Notes from the Riverside – Endemic Official Violence

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Notes from the Riverside, is my byline for the Eugene Weekly publication.

I’ve been writing for some form of the Weekly for more than 20 years. Notes from the Riverside, refers to the Willamette and McKenzie Rivers, which flow through Lane County, and Eugene and Springfield.

(Parenthesized comments are only published in the blog version)

“Safe” at home, I’ve been watching a pandemic, wrapped in a depression, with tales told by an idiot genius, hoping things will return to a new normal. Except the old normal wasn’t or isn’t so great for a lot of people. To be sure, this isn’t the first pandemic to strike this continent. The common cold, flu, syphilis, gonorrhea, small pox, devasted Indigenous populations. Healthy doses of the memes justifying colonialism, and white supremacist Manifest Destiny, accompanied the germs, and helped establishing endemic underlying conditions of a new normal. Intersectional discrimination became the new normal. Primary symptoms of this infection, is an inability to remember what came before, especially that which you are doomed to repeat.

Recalling the ’92 Rebellion in Los Angeles (Riots are spontaneous, Rebellions are planned), two-thirds of the arrestees were not Black. Meaning, more people are suffering American inequities than Black people, though we are a sort of very visible indicator species. What was once done to us because of race, is now being done to others for the money. Dogs and firehoses in the 50’s, turn to peppergas and bean bag rounds, drone surveillance in the 21st Century.

Even in Eugene, where the white anarchists, white supremacists, white vandals, outnumber the BIPOC peaceful protesters, that seemed to reflect a national trend. What happened to Rodney King, was a well known, commonplace experience in communities of color. So, nobody believes us, until a white man video tapes the beating?

Still the cops are acquitted, because ‘Strange Fruit” is always in season, not just in the South. Training officer Derek Chauvin, even while being videotaped using a known kill move, on a suspected fake $20 bill passer, didn’t feel there were going to be any negative consequences for his actions, even lying on his report of the incident. He was setting an example for the cops of color, witnessing Floyd’s death: This is the expected behavior because the only color you need to see is Blue. (In the Just Us System, only Blue and White Lives Matter)

While I am heartened by the condemnation by the law enforcement and legal community, I am sobered by my long career as a mandatory reporter. How do you abolish the police, and still provide protection for kids facing sex slavery, child abuse, and other common horrors? I’m not aware of any civilization reaching our level of urban complexity, that hasn’t had some body, enforcing the behavioral norms of society, especially when those norms were unjust. When it was the law that it was illegal for people of color to be on Eugene streets after dark, because it was also illegal for them to live within the city limits, I’m sure the cops, sheriffs, banks, chamber of commerce, and many citizens, enforced those behavioral and legal norms. The resulting low ethnic minorities in the city, state, and county, was an intentional feature of the permanence of racism. So, breaking the windows of businesses, does nothing to dissolve the bedrock of systemic discrimination.

Renaming Deady Hall by itself, does nothing to the curriculum taught inside those walls, nor racist attitudes of math teachers. (A monolingual English speaking White PhD math graduate of Deady Hall, who taught at Lane Community College, opposed the implementation of a nationally known math literacy program: The Algebra Project. Suggested by the first and only Black Dean of LCC’s Math Department, it was rejected because “he was Black”. Never mind that the Black Dean had dual degrees in Math and Nuclear Physics, spoke 9 languages, was adding Spanish and ASL to his 9 languages, and was proposing an intervention designed by a Black Harvard trained mathematician, who framed Algebra as a Civil Rights Issue. The program was intended to benefit largely white students at LCC. The Black Dean left, the white faculty member got promoted to an Assistant Vice President at Lane).

No more than tearing down pioneer statuary, changes neither the urbane, nor the bucolic expressions and manifestations of institutional racism within the University, or the city, county, and state, within which it resides. Its progress to switch the name of a dorm, from Eugene Klan #3 Exalted Cyclops Frederick Dunn, to Black Architect DeNorval Unthank, and I supported that. But Dee’s future wife had a cross burned in front of her sorority, and was ejected from that sorority because she was dating a Black man. Her ejection was supported by a woman whose family name graces another prominent building at the University. (In other words the Erb Memorial Union) https://around.uoregon.edu/oq/cross-burning-at-gamma-phi-beta

I wish the math department in Deady Hall could find a way to mathematically measure, therefore predict, the degree of racist meme infection, a sort of memetic viral load, to assess the degree of feverish delusional supremacy someone labors under. Apply quarantine, isolation, social distancing, before they infect others with their deadly strain. Perhaps they could partner with the Psychology Department, which could be part of the movement within that field to declare how racism might affect and infect people emotionally and psychologically: Ethnic Identity Dysphoria. Devise at least a talking cure.

The utility of such mathematical precision, and psychological healing could be useful, to prevent needless injury and death. What strain of racist meme infected Dylan Roof to commit racist mass murder in a church, and then have the arresting officers take him to Burger King, on the way to jail?

What strain of racist meme prevented officers from simply taking a drunk Black man home, to sleep it off, rather than illegally shooting him in the back, when he ran away, still drunk, in fear, apparently justifiably so? What anti-racist vaccine can increase our common humanity, and compassion, and help reduce the impact of the disasters we find ourselves in. I think I remember, the cure.

(Human Unity is a cure for White Supremacy)