he loved us.  We would visit with him until our mother would call us to come home for the night.  One night Kitty gave Moses a kiss on the forehead as we said 'good night' and one of the neighbor kids witnessed it.  The next day the kid taunted Kitty by chanting "Kitty kissed a nigger, Kitty kissed a nigger." I got into a fistfight, wrestling match, some kind of scuffle with the kid for mocking my sister, the only physical fight I ever had in my now-long life.  I can't remember now how it ended or how our relationship with Moses ended- probably with the completion of the construction project.  But I do remember Moses, that he was kind and gentle and loving and God-fearing (though I surely didn't think in those terms then.)  And he was Black.  A Black man.  To Monsignor Malloy "an undesirable."  To the neighbor kid "a nigger."  To Kitty and me a friend.  So when the time for White Flight came to 73rd and Emerald Avenue and my family moved with all the other Whites to 'safer,' still White neighborhoods, it was confusing to me I suppose because it could have been Moses and his family who were moving into the neighborhood.  Almost 3/4th of a century has gone by since those events but I still have a clear memory of Moses in his shack with the 55-gallon coke drum radiating heat and Moses radiating goodness, surrounded by the unwelcoming fear of him and 'his kind' in "our" White neighborhood.

Photo by Robert Frank from "The Americans" 1955-1957

Nicole Hannah-Jones; Caroline Randall Williams.  Both Hannah-Jones and Randall Williams are bi-racial.  Hannah-Jones's father is Black, her mother White.  Randall Williams'great-great-grandfather was Edmund Pettus, an Alabama senator, Confederate army officer, and Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.  The infamous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma is named after him, a reminder to all of White Supremacy and Black Subjugation.  The fact that Randall Williams has some "White blood" in her makeup doesn't keep her from being caste as Black, though the presence of any "Black blood" in her under classical American race laws would caste her as Black.  Wikepedia entry on her relates: "In 2020, amidst the national discussions around removing statues of Confederate generals and renaming of U.S. military bases, Williams wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, titled "You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is A Confederate Monument." She argued for the removal of Confederate monuments, using her existence and family history to make her point. In that essay, she stated, "modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help." She opened the piece by writing: "I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.""  I used the word 'caste' above as a verb though the dictionaries recognize the word only as a noun or an adjective.  In America, it seems perfectly appropriate to use the word as a verb, as in 'to situate someone in a caste.'  If there were any doubts about this, Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste should have resolved them.

Wisconsin youths: More mental illness, more intense behavior, more suicide attempts.  From this morning's JSOnline: (1)  A 13-year-old boy was shot and killed Sunday evening, the fourth child to die in a shooting so far this year, according to Milwaukee police.  The shooting was reported at 6:30 p.m. on the 4100 block of North 47th Street, on Milwaukee’s north side. Police did not release any details about the circumstances of the shooting and said unknown suspects are sought.The boy was identified Monday as Jamarri Paige by the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office.  The incident came after two adults died by homicide in separate incidents over the same weekend, and just two hours before another 15-year-old boy was injured in a shooting on the 3000 block of North Teutonia Avenue.  Police reported three other teenagers – ages 14, 15 and 17 – were killed in shootings in January. An 18-year-old was shot and killed in early February.  It continues a trend of more children being victimized by the city’s gun violence. From 2016 to 2019, no more than 10 children 17 and younger died by homicide in Milwaukee, but 20 or more have been killed in each of the three years since then, according to police and the city's Homicide Review Commission.  Police reported three other teenagers – ages 14, 15 and 17 – were killed in shootings in January. An 18-year-old was shot and killed in early February.  It continues a trend of more children being victimized by the city’s gun violence. From 2016 to 2019, no more than 10 children 17 and younger died by homicide in Milwaukee, but 20 or more have been killed in each of the three years since then, according to police and the city's Homicide Review Commission.  Twenty-seven child victims were reported in 2022, according to police.  (2)  In Milwaukee, Children's Wisconsin hospital saw a 60% increase from 2020 to 2021 in emergency department patients who had attempted suicide.  "It is more common than not for a provider during any given shift to have at least one patient who's coming in for suicidal ideation or suicide attempt," said Dr. Erin O'Donnell, emergency medicine physician at Children's Wisconsin.

Our children are the canaries in the coalmine we live in.