The Tides of Racial Reconciliation

Charles M. Blow

New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow recently wrote: "Sometimes you simply have to call a thing a thing, and the thing here is that Trump’s inner racist is being revealed, and America’s not-so-silent racists are rising in applause."

Heather Heyer

He was referring, first and foremost, to "Trump’s growing intolerance and his growing adoption and internalizing of white nationalist ideology," as revealed by his reactions to the recent tragedy at Charlottesville in which a counter-protester named Heather Heyer was killed by a vehicle driven by one of the white supremacists protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.

I've been trying to figure out how best to respond, myself, to Charlottesville.

On the one hand, Blow is right to rue the president's constantly appealing to Americans' worst hatreds, whether racial or ethnic or otherwise. He is right to worry that all the hatred, whether it is of African Americans or Latinos or Muslims or any other group defined by skin color or religion or sexuality or gender, is pulling us in the wrong direction entirely.

Yet it seems clear to me that the tides of history are moving in the direction of reconciliation, not hatred. The most important of these tides is the one that is moving us toward a healing of the scars of African slavery in America.

We have, after all, just lived during the time of the first African American presidency, that of Barack Obama. Fifty years ago, no one would have thought that possible.

Catherine Pugh

I live in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, a city whose mayor, Catherine Pugh, is African American. Citing questions of her city's safety and security, she wisely orchestrated the removal of the city's Confederate monuments in the wake of Charlottesville. For Baltimore to have an African American mayor — the third black mayor in a row since 2007, and the fifth since 1987 — is something that would have seemed possible in 1967.

But the other side of that same coin is a negative one. Baltimore can have had a succession of black mayors in large part because of the white flight to the suburbs that took place during the 1950s and 1960s.

So the overall direction of the tide during the 70 years of my life has indeed been a positive one, in the direction of racial reconciliation. Yet I have to acknowledge that backlash has never ceased to rear its ugly head. The best metaphor I can come up with for that recurrent backlash is that of undertow. And as Charles M. Blow indicates in his column, undertow can be very, very dangerous.