Upstander Reflections

As a high school history teacher, I have the luxury of spending time thinking about things that the average adult just doesn’t have time to think about. For example, I just spent several weeks looking at how propaganda was used to divide Americans into “us” and “them” groups throughout our history. It is clear from studying the primary sources that from the moment Columbus got off the boat, there was a concentrated effort to create an “us” group (Europeans) and a “them” (everyone else) group in North America. At first, the targets were the Natives and Africans slaves. As time passed, Catholics, Jews and the Chinese were added to the “them” group. Over time, Catholics had two advantages that allowed them to claw out of the “them” group. 1. Skin color 2. Sheer numbers. However, to this day Non-Whites and Jews are still the “other” in America.     The narrative since World War II has tried to tell a different story. America supported the development of Israel and welcomed

It’s a cold, grey and wet weekend in Chicago. This is normal. It’s October, what do you expect? My Dad used to walk around the house lamenting these kind of days when I was a kid. At random moments he would simply bellow out in a loud and deliberate voice “cold, grey, wet October!” Us kids would be like, “yeah, what’s your point?” He didn’t have one. I think he was just moved by certainty of Chicago autumn. It always came. It was always cold. It was alway grey. It was always wet. It was part of life in Chicago. Clearly, it still is. Cold, Grey, Wet October! In the 1980s and 90s I grew up with a lot of certainties. Some simple, like “the Cubs and Sox will never win the World Series” and “you don’t put ketchup on hotdogs.” Other certainties were more profound like “boys will be boys” and “snitches get stitches”. Well… the Cubs and the Sox have won the World Series and I don’t really eat hot dogs anymore. You can see where my loyalties lie... This week tho

There are few phrases in America today that create more division than the phrase, “the police.” When I was growing up and I heard the phrase, “the police,” I thought about Officer Friendly, my friends’ dads and the people that would save me if the “bad guys” ever got to me. When I got a little older and started to interact more with people who were African Americans, I learned that many of them had a completely different view of “the police.” That phrase to them meant racial profiling, police brutality, and the guys that might lock them up, hurt them or kill them unjustly. As far as I could tell, it was a Black and White issue. White people admired “the police.” Black people feared them. This Norman Rockwell painting is a great depiction  of how I grew up viewing “the police”. Source However, over the course of the past several years and with the help of digital media technology, many White folks have abandon their traditional view of Officer Friendly. Liberal White fo

It’s 4am and I can’t sleep. The cries of children woke me up. Not my children. Not the ones down the hall sleeping comfortably in separate spacious bedrooms in the safety of their own home. The cries that woke me up permeate out of a detention center about a thousand miles south of here. The cries for “papa and mama” float across the Great Plains and into the Midwest. They drift along the southern border and up the west coast. They skirt though the deep south and up into New England. Can you hear them? During the day, I cannot hear them. There is too much noise. We are busy. We have meetings to get to. We have jobs to get done. We have vacations to plan. Mom needs flowers on Mother’s Day. We have to call dad on Father’s Day. The kids need to get picked up. They need to get dropped off. Phones get lost. Grandma is in the hospital. Life is swirling all around us and we’re just trying to keep up. But at night, after I tuck my kids into bed and tell them I love them, af

On April 16th, two Black men were arrested for trespassing in a Starbucks in Philadelphia. On April 22nd, a Black man wrestled an AR-15 rifle from a mass shooter in a Waffle House in Nashville, saving many lives. The first thing I thought when I read about the Waffle House shooting was, “thank God no one called the police on James Shaw Jr., the reluctant Waffle House hero. Thank God that guy was in there at the time. In fact, I’m in a Starbucks right now and I would feel a bit safer if he was sitting right next to me.   I’m pretty sure all Americans were happy he was there. None of us want carnage. However, I think many of us look at these two events separately. They are different situations that took place in different cities. However, to look at them separately, I would argue is to look at them simply. I’m a White guy, so I know how us White folks like to think and talk about these things. I don’t claim to speak for all White people, but with 38 years experience