WESTMINSTER WEST — When I was a boy of 5, in 1967, my family, white and poor, was living in a neighborhood of Linden, N.J. that was otherwise occupied by people of color.
Linden was two towns away from Newark, N.J. where my parents had grown up and lived most of their lives. Despite our locale and neighbors, I do not remember my parents having any friends of color. I do not remember any immediate neighbors entering our home for a visit.
On July 12, 1967, John Smith, a Black cab driver in Newark, was pulled over for an alleged traffic infraction while he was transporting a passenger. He was taken to the police precinct, all the while beaten by one officer while the other officer drove. Once inside the station, Smith was beaten again by a group of officers. One officer hit him in the head with the butt of a gun.
Black citizens who lived across the street from the precinct called for advocates to intervene because they feared Smith was dead when they saw him dragged and carried from the police car into the precinct. Their intervention led to Smith being transported to Beth Israel Hospital, where he was diagnosed with, among many injuries, broken ribs and a broken jaw.
In response to yet another instance of police brutality against a Black person, crowds gathered outside the police precinct, and tensions between police and the protesters boiled over.
What are often referred to as the Newark Riots began.
Five days later, buildings had been burned, stores had been looted, the National Guard had been called in, gunfire had been exchanged. In the end, 26 people were killed, 750 were injured, and more than 1,000 people were arrested.
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Also in the summer of 1967, my parents left the apartment we were living in, partly due to being significantly behind on rent, and moved just 5 miles west to the all-white suburban town of Garwood, N.J.
My mother consistently suggested that we moved to get away from the riots, noting that Linden and Newark were increasingly dangerous for us. Garwood was considered safe. What would become of the people of color whom we had lived amidst without any harm done to us - that was not spoken about. The question was not even asked.
For me, Newark and Linden became an island of sorts - embroiled, troubled, frightening. Even with our history of being delinquent renters, it was possible for us, as white people, to escape from this other land, never to return.
I need to tell you about Garwood, because it is what I know best. It is what I was made to study as a boy. And at present, it informs me about whiteness in that it is what white people created when we had the privilege of being exclusively among ourselves.
Garwood takes up less than 1 square mile. While I grew up there, it was an open secret that no people of color would ever be allowed to live within its boundaries. Each of its two neighboring towns from which it had seceded, Cranford and Westfield, sported considerably more affluence, had single-street neighborhoods where Black families were sequestered.
I heard adults and their children, my neighbors and classmates, claim our town was superior because it did not have those streets, those people. The n-word was used liberally. My mother called these opinions ignorant, yet we continued to pay rent and live our lives there.
Garwood also happened to be vehemently anti-Semitic. My family was one of three Jewish families in town. My very first day of first grade, walking to school, a neighborhood girl also entering first grade, told me that her mother told her that I killed her God.
Returning from one of his first days at the regional high school he was now attending, my older brother was called a Jew just below our second-floor apartment. He was asked to push a penny across the road with his nose by several older members of the football team, in front of other teenagers and children. When he refused, he was held by boys in varsity jackets and forced, face down, to do exactly as they asked so that he entered our apartment with his forehead, nose and lips scraped and bleeding freely.
The music teacher in our elementary/middle school allowed students to bring in favorite records to play and discuss, and he gave lessons to those interested in a myriad of instruments. He was Jewish, though I never once heard him speak about his own or anyone's faith or culture.
But our teacher was often referred to as a Jew and, once, his room was secretly decorated with hundreds of pennies so that every surface would be an indignity.
I was called a Jew on the playground by boys stronger or more aggressive than me hundreds of times. Adding to the epithet, I was punched in the arm until bruised, day after day.
In sixth grade, a full six years into living in this town, I opened my social studies book, and pennies spilled onto the floor. I was taunted by remarks by a minority of students about how badly I wanted the money and that I would, by my own Jew nature, be forced to pick them up.
No other student and no teacher said a word to address this.
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It is clear that I was not allowed full access into this white supremacist culture. But my exclusion was only partial.
Whiteness allowed my family to rent in Garwood and, immersed in the racial messaging, we were invited in. My family fully considered this condition safer than where we had come from.
I took in - completely and in opposition to my direct experience - the message that blackness was dangerous for me and whiteness was not. No matter what happened to us, we had moved up some mysterious ladder, and would never consider moving back to Newark or Linden.
But why was there rioting in Newark in the first place?
The riot did not happen just because one man was injured badly by the police. Rioting occurred because the very same kind of white people who created the culture of Garwood created the even-more-oppressive culture that was Newark.
The belligerent enforcement of white dominance and exclusivity and the underpinning of hate that I saw enacted in Garwood was happening to a far-greater degree to people of color in Newark and Linden and Elizabeth and Plainfield.
If a Black person entered Garwood and some white people got it in their minds to kill that individual, most likely no one would have intervened. Maybe there would have been consequences after the fact - definitely not any equal to a human life lost.
And this was everywhere - not just in New Jersey, but in every white system across our country. In every system that existed, the police, the courts, the schools, the health-care system, the real estate and insurance agencies, the offices and factories, the stores and theaters were saturated with racist values that made life easy for white people and difficult to the point of being unsafe for people of color.
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John Smith was charged with assaulting an officer and was tried by a jury made up solely of white males.
Isn't it actually easy to see what “white supremacy” actually means? White people, en masse, feeling that white people are better and more deserving of money, property, and resources? Whose means to gain and consolidate their advantages, when necessary, included segregation, deprivation, vilification, bullying, and also tremendous degrees of violence? Bloodletting? Denial?
Now, more than 50 years later, I live in a peaceful Vermont village known for its liberal politics. Arts abound. Pastures roll out. Farms that I love sell my family the milk, eggs, cheese, and produce we eat. Everything around me communicates safety and security.
And I have the privilege to continue to participate in this narrative of safety if I like.
But safety is a false narrative. Not everyone can feel safe where I live because of the context that surrounds it.
White people live here in stunningly high proportion. The fact that there is not a more diverse population is because my village looks, by virtue of its whiteness, like other places that are, and have been for centuries, pointedly unsafe for people of color.
And the comfort and sense of home I feel here as a white person is built upon local and historical atrocity. The stability I feel has a shadow that has for so long been exported to urban areas and places where people of color have been asked to live, where criminal activity like break-ins, drug possession, and violence are focused on and crimes related to racism, institutional abuse by police, school segregation, and infrastructure degradation are conveniently ignored.
I now fully understand and want to help other white people understand that the trouble in Linden and Newark N.J. in 1967 was not and is not a Black problem. Not at all. It is exclusively a white problem and it fully reveals the trouble with whiteness.
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Hidden values of white supremacy, white advantage, and white violence color how a majority of us, as white people, continue to organize - actively or passively -Â the way we live.
We see our society coming apart at the seams. We are mystified and think this is happening to us. In reality, it is because white people have used their own and other people's time, energy, and resources to construct our society exactly this way, replete with racial hierarchy and white-against-black violence at every level. We hold privilege in a way that leaves a wake of diminished lives and blood behind us.
So let's not feel safe. Let's not settle into our good but white neighborhoods and think nothing is wrong.
It is healthy to feel uncomfortable and guilty and use those feelings to motivate white people to be active and brave and to push for change that may even cost time, energy, or money but benefits others.
But white people can't wait for people of color to find patient and delicate enough ways to educate them. White people must think about race, talk about race, and know racial inequity has always been real - then seize and change every institution, from village to state to country.