I Wish I Could Make You Cry over Robert Cuadra As You Cried over George Floyd. A Letter from the Ghetto to the Suburbs

 

"I Wish I Could Make You Cry over Robert Cuadra As You Cried over George Floyd "
A Letter from the Ghetto to the Suburbs
 
Dear Collette,

 

For the past four days, I've been thinking about writing this letter. I couldn't write earlier because I was crying. Four days ago, I got the news about Robert. Tears washed away my ink. Friday? Saturday? My brain ping-ponged from one scheme to another – should I march? Should I fast? Should I paint a protest sign? Should I go to Robert's house and pray the rosary on my knees? Should I write a letter to my senator, Cory "Spartacus" Booker?

 

I am as voiceless as a submerged sea sponge. Robert's life didn't matter. My life doesn't matter. Nothing I would do would matter to anyone with any power to change anything – would matter to you. We, all of us here, we are all powerless and worthless targets in some gun's sight. My soul curled up like a worm. It's people like you who steer national policy, and nothing I say can make you cry over Robert as you cried over George Floyd.

 

Collette, when I first "met" you via social media, I had an immediate girl crush on you. Though you are a woman of a certain age, you retain the physical attractiveness you've been blessed with, and have used, since girlhood. You regularly post new, full-face selfies, and bask in the praise from your many fans. You live one of the lives I wish I had lived. You married a man who earns enough that you don't have to work. You devote your hours to cultivating an expansive garden, housing collectibles in your tastefully appointed home, honing your creative gifts at your easel, and training your pedigree dogs. Your tender heart you exercise in high-minded volunteer work.

 

I remember the first time I realized that my crush would not be reciprocated. You seem to live in a world without black people. You finally crossed paths with one and found it necessary to breathlessly detail the encounter on Facebook, as if you'd discovered a new species of butterfly, and you returned to civilization in your pith helmet and knee-high leather boots. She lives in twenty-first century America but suddenly you were Atticus Finch, you were Harriet Beecher Stowe, and you had to educate your Facebook friends about the evils of Jim Crow. That, at that time, we'd already elected a black president twice – and black governors, mayors, representatives – seemed lost on you. Black people are "helpless" and "afraid" and good white women – "allies" – like you – protect black people.

 

I wanted to say, but didn't, "You are infantilizing her. What are you protecting black people from? In this theatrical production, the enemy is an amorphous, shadowy mob of whitemen – one word – Republicans, Southerners, Christians, but, primarily, poor whites. You've chosen poor whites as your villains because we say things that rich whites feel it beneath them to say; we live truths that rich whites find unacceptable in their narrative; and because you don't know us, any more than you know black people."

 

I said none of that. I wanted to have what I could of your privileged life, even in just being allowed to view your Facebook photos of your burgeoning, bee-rich garden and your sweet, fluffy hounds.

 

And then George Floyd.

 

I tried to say the following. Every responsible voice in the country condemned Derek Chauvin. Chauvin was immediately fired, charged, imprisoned, tried, and is now serving time for murder. This swift and furious justice was wielded, primarily, by uniformed and otherwise institutional white men following rules set down by other white men. Thugs, arsonists, and crazies in the streets – including Ivy League lawyers throwing Molotov cocktails at a police car – played no role in advancing that justice at all.

 

I said something else, something that was very difficult for you to hear. "Play stupid games; win stupid prizes." No, no one wanted Floyd dead, least of all Derek Chauvin, whose own life effectively ended as Floyd breathed his last. But by choosing drugs and crime, Floyd gambled with his own fate. Repeat criminals increase the chances that they will encounter a cop who makes the wrong choices and ends them.

 

Collette, in your language, "Play stupid games; win stupid prizes" is translated as "Blame the victim," as "Floyd deserved to die," as a callous, racist person refusing to feel compassion, and gloating over Floyd's death. Your translation of that phrase is a refusal to understand. Your translations of that truth and others damage the very black people you, an "ally," claim to protect.

 

Let me enflesh that proverb; let me animate it with real life. Every male in my immediate family has been in jail. They were arrested, often, for the most minor of infractions. Here's one: "Talking back." My mother saw my father being viciously beaten by police. She didn't tell me this to make me hate police. She told me this to educate me in real world survival.

 

My parents took the side of the law against my brothers. Obey authority. Not because you like authority; in fact, the subliminal message was that authority was categorically different from and opposed to folks like us. We should resist authority, but cleverly and cautiously. "Play stupid games; win stupid prizes" did not translate to "blame the victim;" rather, it translated to "Survive this time; win next time."

 

You scoff. You don't believe that white men also have bad encounters with cops. You allow only discussion of race, never of class. Convenient for you, because, of course, you have money. We, poor whites, are the bad guys of your narrative. You want to be able to justify your contempt for us. Our mere existence, the truth of our lives, throws you off your game.  

 

Unlike my four brothers, I was a girl and my nemeses were not cops but nuns. One day I was punished for wearing shabby shoes. They were the only shoes I had. Sister Anthony made me stand in the hallway for hours, even after the other kids had left for the day. Near sunset, I finally peed myself. Then, when my woolen uniform skirt and white anklet socks and shabby shoes were wet, she bade me walk home. Neighbors were sure to witness and gossip about my humiliation. My mother, when told, immediately drove to the store, bought a gift for the nun, drove to the nun's house – to my surprise all the nuns inhabited a trailer plopped in a weedy field – and my mother apologized to the nun in front of me.

 

Can you even understand that attitude to authority, even authority so minor it could not afford a house, a lawn, a private bedroom? Crossing authority, even in so naïve an infraction as wearing the only shoes you have, risked that you would fall through the invisible trap door that was underneath every poor person, black, white, or brown, in my small town. One false move, and you could be behind bars, like my father, who was sent to reform school as a child. You could be dead, like my first crush, who died of a heroin overdose. You could be a drunk on the street, like the men my father left the house in the middle of the night to help, as part of his Alcoholics Anonymous activities. People tease me about my obsessive cleaning. They don't know the anxiety. If dust accumulates on the floor, here come the Cossacks. It's off to Siberia with me. Please don't think I'm kidding. I'm not.

 

My parents' approach was reasonably successful. Four of their six kids, who grew up eating surplus food, owned their own homes at the times of their deaths. Five of the six had degrees. Only one of their children fell through that invisible trap door into lifelong poverty, the one naïve enough to get a PhD and attempt an academic career. Does making choice A rather than choice B benefit black people? Only 6.2 % of married black people live below the poverty line. Almost 30% of black single mothers live below the poverty line. Yes, personal choices matter.

 

"How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police" is Chris Rock's dramatization of "Play stupid games; win stupid prizes." Chris Rock isn't saying, in his comedy video, that black men deserve to get their asses kicked by police. He's saying that some behaviors make it more likely that one's ass will get kicked by police. Getting high on meth and fentanyl and trying to pass a counterfeit twenty is one of those risky behaviors.

 

"America is a terminally racist country and you are doomed till we destroy and replace it." What if, instead of this, BLM supporters said, "No drugs; no lawbreaking; if stopped, don't move unless told to do so." Which message would save more black lives? Leftists require black men's doom to justify their revolution. Nice white ladies like you can't encourage black men to protect themselves with the choices they make because to you, black people are children, and you are their protector. Your status robs black people of agency. Your approach will get more black people killed.

 

"All Mothers Were Summoned When George Floyd Called Out for His Mama," read the caption on a photo you posted. An artist, Valerie Delgado, painted George Floyd as Jesus being tightly embraced by a paler-skinned Mary. Another image replaced Jesus' body with Floyd's in Michelangelo's Pieta. Kelly Latimore's painting "Mama" depicts Floyd as Jesus embraced by Mary. Mary and Floyd appear to kiss each other on the lips. It's impossible to deny the erotic component in these depictions. In 2007, Floyd tricked a pregnant woman by wearing a meter reader's uniform, gaining entry to her home, and holding a gun to her belly as he and his partners robbed her. Nice women are often notoriously attracted to "bad boys."

 

It's your selectivity that is so telling. On July 6, 2016, a police officer stopped Philando Castile for a broken tail light. Castile's girlfriend was in the car, as well as her four-year-old daughter. Castile informed the officer that he had a license to carry a gun. The officer panicked and shot Castile. The girlfriend livestreamed a dying Castile, wearing a white shirt stained red with his blood. Her four-year-old daughter watched a man die. Castile was, by all accounts, a mild-mannered cafeteria worker who often paid for the lunches of poor schoolchildren. Conservative media, including Front Page Magazine, condemned this killing.

 

On July 15, 2017, Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a visiting Australian veterinarian and meditation coach, phoned Minneapolis police to report what sounded, to her, like a rape in an alley. Police arrived. Damond approached. She was "unarmed and barefoot, wearing pajama pants and a pink T-shirt with the image of a koala." An officer shot her dead.

 

In 2016, Tony Timpa died under similar circumstances to George Floyd. Also in 2016, Daniel Shaver was shot dead by police under horrific circumstances. Timpa and Shaver were white. I posted about Castile and Damond, and protested that their killings were tragic and unjust. None of my Facebook friends who would later become obsessed with George Floyd said anything to me about Castile or Damond, Timpa or Shaver. There is lovely art dedicated to Castile, but I didn't find any depictions of Castile and the Blessed Virgin Mary swapping spit. Your tears and rage are as exquisitely discriminating as a sommelier's palate or a perfumer's nose. Why?

 

"Jeronimo Yanez": that's the name of the cop who shot Castile. Yanez's first name is the name of a famous Apache warrior. Yanez is a common Hispanic surname. Yanez's Mestizo ancestry is apparent in his features; he looks like an Olmec sculptured head. Mohamed Noor is the name of the man who shot Justine Damond. Noor is black, an African immigrant, and a Muslim. He was hurried through training as a "quick way to diversify" the police force. In two years as a cop, Noor had three formal complaints.

 

Collette, "allies" like you were not going to set your Facebook pages on fire, were not going to march and burn and loot and destroy, over a cop named "Jeronimo Yanez," over a cop named "Mohamed Noor." Fate, functioning as central casting, sent you Derek Chauvin. The first name is the word for a phallic tower that yanks oil out of the ground. Chauvin shares a last name with Nicolas Chauvin, origin of the word "chauvinism," for a belligerent and unearned sense of superiority because one is male or one is Western, as in "male chauvinist," and "Western chauvinist." Chauvin's reptilian eyes glare as if he were a hit man on "The Sopranos." This is the villain you're looking for.

 

Collette, I suspect that you and your "allies" did not tear America apart because you care about police excessive force, or because you love George Floyd, but because you hate Derek Chauvin and what he represents to you. Floyd is less human to you than he was to Chauvin. Floyd is merely a Molotov cocktail you can fling from your Facebook page without polluting your manicure with the lingering scent of gasoline. Floyd was a convenient tool to denigrate America and depict it as deserving of being plowed under and replaced with a Woke Utopia.

 

You married an alpha white male, Collette. His white male ambition underwrites your life and your personality. Your ancestors built this America, Collette, which has rewarded you so very richly. You hate so much what you have, that I can only dream of having. After George Floyd, my girl crush swung to obsession. Why does Collette want to destroy her own world? My parents descended into steerage, crossed an ocean, seasick and vomiting, crawled into coal shafts, swabbed rich women's toilets, striving all their lives, not to earn a ticket to your neighborhood; they knew they'd never be granted entrance except as day laborers. But if their kids never spoke a word of Polish, worked full time after school at menial jobs and still earned straight A's, learned to say "Yes, sir, yes, ma'am, whatever you say, sir" – and yes my parents really did drill us in these phrases – then their kids might be able to enter your world. I am without a clue here as to what inspires culturally genocidal fantasies in such a nice suburban lady as yourself, fantasies you hide behind "compassion" for George Floyd.

 

Which brings me to Robert. To talk to you about Robert, I must again resort to a bilingual dictionary. I must translate a world you do not inhabit. Paterson, New Jersey's, streets are littered with garbage, there are abandoned brick textile mills and boarded up factories among the residences where children play, bums shoot up, hook up, and defecate in public, and luxury cars roll down their windows to curbside heroin venders. In this world you would be careful not to visit, Robert Cuadra managed to be an honor student, and an inspiration to his mother, an addict, who had to surrender him to foster care. He helped her to get clean. Robert earned a scholarship to Montclair State University. Academy-Award-winning actress Olympia Dukakis, TV star Stephen Colbert, and journalist Jonathan Alter are among the celebrities who live or have lived in Montclair. Just walking down the street in Montclair brings out my inner Marxist: mansion, mansion, mansion, mansion. Robert won a scholarship to spend four years there. I imagine Robert in college classes that introduce him to poetry, to physics, to his own depths and the universe's expanse.

 

Robert deserved the scholarship. "He did not hang out. He was school, work, and home to his mother and grandmother. Real good kid, real good kid," says a friend of the family. Robert's high school principal reported that Robert looked forward to "a tremendously bright future … everyone loved Robert. There are no words." "That boy, he had a heart of pure gold… He was trying to live better than being in the ghetto," said his cousin. "He did not have a malicious bone in his body. He was smiling all the time. He was the true definition of an innocent, good-hearted boy." Robert "helped build homes in Paterson for low-income families … he participated in charity fundraising walks, collected food and clothes for needy families and fed homeless people during the holidays."

 

On Wednesday, January 19, Robert was carrying groceries into his grandmother's house. "He always wanted to show that he was strong and could lift heavy things," said his aunt. "Gunfire erupted … The teen saw his grandmother fall to the ground … he rushed over to her … he was struck." (Accounts of Robert's death here, here, and here).

 

Robert was shot a mile from me. I walked to the memorial. It's a propped up white sheet. In black magic marker, people tried to say the right thing. They are the kind of sentiments one might write in a high school year book. "Miss you." "Love you." "See you when I get there." People lack the words to make this any easier. Under the sheet is a plastic milk crate holding over a dozen candles, the tall ones in glass containers with pictures of saints glued on the glass; you can buy these candles in bodegas and botanicas. There were bouquets of roses. Sidewalk memorials like this scatter throughout Paterson. I encounter them as I walk.

 

Robert was shot near the intersection of Rosa Parks Boulevard and Martin Luther King Way. I passed Midtown Liquors, a grotty little puke-green cube, daubed with graffiti. Seven black men were drinking in front of the liquor store. A young black man was curled up on the street, lying in his own waste.

 

Back in 2020, there wasn't much BLM activity in Paterson, but some activists did arrive to paint "Black Lives Matter" in huge, yellow, block lettering on Martin Luther King Way. I wish they had saved money on that mural and invited the men in front of Midtown Liquors to reflect on how their lifestyle choices affect youngsters. What must it be like to be a black boy in that neighborhood, to witness potential role models surrendering their minds and dignity to alcohol and drugs, and then, in the middle of the day, paving the sidewalk?

 

Did I know Robert? No, never met him. Did I know Robert? He is so like so many of my students. I know his challenges. I know his determination. I know his hope. For decades, I said to my students, "Work hard. Play by the rules. You can have it all. You could even get a scholarship to Montclair."

 

I would have said that to Jasmin Wel, 25, who graduated from my school and was working in skin care, her chosen field. She was shot to death on December 3, 2021, a mile from me. Khadijah Wilson, 27, was shot to death less than a mile from me the day before Thanksgiving. Khadijah was a nurse's aide, as I once was. Remy Lee, eight months pregnant, was shot by her baby daddy, Donqua Thomas, in 2020. Remy was shot on the road I walk to get to work. Genesis Rincon, 12 years old, and Ragee Clark, 15, were both shot to death by 19-year-old Jhymiere Moore in 2014; like Robert, they were shot close to the intersection of Rosa Parks Boulevard and Martin Luther King Way.

 

Kristal Bayron-Nieves, 19, was working the night shift at a Harlem Burger King. She was saving up to buy a car and attend nursing school. Her mother felt that the Burger King job was teaching her daughter responsibility. Kristal and her mother moved to New York from Puerto Rico just two years ago. Kristal was shot to death by a robber on January 9, 2022.

 

Sandra Shells was a 70-year-old African American nurse. While waiting at a bus stop, she was physically attacked on January 19, 2022, and died of a fractured skull. "Shells worked at LAC+USC Medical Center for 38 years and is being remembered as a dedicated public servant … 'Everyone is going to remember her by her smile. She just was a really nice person, mentor. Everyone loved her,'" reports ABC news.

 

Brianna Kupfer, 24, was working in a Los Angeles furniture store on January 13 when a man walked in, stabbed her to death, casually left the store and went shopping, as surveillance video shows, for a vape pen.

 

Michelle Alyssa Go, 40, "was incredibly smart. She was just the person who did everything right," a neighbor said. "She volunteered for 10 years … coaching women and children on nutrition with a goal of stabilizing at-risk and homeless families … While on a committee that focused on empowering young adults and teenagers, Ms. Go prepared job candidates for interviews, helped fine-tune résumés and offered tips on personal finance." Go was pushed in front of a subway train on January 15, 2022.

 

Jason Rivera, 22, when asked why he wanted to be a police officer, replied, "Coming from an immigrant family, I will be the first to say that I am a member of the NYPD, the greatest police force in the world … I witnessed my brother being stopped and frisked … [this] really bothered me … I wanted to be a part of the men in blue [to] better the relationship between the community and the police … I know that something as small as helping a tourist with directions, or helping a couple resolve an issue, will put a smile on someone's face." Rivera was shot to death when responding to a domestic violence call. His partner, 27-year-old Wilbert Mora, was also killed.

 

LaShawn McNeil is the alleged killer of Rivera and Mora. The New York Daily News reports that "McNeil raged on social media, posting anti-government and anti-police rants on his Facebook page … One post included a link to a video of the rap song 'Hands Up' by Uncle Murda and Maino. The video – considered a tribute to Eric Garner, who died at the hands of the NYPD in 2014, and other victims of police violence – shows the two rappers pointing guns at a cop's head."

 

The DC chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted on January 23, 2022, that "tear jerker press conferences and proclamations of heroes" are "copaganda," and that "being Black is more dangerous than any job."

 

Every one of the victims mentioned above, except Robert, Jasmin, and Khadija, for whom no suspects have as yet been named, were killed by black men. I cannot find a description or a mugshot of Kerry Bell, the man accused of murdering Sandra Shells. If a white man beat a black nurse to death at a bus stop, that would be front-page news worldwide. Given that Shells' death has received minimal attention, I have to guess that her killer was black.

 

Brian Lehrer is the far-left morning talk host on WNYC, the far-left, New York City NPR affiliate. A caller phoned in on January 24 and oh-so-delicately broached the difficult topic. The caller said that there was an undeniable pattern in recent high-profile killings. The killers were black. "Four hundred years of racism!" Lehrer replied. And, of course, "Poverty!"

 

Poverty didn't cause Winston Glynn, to, allegedly, shoot Kristal Bayron-Nieves dead. Glynn was living in a homeless shelter on the taxpayer's tab. He demanded money; Bayron-Nieves gave him money. He was about to leave the Burger King, surveillance video shows, but he turned around and shot her to death anyway. Self-pity and a sense of entitlement appears to have motivated his actions. "Where's our reparations for four hundred years of f–king slavery!" he shouted during his perp walk. He alleged that police wrongfully and habitually arrest "n------." Ideology pulled that trigger. The very ideology that, Collette, you peddle on Facebook. And that Brian Lehrer broadcasts via taxpayer-funded radio.

 

On November 21, 2021, Darrell Brooks is alleged to have driven an SUV into a Christmas Parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Brooks is alleged to have murdered six people, including an 8-year-old boy, Jackson Sparks, and four grandmothers who were members of the "Dancing Grannies" dance troupe. A Brooks supporter began a GoFundMe fundraiser to support Brooks, justifying the appeal by citing Black Lives Matter, and stating that Brooks' imprisonment was "purely political and racist … There is no excuse for this continued treatment of black Americans by prosecutors around the country … RacismIsReal … NoJusticeNoPeace" Brooks' Facebook posts called for violence against whites and voiced support for Black Lives Matter. How did the Washington Post address what gave many signs of being an ideologically and racially motivated terror attack? By alleging that an SUV caused the Christmas parade massacre. "The Waukesha tragedy" was "caused by a SUV" (sic).

 

New York City's newly elected Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, is treating the recent shocking upturn in violence as a gun problem, sort of like the SUV problem in Waukesha. WNYC and other media are following suit. Anyone who listens to mainstream media now knows that the gun used to kill Officer Rivera and his partner, Wilbert Mora, was a 45 caliber Glock equipped with a drum magazine supporting 40 rounds, and that it was stolen in Baltimore in 2017. On January 25, 2022, Brian Lehrer blamed Southern, white, male Republican Mitch McConnell for current killings. Because Republicans traditionally resist gun control.

 

Collette, here's a question for you. What was the make, model, and capacity of the gun that white vigilante Travis McMichael used to shoot black jogger Ahmaud Arbery? You don't know anything about McMichael's gun, and neither do I. Any attention to the make, model, and capacity of the gun in the Arbery shooting would be an obscene distraction from the more important theme of the case. Any political and mass media attempt to write off the death of Ahmaud Arbery as "gun violence" would be met with outrage.

 

The black man who pushed Melissa Go in front of a train didn't need a gun to kill her. The black girls who carjacked immigrant Uber driver Mohammad Anwar and left him crushed on a sidewalk didn't need a gun to kill him. The black teen who pushed 84-year-old Thai grandfather Vicha Ratanapakdee to his death didn't need a gun. The 14- and 12-year-old black children who menaced Atlantic City shopkeeper Mehmood Ansari with a knife didn't need a gun to end his life. Shawn Laval Smith allegedly stabbed, not shot, Brianna Kupfer to death.

 

Collette, I'm old enough to remember the Civil Rights Movement and TV news programs engaging in mea culpas, saying that they were no longer going to identify criminals as "black," but merely as criminals. I know the history behind that choice. False accusations resulted in thousands of horrific lynchings. Emmett Till was just one victim; his accuser later admitted to making false accusations, accusations resulting in 14-year-old Till being lynched.

 

Collette, it's not sixty years ago. Collette, what if President Biden said he wanted to prepare for potential war with Russia by improving America's cavalry and increasing its stockpile of biplanes and dirigibles? He'd be recognized as demented and removed from office. We need to address today's problems, not those from sixty years ago.

 

We need to address the crisis in the family. LBJ's left-wing policies tried to replace the family with the government. Fathers, especially, were driven out of black households. Children from father-absent families face a plethora of challenges those from intact homes do not face. These children are far more likely to be imprisoned, and they are more likely than children raised with both biological parents to be abused and killed by their caretakers.

 

We need to address oppositional culture. Scholars like Orlando Patterson, John Ogbu, and John McWhorter have addressed oppositional culture and the menace it poses to black Americans. We should be reading these authors and assigning their works in schools.

 

We, Americans, as a country, have failed Robert Cuadra and all the other victims. And we've failed the victimizers, too. Look at any given photo of Jhymiere Moore, Genesis Rincon's killer. Does he look happy? Does he look, even, normal? Does he look like anyone who has ever been loved, cared for, guided, treated as if he mattered? I'm not saying he's not a killer and he doesn't belong in jail. He is a killer and he does belong in jail. But he is a victim, too. As long as black boys are victimized by neglect and false narratives, they will victimize others.

 

Heather MacDonald has the courage to say that "bourgeois values" are key to rescuing black boys in pain. Walter E. Williams enumerated salvific bourgeois values in his article "How Not to Be Poor." Graduate high school. Wait till you are married to have kids. Take a job and don't quit. Don't break the law. Heather MacDonald boosted such values here, and the responses from leftists in the comments section are absolutely murderous. MacDonald is called a racist, of course, but much worse.

 

Rich white liberals chose George Floyd as their poster boy, and not Philando Castile, not just because of the race of the officers who ended their lives. You chose the bad boy over the nice guy. You want black people to be gangstas, to live out the fantasies you dare not live out yourselves. Collette, you follow the rules. You delay gratification. You got married before you had kids. You don't drink or shoplift or shoot up. But you don't want black people to be like you. It's not that you don't want black people in your neighborhood; you don't want black people in your ethos. And there's more. Rich white liberals prefer George Floyd to Larry Elder, to Ben Carson, to Glenn Loury, to Candace Owens, to Carol Swain, because these high-achieving blacks worked hard, and played by the rules, and succeeded without your help. You want young men like Jhymiere Moore, who grew up on a street where his elders, black men, drink all day and lie on the sidewalk when they can no longer stand, to remain broken, because you want him to serve as an object lesson on how much America stinks, and how your bizarre hatred for your own country is justified. You want black people to suffer to underwrite your narrative, and to wait till you come along and rescue them with more welfare, more affirmative action, more lowered standards, more street murals of Mary kissing George Floyd.

 

Collette, I'm dyslexic. I grew up poor, that is, at-times, no-shoes, no-food poor, my dad was an alcoholic, and I was an abused kid. I'm fat and awkward, and when I was a grad student I was stricken with a chronic illness. For years, I often couldn't walk, could barely see, and could not stop vomiting. But I got a PhD, and my dissertation became an award-winning book.

 

How did I do it? Many factors contributed. Here's one. Those merciless nuns, who set the bar high, and never lowered it. We were poor. The nuns didn't care. "You want this?" they said. "Jump through this hoop to acquire it. If you can't, you can't have what you want." They didn't just make demands. They told us about a God who created the universe and yet was closer to us than our own breath, and cared about us intimately. We jumped, Collette. We jumped, higher and higher and higher and higher. And we believed that God had our backs, so we couldn't let Him down. You can't stand it that people can achieve without you lowering the bar. But we can. I began this letter quietly, but now I want to scream – at you, at Brian Lehrer, at Eric Adams and Cory Booker, at Stephen Colbert living in the Montclair where Robert will never study. I want to scream at all of you: my life, Robert's life, Jasmin's and Khadijah's and Remy's life, yes even Donqua's and Jhymeire's lives – our lives matter. People like you have power that people like me don't have. I'm begging you. Cry, as you did over George Floyd, for Robert Cuadra.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

Hearing Aids

 

I lost most of my hearing decades ago after a long, torturous bout with an inner ear disorder. Alas it looks like I'm losing even more hearing now, and today a doctor urged me, again, to get hearing aids.
 
I wanted him to tell me that there was some way I could stop the process, but he had no such good news. Vestibular disorders are hard to treat and little researched, or so it seems to me.

 

I'm a very hearing-oriented person. I'm bad at recognizing faces but I do recognize voices, sometimes years after hearing them and only hearing them for a second or so. I don't have a TV, and as a dyslexic reading is hard, but I have the radio on all the time. I started to cry.

 

Dr. P asked me I felt that losing my hearing would stigmatize me. No, I said. It's not that. I'm not afraid of stigma. After all, because of my ear disorder, which destroyed my balance, I walk with a cane, and have for most of my life. I'm already stigmatized. It's just that hearing is so important to me.  

 

I told Dr. P a family story. My Slovak grandmother, a peasant woman, lost her firstborn, Mary, in the influenza pandemic of 1918. I think of Mary as my spirit aunt.

 

My grandmother prayed hard to conceive again, and to have a healthy child. She prayed to Saint Joseph, Jesus' adoptive father. Of course my grandmother named her second born child "Joseph."

 

But then disease struck Joseph, too.

 

He was very, very ill. The doctor told my grandmother to give up on him. He was a goner. Just cut the cord. Write him off. We can't do anything for him.

 

I think of her in that house, which I did enter when we visited Slovakia over fifty years later. A house my grandfather built my hand. Very simple, stark, small, basic. No electricity, no running water. A woman alone watching her second baby die.

 

But my grandmother rejected the doctor's advice. She prayed hard for Joseph.  And he lived. But he was deaf.

 

When my grandmother, my mother, and my uncle Joe emigrated to America -- my grandfather was already here, working the coal mines -- life was hard. My mother told me about foraging for food in a garbage dump. My grandfather had emphysema from the mines and couldn't work.

 

Someone had to work to feed the family. My grandmother had four more kids after reuniting with her husband. She had to take care of the kids, and grandpa.

 

She sent my mother out to work as a nanny and domestic servant. My mother, a very smart woman, never got to go to school in America, and she was doomed, without any school diplomas, to doing domestic and factory work for the rest of her life.

 

It was very different for my Uncle Joe. Because he was deaf, he qualified for various charities. He attended a special school, learned a skilled trade, and became much more economically comfortable than my mother would ever be.

 

In short, I said to Dr. P, being deaf was a surprise benefit to my Uncle Joe.

 

Dr P looked thoughtful.

 

He reached up and removed a hearing aid from his ear. I had never noticed this before.

 

When his mother was pregnant with him, she had rubella, aka German measles.

 

Doctors told her to abort the fetus growing inside her.  Birth defects would be inevitable.

 

She was, Dr. P. said, a religious person, and she declined to have the abortion.

 

Dr. P. was born hard of hearing. He had to attend special classes and he was mercilessly teased. He imitated how other kids would make fun of him, using the voice that people who are hard of hearing from birth speak with. I was astounded. He captured that voice perfectly.

 

It wasn't till he was older that he got his first hearing aids, and that changed his life. He went to medical school.

 

One day, he was home alone with his mom, and she had a medical emergency. She was dying. By chance, Dr. P. was there, and he performed the necessary procedure to save her life.

 

His mother later said to him, "They told me to end your life, and I did not, and here you saved my life. Had you not been here, I would have died."

 

Dr. P. looked very thoughtful and said to me "I don't normally share that story with people."

 

Two stories about things not turning out as one might have thought.

"Woke Racism" by John McWhorter Book Review

 

Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John McWhorter
A Black Scholar's Elegant Prose Excoriates Woke
 
John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He has also published in numerous prestigious outlets, and he is currently an op-ed columnist at the New York Times. McWhorter is the son of a college administrator father and a professor mother. He attended Friends Select School, a private, a 189-year-old college-preparatory institution. In short, McWhorter is a highly accomplished member of the American elite. He is black. A man should never be reduced to a skin color. But we live in, as the apocryphal Chinese curse is alleged to say, "interesting times," and, so, yes, every mention of McWhorter's new book Woke Racism may skip his many accomplishments, and focus on his color.

 

"I know quite well," he writes, "that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when they're written by a black person, and I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book … A version of this book written by a white writer would be blithely dismissed as racist." As McWhorter notes, he is accused of being "not really black."

 

McWhorter responds by reminding our Woke overlords, whom he calls "The Elect," that their very ideology insists that every black man in America is living under the oppressive boot of white supremacy. The New York Times published at least one op-ed by a black professor who insisted that being a professor is no escape from America's pervasive racism. Chris Lebron's June 16, 2020 op-ed was entitled, "White America Wants Me to Conform. I Won’t Do It. Even at Elite Universities, I Was Exposed to the Disease that Has Endangered Black Lives for So Long." So, yes, as McWhorter points out, by the Elect's own value system, he is indeed "black enough."

 

McWhorter has been producing necessary prose for decades; he should be required reading for American students. His essay entitled "Explaining the Black Education Gap" in Wilson Quarterly's summer, 2000 issue, is one of the boldest pieces about education I've ever read. I wish I could require every one of our Woke overlords to read McWhorter's June 11, 2020 piece in Quillette "Racist Police Violence Reconsidered." 

 

McWhorter is an exquisite wordsmith and Woke Racism's pages are replete with lapidary phrases that are destined to fill the book's Goodreads favorite quotes page. Some samples:

 

Woke racism, McWhorter writes, teaches blacks "that we are the first people in the history of the species for whom it is a form of heroism to embrace the slogan 'Yes, we can't.' … Black America has met nothing so disempowering – including the cops – since Jim Crow."

 

"For us, for us only, cries of weakness constitute a kind of strength, and for us only, what makes us interesting, what makes us matter, is a curated persona as eternally victimized souls … White people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters' sense of self."

 

"You can make a shark approaching you go away by bopping it on the nose … We need to, metaphorically, start bopping Elects on the nose when they come for us."

 

Woke Racism's main thrust is that Woke is a religion, and, as such, in McWhorter's understanding of what religion entails, the Elect are beyond the reach of reason. McWhorter provides a handy chart that outlines exactly how Woke demands are self-contradictory. Whether or not whites apologize to black people, whether whites remain silent or speak, whether whites move into or out of black neighborhoods, makes no difference. Each behavior, and others McWhorter lists, are racist. In short, there is no escape from the machinery of accusation. "The sense our society must make …  is tarring whites as racist and showing that you know that they are racist … anti-racism is everything regardless of logic."

 

Woke is not just a silly fad; it is destroying lives. "Being called a racist is all but equivalent to being called a pedophile." Americans, out of "simple terror," are "peeing themselves." Americans fear this accusation just as "the serf cowering under the threat of a disfiguring smash from the knout." The elect "are gruesomely close to Hitler's racial notions in their conception of an alien, blood-deep malevolent 'whiteness' in their simplistic conception of what it means to be 'black,' in their crude us-versus-them conception of how society works, as if we were all still rival bands of australopithecines."

 

McWhorter cites the dire fates of innocent people like Alison Roman, a New York Times food writer; Leslie Neal-Boylan, the dean of nursing at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; David Shor, a data analyst at a consulting firm; and Greg Patton, a professor at USC Marshall, whose careers were damaged by trumped up, baseless Woke hysteria. These people, whose persecution made headlines, are not alone. McWhorter maintains an active YouTube presence with his fellow black conservative Glenn Loury, also an Ivy League professor. "Droves" of "students and professors" write to McWhorter and Loury, "frightened that this new ideology will ruin their careers, departments, or fields."

 

McWhorter vehemently rejects the Elect's insistence that America is a racist country. He documents how very far America has come from its racist past. The Elect cling to the idea that America is racist "because, with progress, the Elect lose their sense of purpose." Because of this need for a sense of purpose, McWhorter writes, no change would satisfy the Elect. If reparations were ever paid, the Elect would announce that no amount of money could ever compensate black people. McWhorter's friend announced on social media that he agrees with BLM. For this statement, he was "roasted." To say that one agrees with BLM implies that one might disagree, and any such implication is a racist thought crime.

 

McWhorter utterly rejects fictions concocted by the Elect to support the sense of purpose they receive from denigrating America. The Elect like to attribute the academic achievement gap to white racism. McWhorter writes, "Black boys do commit more violent offenses in public schools than other kids. Period." Because teachers are punished with the "racist" slur for reporting violent incidents committed by black boys, "underreporting of serious incidents" is "rampant." Not just teachers and fellow students are harmed. The black perpetrators are harmed themselves by the Elect's self-serving fiction. "to insist that bigotry is the only possible reason for suspending more black boys than white boys is to espouse harming black students."

 

The affirmative action practiced by college admission offices also harms black students. Selective colleges admit black students who are not prepared for their rigor. These students are more likely to drop out. Had these students been rejected in the first place, and been admitted to a less selective college, they might have persisted at a less demanding program and gotten a degree, and an easier path to a career.

 

Destructive condescension extends to the world beyond college. Nikole Hannah-Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for the 1619 Project, whose central claim is "quite simply false." "Someone has received a Pulitzer Prize for a mistaken interpretation of historical documents about which legions of actual scholars are expert," McWhorter points out.

 

If a black person attempts to be anything other than "not white," that black person's individuality is erased. A black person, to satisfy white patrons, must be a stereotype, not an individual. McWhorter asks his reader to name a black author who has written a non-fiction book on some subject other than blackness. He says that this is hard to do because the Elect want black people to focus on being pathetic victims of racism, not, say, experts on auto repair or Inca architecture.

 

McWhorter does not, though, reject all of Woke. He approves of statue removal, but they have to be the right statues. Remove Robert E. Lee and Woodrow Wilson; keep George Washington. McWhorter does not address the belief of many that Robert E. Lee is a mere Woke camel's nose under the tent, or, to mix a metaphor like a Martini, a mere Woke camel's nose on the sill of the Overton Window. The Woke chose Lee as an easy target. And then they moved on to chopping down or merely desecrating memorials to Hans Christian Heg, a Norwegian immigrant and abolitionist martyr who gave his entire life to ending slavery; Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish freedom fighter who debated slavery with Thomas Jefferson and left money for the liberation of American slaves in his will; Miguel Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, who was himself a slave; Thomas Jefferson, author of the document that made the abolitionist movement's victory inevitable; black soldiers who fought against slavery; and a Lincoln statue funded by former slaves. McWhorter himself reveals awareness of how, when it comes to Woke, one does not get to pick and choose. "This is not a buffet; the Elect is a prix fixe affair." McWhorter doesn't seem to realize that that Woke principle applies to statues.

 

McWhorter agrees with the Woke on the existence of white privilege, insisting that white "figures of authority" are like all other white people, and that white people are "not subject to stereotypes." Reading that, I wondered if McWhorter has ever had a real conversation with a poor or immigrant white person, and, given his biography, I feel it safe to guess that he has not. It really doesn't even require actual contact with non-elite whites to understand that "not subject to stereotypes" would be laughable were it not so callously irresponsible. I've met very few poor, white, Christian Southerners, but as a consumer of American culture, from "Tobacco Road" to Bill Maher's jokes, I know that poor, white, Christian Southerners are one of the most egregiously stereotyped and safe-to-hate populations in this country.

 

New York City will prioritize providing COVID treatment to non-whites over whites. Previously, governments prioritized non-whites in vaccine distribution. A black applicant to a college can have a much lower SAT score than a white one and receive admission, while the white applicant will be rejected. These facts and more call a universal and eternal "white privilege" into question.

 

McWhorter's vision of whites as being all pretty much the same, interchangeable, the "default," as he put it, is exposed when he says that the difference between Germans and Slavs is a "horizontal" difference, not a "vertical" difference of "who is hurting who" (sic). No self-aware German or Slav could read that sentence and not recognize McWhorter's lack of awareness. Germans have been aggressing against Slavs – the famous "Drang nach Osten" or "drive to the east" – for at least a millennium. Berlin was a Slavic settlement before it was German. In the twelfth century, Germans carried out a Slavic Crusade; they effectively erased the original Prussians, a non-Germanic people; they carried out a kulturkampf against Polish Catholics. The 1938 Russian film Alexander Nevsky depicts medieval Slavs fighting for their lives against invading Germanic people. The film roused Russians who had to fight invading German Nazis. In short, no, whites are not all just alike.

 

McWhorter cites real-world facts-on-the-ground to counter the idea that, as Ta-Nehisi Coates put it, "the total elimination of white supremacy" would solve whatever is "wrong with black people." In fact very well-meaning efforts by anti-racist whites have not produced the results desired. In 1987, Wall Street money manager George Weiss promised to pay college tuition for 112 black sixth graders. Their part of the bargain was to graduate high school, not do drugs, not have children before marriage, and not commit crimes. Weiss "also gave them tutors, workshops, and after-school programs, kept them busy in summer programs, and provided them with counselors … forty-five of the kids never made it through high school." Nineteen of the sixty-seven boys became felons. By 1999, "The forty-five girls had sixty-three children between them, and more than half had become mothers before the age of eighteen." These sad results were not caused by white racism, McWhorter argues, but rather because "these kids had been raised amid a different sense of what is normal than white kids in the burbs." The problem, McWhorter diagnoses, is "culture."

 

Nor is Weiss' experience a "fluke," McWhorter writes. In Kansas City, during the same time period, a $1.4 billion dollar effort was made to improve schools serving black students. "Dropout rates stayed the same, the achievement gap between white and black students sat frozen, and the schools ended up needing security guards to combat theft and violence."

 

McWhorter's book is more about description and analysis than prescription, but he includes a few short pages on what he thinks should be done to help black people. He offers three suggestions: end the war on drugs; teach reading using the phonics method, rather than the whole word method; and recommend trade schools rather than college. This reader did not see how McWhorter's three suggestions get around the problem of culture he describes so fearlessly in his other works. If a billion and a half dollars spent on improving schools resulted in negligible gains, it's not clear how phonics will move the needle.

 

I hope this review conveys the excellence to be found in McWhorter's book. I was not as enthused about this book as I'd hoped to be. There are two reasons.

 

As I was working on this review, 200 feet behind me, an eccentrically attired black woman was standing on a sidewalk, staring at a chain link fence. I first noticed her at ten a.m.; I don't know how long she'd been there before that. I checked on her frequently throughout the day. For seven hours, she stood staring at the chain link fence. Neighborhood children walked past the woman as if she were not there. They have learned young their skills for survival here.

 

I wondered if I could help the woman by talking to her. I'm white. The neighborhood is not. I might be perceived as a "Karen" and trouble, possibly violent, might ensue. Should I ignore her? I could not. Her insistent staring at the fence, hour after hour, broke my heart. Should I call the police? The police might say that she is not breaking the law and they can't do anything. Snow was predicted to begin to fall along with the night.

 

After she'd been out there for eight hours, an ambulance arrived. Uniformed personnel emerged and began to talk to her and also to a male who had arrived on the sidewalk shortly before the ambulance. He was sitting on a milk crate and drinking liquor. The ambulance blocked the narrow street completely. Residents could not drive in or out for about the next hour. The two resisted their rescuers for that hour, and finally succumbed. The ambulance drove off with them.

 

On another recent day, a black woman was walking down the middle of the street in revealing pajamas. She had no shoes. She was muttering incoherencies. Cars swerved. I pulled her out of the street, called 911, and stayed with her till help arrived.  

 

A mile and a half from where I worked on this review, Remy Lee, eight months pregnant, was shot to death in the street by Donqua Thomas, her baby daddy.

 

I watch children grow up from the innocence and promise of infancy into lives that very quickly descend into much more misery than is necessary. Why? That very culture that McWhorter dares name. We could change that culture tomorrow. A generation – twenty years – from now, there would be that many fewer women staring at chain link fences even as snow begins to fall; that many fewer taxpayer dollars devoted to their temporary and incomplete rescue.

 

I wish there had been less of a sense of cocktail party banter and more of a sense of urgency in McWhorter's book. Black people are being harmed by the lie that they are helpless victims and only white people can save them, and that harm is real and pressing and could be ended tomorrow. McWhorter wants short lists of prescriptions. No big programs. Here's half of my two-item list: consequences. Consequences for small things. Some residents in my building drop garbage randomly in the halls. That garbage includes the bones and skin of the chicken they are eating. If someone said to a young person, "You cannot just drop your garbage. You need to transport it to a trash can," and delivered consequences when and if that statement was ignored, much would change. Impulse control and a sense of duty to the wider society, an awareness that urinating in the elevator creates a clean-up job for the Hispanic janitorial crew, who don't deserve to be saddled with that, that impulse control, instilled young, can mature, in adulthood, to hesitation when a man feels the urge to shoot his baby momma.

 

The second item on my two-item list is love. Black parents must choose to love their black babies enough to graduate high school, to move into their own homes and support themselves with their own jobs, and commit to marriage with their co-parent, before producing those babies. To do less is abusive of black babies. Someone should be saying this to black parents. If that message were delivered and hit home, twenty years from now, one would have reason to hope that ghettoes would be on the verge of extinction.

 

My second problem with Woke Racism is its Christophobia. McWhorter's main argument is that Woke is a religion "eerily akin to devout Christianity." Woke Racism is like a palimpsest. One layer is an urbane take down of Woke written so charmingly it could almost be an anthology of Cole Porter lyrics. Underneath that layer McWhorter rants against Christianity and Christians. He says that Woke is like a "virus," a "fungus," a "little worm," and "smallpox." By extension, Christianity is all those things.

 

McWhorter flings the standard arsenal of accusations against Catholicism: witch burners! Inquisitors! Medieval throwbacks living in the Dark Ages! Resisters of science! Bigoted murderers of Muslims! Stupid blind followers of irrational ideas!

 

In response to McWhorter's belief that Catholics are all about witch trials, please see here and here. For the Inquisition, please see here, here, and here. For the use of "medieval" and "Dark Ages" as a slur implying that the Catholic Church imposed a reign of stupidity on Europe, see here, here, and here. For Catholicism as the enemy of science, see here and here. Regarding the charge that Catholics are "lesser humans," are irrational, hate-inflamed murderers of Muslims, see here, here, here, here, here and here. Christians, McWhorter states, believe a Bible that "makes no sense" and that cannot be questioned. I invite him to read every introduction and every footnote here. Then read this and every other book in the series. Christians can't ask questions? Start reading here. Need something shorter? Here. Finally, regarding Christianity as foundational to Western Civilization, McWhorter should read Tom Holland's Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

 

McWhorter has no love for Protestants, either. His idea of a representational Protestant is Saturday Night Live's "Church Lady," ugly, hypocritical, and vicious. McWhorter mentions Cotton Mather, a Puritan clergyman implicated in the Salem Witch Trials, but not Robert Calef or William Milbourne, contemporaneous Christians who criticized Mather's role. McWhorter says that race hustler Robin DiAngelo is the Woke incarnation of Aimee Semple McPherson. In fact McPherson was a trailblazing Pentecostal preacher. She was a self-directed religious force before women could even vote, and many felt that women should not preach. A teenage bride, she traveled to China, where her missionary husband died of dysentery and malaria. She returned to the US and began a career as an iterant preacher. She and her two children were so poor that they slept in leaky tents and ate meals of canned corn. She set up soup kitchens, school lunch programs, and free clinics. She "alleviated suffering on an epic scale." Daniel Mark Epstein, McPherson's biographer, said he found no evidence of fraud in McPherson's unprecedented number of faith healings. In short, McPherson deserves respect for the hardships she undertook and for the good she did; her biography is not comparable to Robin DiAngelo's career.

 

McWhorter praises Jane Addams and Martin Luther King, two Nobel Peace Prize winners whose work was informed by Christianity. Christophobes can have their cake and eat it, too. McWhorter, like everyone, has his own belief system: human progress. He dedicates his book to "each who find it within themselves to take a stand against [Woke's] detour in humanity's intellectual, cultural, and moral development." The idea that humans can make moral progress – as opposed to the Christian idea that man has a flawed nature that must constantly struggle to abide by a higher, divine law – also has its deadly expressions. The New Soviet Man was to be arrived at after killing off all the old style men through actions like the mass murder of priests and nuns, and the starving of millions of Ukrainians who refused to "progress." And McWhorter praises the Enlightenment as a model, but then equates all he hates about Woke with a "reign of terror." The actual Reign of Terror was very much an Enlightenment phenomenon.

 

McWhorter gets in a couple of gratuitous shots at the, in his words, "openly bigoted" Donald Trump and his supporters. These marginal statements on such an inflammatory and divisive topic as Trump will alienate some readers unnecessarily.

 

This is not the first time McWhorter, a man I admire, has made derogatory comments about people like me. In a December 30, 2008, Forbes article, McWhorter refers to threatening, racist whites as "bohunks" (sic). "Bohunk" refers to Americans of Christian, peasant, Eastern European descent: Polish-, Czech-, and Ukrainian-Americans, for example. McWhorter's comment is part of a trend, dating back at least to the 1960s, of elites attributing racism to poor white ethnics, as I describe in this blog post and this book.

 

McWhorter's snobbery directed at working class whites, Trump supporters, and Christians will present few obstacles to many readers of his book. His intended audience, he says, consists of New York Times readers and people who listen to NPR. Many of those readers will be attracted to, rather than put off by, McWhorter's argument that Woke is bad because Woke is like Christianity.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery