By Dr. Jessica Johnson
Guest Column
Three days before Juneteenth was celebrated this year, the results of a Washington Post-Ipsos poll were published that showed a majority of African Americans in a 1,225-survey sample believe that racism will get worse over the course of their lives. Seventy-nine percent of older Black adults, those between 50-64 and those over 65, respectively, stated that they felt it is more dangerous to be a Black teenager now than when they were teens.
The April shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, a Black teen in Kansas City, Missouri, who went to the wrong home to pick up his siblings, was a question on the survey regarding how Whites interact with Blacks. Yarl was shot and wounded by Andrew Lester, the 84-year-old White homeowner who claimed he feared for his life and believed that Yarl was trying to break in. Eighty-five percent of the Black adults in the survey said this incident is an example of “broader problems in the treatment of Black people by White people.” Only 54% of Whites in a smaller Post-Ipsos sample size of 696 agreed.
I was not surprised that the African American respondents over 50 believed that our current time is much more dangerous for Black children and expressed unease for present race relations. A story published in The Independent during mid-June details two disturbing occurrences in Redmond, Oregon, involving a Black city council member and a Black 10-year-old fourth grader that support this type of concern. A dead raccoon along with a sign containing “intimidating language” was left on the front door of Redmond Mayor Ed Fitch’s office.
A friend emailed this story to me and one of the first things I thought of when I read about the dead raccoon was the detestable “coon caricature” from the Jim Crow era. The “coon,” which was an abbreviation of raccoon, characterized a Black person who was slothful, habitually engaged in frivolous matters and always terrified. Being a native Southerner, I am very familiar with this stereotype, and those who attempt to revive it today represent a dangerous ideology in our society. The Redmond incident is currently being investigated as a bias crime.
If discovering a dead raccoon wasn’t troubling enough, Gavin Alston, the fourth grader mentioned in The Independent article, shared his experience of being racially taunted in school at a Redmond city council meeting. Alston told the council members that he had been called the N-word and a monkey. The most alarming part of Alston’s account was when he recalled a classmate threatened to hit him but instead mocked his appearance, sneering, “(T)hat’s called animal abuse.”
Alston bravely told the adults in the meeting that “(he) should get treated equally” and that “(this) is not fair to us Black people.” Alston’s harrowing school encounters would make one think that he was living in the segregated South in 1953 rather than on the West Coast in 2023. Reading this also made me feel sad for his classmate who is being indoctrinated with racial animosity at such a young age by her parents or other influential adults in her life.
These recent events in Redmond are disturbances that cause many older Black Americans like those sampled in the Post-Ipsos poll to view present racial confrontations with apprehension, especially when thinking about their long-term consequences. Being an older adult myself, I do agree that race relations are worsening in many parts of the country, but I am reminded of how God spoke prophetically through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who always proclaimed that love is the remedy for hate. King spoke of hate as “too great a burden to bear,” and in his 1957 speech “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” he declared how the agape love of Christ that enables us to love our enemies could “be the salvation of our civilization.” King explained that agape love is “an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return” and “(w)hen we rise to love on the agape level, we love men not because we like them, not because their attitudes and ways appeal to us, but we love them because God loves them.”
Godly love is the most powerful weapon against racial hatred, and it is the spiritual foundation that I will continue to stand on in opposing bigotry.
Dr. Jessica A. Johnson is a lecturer in the English department at The Ohio State University-Lima. Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @JjSmojc. Her opinion does not necessarily represent the views of The Lima News or its owner, AIM Media.
