Upstander Reflections

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 Whit...

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 experi...

“What’s democracy?” This is the question that my nine year old daughter, Maddie, asked me a few Saturday’s ago. My seven year old daughter, Leah chimed in as well. “Yeah, Dad. What is… democracy?” I field a lot of questions as a high school teacher and a father of three. In fact, I’m sure I’ve answered this exact question many times in class. But this time was different. The circumstances that gave birth to this question were what made it so memorable. We had just ducked out of the March for Our Lives in Chicago and we were heading north on Loomis Street. Thirty years ago, when I was eight, we would have been walking among warehouses and factories but today those same old buildings have given way to high-end lofts, trendy boutiques and sidewalk cafes. The four of us had just met up with a group from my school to participate in this historical event. From the Right: Mike, Leah, Nate and Maddie on the corner of Loomis and Washington I didn’t really know how to ex...