Racism Reversal

York city Pastor Aaron Anderson posted this article on Facebook. Essentially, the dude above had the audacity to loudly confront a black mom on the trolley in Philly about her beating her kids in public. She, in thanks, spat in his face. There is a very good chance, no certainty, that the woman was also beat as a child. She has learned that when you are a kid, adults have the authority to beat you for infractions both great and small. Now, it is what she knows and what she does with her own.

It sounds like all of the other passengers on the trolley either looked the other way or tried to stare the woman down into compliance but it did not have its intended effect. She beat on. It also seems to be the case that he was the only white passenger. Sure, he could have intervened perhaps in a way that did not diss' the mom in public. In city culture, stepping into a situation not your own and weighing in can create a perspective of shame and anger. But, situations like this are all our own, the human family is inevitably connected. We have a duty to speak or we will answer to God for our silence. Defending the helpless is a biblical imperative and the four year old boy today is the gang-banger of tomorrow who see his life and others as cheap. The baby girl now is the pregnant thirteen year old a decade or so later.

We can try and quantify the costs of such abuse but they cascade out of individual lives into the stream of the community, the river of the city, and the ocean of humanity. So, I ask the question, is it more racist to not say something? To expect this black mom to treat her children abusively because, "Hey, she is black, what do you expect?" I work with the rural poor, almost all of whom are white, and incidents like these are not unusual in the community I work in. So, it is not only a black vs white thing, but there are excuses we all make for behavior for those we deem unable intrinsically to act better, to be better. The race card of low expectations is particularly, but not exclusively, lethal.

I don't play the game that there are different standards for different people. Children in the trailer parks are just as much a treasure as the beloved child of an upper middle class family. To consign the poor to a different category, like the Indian caste system, creates a circle of cultural karma that cannot be broken. Our society will be a lot better if we stop assigning destiny by demography.