You remember Colin Kaepernick, right? When he used to be a football player he took a knee for a cause, and after hanging dormant for the better part of a year, his knee has taken on a new life of its own, has become the catalyst for words and actions and tough talk and hurt feelings and harsh realities and, maybe, liberating ideas. In all this dust-up we can’t lose track of the knee. We mustn’t let the subject be changed, the agendas that come from the mouth can’t be allowed to overpower the knee.

The “knee” isn’t about football or the NFL or the flag or patriotism or the songs we sing at sporting events, it’s about race. Racism. Racial inequality. We need to stay on that point and search for perspective, rather than being wave-washed by emotion. I already know what my perspective is, improving the state of race in this country requires me to gain and embrace the perspective of others. I’m looking for that perspective. I often find it in books. I know that inequality and injustice cannot begin to ebb until the white man gets up and stands next to the black man in support of his cause; until the black reality of oppression eclipses your discomfort about the proper way address flag and country. This has to be a search for perspective.

♦

Perspective. Twelve U.S. Presidents owned slaves, eight while in office. This is tough to reconcile. How do liberty, freedom and equality coexist with enslavement? Perhaps it is not to be reconciled. To be sure, it is not to be excused. John Jay Chapman said, “There was never a moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention …” Another axiom that was often tossed about was that (paraphrasing) slavery was like holding a wolf by the ears, you didn’t like it but you didn’t dare not let it go. I call bullshit. What would have happened if someone would have shot the “coiled” snake or released the wolf? Certainly, James Madison and probably the other Founders believed that if it excluded slavery, the Southern states wouldn’t ratify the Constitution. There would be no America. The American Revolution would be meaningless. So the Founders, so prescient on so many other principles and concepts of citizens’ rights, essentially looked the other way. They kicked the can down the road, and the can continues to clank along American roads today. The thought that slavery might cause the dissolution of the Union terrorized Jefferson. He felt the Republican experiment was right and that any flaws in it would ultimately be righted by Republican principles. In other words, it will work itself out; let someone else figure out how. It’s hard to second-guess people like Washington, Madison and Jefferson. They believed the chance to form a democratic republic would not come again. Still, the hypocrisy is immense, their lips spoke freedom, their actions, their founding blueprint spoke of one man owning another.

♦

Perspective. Your view on race relations in this country, your view on whether there is progress being made toward equality, is 100 percent influenced by where you do the viewing from. The view from the hill belies the reality in the valley. I’ve always thought it virtually impossible for a white man to have the slightest clue about a black man’s life, a black man’s circumstances, a black man’s struggle with racism. The same experience void exists between rich man/poor man. As such, I have sought out books that may provide a thin baseline for a remedial understanding of another man’s reality. The result has been humbling but in no way surprising. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Blacks are through with segregation, now, henceforth and evermore. We are through with tokenism and gradualism, which lead only to donothingism and standstillism, we must move from the quicksands of social injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.” He’s right, we must move, but we haven’t. Black remains segregated from white, rich remain separate from poor, despite the reality that some blacks are rich and many whites are poor. Separate cannot be equal, this has been proved. How does racism live on? Racism, believing race determines your human value, is for sure politically incorrect, meaning most people can’t or won’t say it out loud, but why are so many still saying it under their breath? I think the answer is partly attributable to the original sin: that the colonists brought slavery with them to America and that a constitution was drafted that allowed slavery. Those roots gave hate permission—permission to view races with the eye of inequality, permission for one class to think it should be served by another, permission to build walls between countrymen. More people than we know, more people than imaginable, are still using that original version of that American playbook—the one where presidents owned slaves, etc. Turns out that slavery never went away, it just evolved into different concepts. I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would say? Maybe something like: “The American experiment will never be complete, it was always intended to be a living organism. Keep working at it!” And maybe that’s noble, but the concept that a democratic republic would, at some point, naturally course correct, eventually, organically purge itself of evil poisons, was folly.

♦

Perspective in book form, along with my humble reviews. Stand up, take a knee, read on.

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

“In America, it is tradition to destroy the black body … it is heritage … the (black) soul was the body that fed the tobacco and the (black) spirit was the blood that watered the cotton and these created the first fruits in the American garden.” I try to never say, “I know how you feel,” because it trivializes the plight of the person you say it to and because most of the time it’s untrue, if not disingenuous. It’s a fabulously silly thing for a white man to say to a black man. So I don’t know how the author feels, but I know why he feels that way: He tells us with a kick-to-the-balls dose of honesty and straightforward language that simply feels revolutionary. “All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be twice as good, which is to say accept half as much.” If you’re willing to look at racism, the ongoing white-on-black hate that is in America’s DNA, then these are words you need to read. The book is written as a letter—a love letter it turns out—to the author’s son. But as if to illustrate that love can be conveyed through even harsh words and concepts, the father-to-son letter is purposely void of hope—at least false hope. And it is in that sledgehammer of candor, in the message that—for blacks in America, there can be no expectation of things getting better and no aspiration to anything that looks like what used to be called the American Dream—this book takes you by the lapels and shakes the shit out of you.

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, by Jill Leovy

First-rate and well written. An explosive, polarizing topic and a narrative that slaps you in the face from the first page. The Los Angeles Police Department is short on officers and resources; they use it as an excuse for not solving murders, but people on the streets say the real reason is that LAPD and society at large simply don’t care if blacks kill other blacks. Though the Los Angeles black population is in decline, L.A. blacks die in the same numbers as blacks in cities with much larger black populations like New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Detroit. The white population says blacks don’t respect life, that they’d rather use or gangbang than take responsibility. Perspective can be a chilling truth or a damn lie. Still, there’s one powerful fact: Blacks in L.A. (and many other places in urban America) are marginalized to the point of occupying an impossibly small space—physical space, like a handful of neighborhoods or a few square miles cut out of a city landscape. That space becomes the entire world, and since these people are poor in the extreme, with no prospects and no way out, the only avenue to status or hope or respect, is to be in complete control of this shrinking space (like the South L.A. neighborhoods illustrated in this book)—and if that means killing, so be it. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance or conscientious stupidity.”

The New Jim Crow: Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander and Cornel West

Powerfully written and backed by ridiculously compelling statistics, the authors paint an unassailable picture of the great lengths America will go to to ensure that blacks remain the perpetual underclass. Throughout American history, from slavery to Jim Crow to modern-day incarceration, politicians have triggered a collapse of resistance to change to appeal to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group that is eager not to be trapped at the bottom of the totem pole below blacks. The book asserts that incarceration—disproportionately ensnaring blacks—is simply the latest form of slavery in America (or in other words, The New Jim Crow) and it is institutionalized—not happening by chance but by the wheels of a political and societal machine. Only 2 percent of Americans thought drugs were a problem when the war on drugs started in 1980. The war on drugs started anyway. President Clinton’s “tough on crime” stance resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any U.S. president. Using the patriotic cover of tough on crime and anti-drugs, American civil liberties were trampled. Law enforcement budgets and resources soared and it became easier to make arrests (drug suspicion), imprison people (an angry mob of judges and juries) and keep them in jail (mandatory minimums)—all of which conspired against poor blacks. In 2006 one in 14 black men, one in nine between the ages of 20 and 35, were in jail. The ratio for whites was one in 106. The New Jim Crow paints a bleak picture of our racial reality: (1) the “American dream” does not apply to blacks, (2) we have made virtually no progress toward racial equality in the past 50 years and, (3) racism against blacks is so ingrained into our country’s DNA that it will forever be our national shame.

Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle, by Kristen Green

The landmark Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education happens, and on paper, there is no more segregation in America’s public schools. In practice, things are far from peacefully blended, especially in Virginia’s Prince Edward County. Instead of integrating their public schools, the local school and county officials decide to close them. For most of the white kids, this means finding a new private school; for most of the black kids, it means no school at all—your life’s education has now ended, the last grade you finished is where it all ends. It turns out that the author’s grandparents were complicit in these acts, or at best, looked the other way. It’s an interesting story, well told. Though the author tries time and again to create an underlying feeling of hope—that her family is not tied to a despicable act that fucked over an entire generation of blacks—she can’t, revealing perhaps the biggest takeaway of the book: Racism is embedded so deeply in the fabric of America that time can’t/isn’t healing it. We now know that a segregated school, a segregated society, are inherently UNEQUAL. A half a century ago, people knew this as well, perhaps not empirically, but certainly according to the most basic code of what’s right and wrong. We need to say out loud that depriving an individual of opportunity and therefore success, hope and happiness is pure evil, and evil is what was done in Prince Edward County.