Last month the actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog ranging from \u201cThe Great Debaters\u201d to \u201cThe Crying Game\u201d to \u201cGhost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.\u201d By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can\u2019t get his turn as Idi Amin out of their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, he\u2019d been robbed. <\/span>
<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span> Since the Whitaker affair, I\u2019ve read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a \u201csincere mistake\u201d made by a \u201cdecent man\u201d who was \u201cjust doing his job.\u201d I believe him. \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span> The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker\u2019s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years. <\/span>
<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span> The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant\u2019s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. \u201cWhat if they did that to your son?\u201d she asked.<\/span>
<\/span> And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\nI strongly you go and read the whole thing.<\/p>\n
Bigotry is an evil thing, but it is in all of us. It is a part of our Yetzer HaRa <\/i>(evil inclination).<\/p>\n
By consigning racism to being the exclusive purview evil people, we have denied the racism inside ourselves, and inside our society.<\/p>\n
Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And so are you. We all are. One of the conceits that many people have is that only bad people, with black hearts, are racists. There is none among us who has not, at some point or another, experienced racist or bigoted feelings. Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing an Op\/Ed at the New York Times, muses on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[967,1002,1001],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigotry","category-good-writing","category-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183424"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183424\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}