INSPIRED BY THE BRITISH FILM RED, WHITE AND BLUE

Two weeks ago I watched the British film Red, White and Blue directed by Steve McQueen. McQueen directed 12 years a Slave which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2014. The setting of the film is London in the 1980s. The plot centers on a conflict between Afro-Caribbean Ken Logan and his son Leroy.

Ken drives a haulage truck and one day two cops beat him for disputing a ticket. Leroy has earned a Ph.D. in forensic science but decides to join the police force to, in his words, “bring change to this organization, from the inside.” When Ken learns of this, he confronts his son and calls him a traitor, for joining the enemy.

It is the film’s final scene that haunts and triggered this blog about race in America. Ken and Leroy are sitting alone across a table in Ken’s small kitchen. What Ken does not know, but the audience does, is that Leroy’s police colleagues commit several acts of racism against Leroy during his first six months on the force.

Ken: You know I find. The world, it just moves forward. Always do. Big change. That is a slow turning wheel.

Leroy: Sometimes I think. The earth needs to be scorched. So something good will come of it. Something good.

The second time I watched the film, I noticed something more than words. When Leroy says “the earth needs to be scorched,” for the first time in the film Ken looks directly at Leroy and lets Leroy’s words come inside him. Racism’s different disguises has brought father and son together. Ken and Leroy raise and touch their whiskey glasses and the film ends.

Red, White and Blue is about the lives of Afro-Caribbeans in Britain in the 1980s but the ideas stated in the final scene dialogue apply to America in 2021.

1. “Big Change”

I am a white man born in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball. I remember one of my father’s brothers in the 1950s casually using the n-word and my father in the 1960s referring to Nat King Cole as a “good negro.” I had no black friends, no black classmates in grade school and one in high school. I wept when Barack Obama won the presidency on November 4, 2008 and again the next night in LaCrosse, Wisconsin as Bob Dylan finished a concert with Blowin in the wind.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris

Thinking back over America in my lifetime, big changes have occurred giving African-Americans more choices for how to live their lives. Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are the most visible figures of these changes.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

I wish I could break the chains holding me

I wish I could say all the things I could say

Say em loud, say em clear

For the whole world to see

In 1967, Nina Simone sang these words from the song “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.” This song became an anthem for America’s civil rights movement. When I listen to this song, I feel Simone’s pain and yearning. I ache for her and wish America had been better for her and millions of others THEN. But it is better today. The chains are fewer. Without this change story, without this reform story, cynicism and hopelessness reign, making further reforms impossible.

2. “Slow turning wheel”

George Floyd

In Red, White and Blue, two white police officers beat Ken Logan and two white police colleagues choose not to back up Leroy Logan when a burglar Leroy is chasing beats him. In America in 2020, George Floyd dies at the knee of Derek Chauvin. After Floyd’s death, the Washington Post interviewed Sociologist Orlando Patterson about what hasn’t changed between the 1992 beating death of Rodney King and George Floyd.

The common denominator is police violence and brutality. We have these brutal acts and killings, and we have outrage, protests, commissions, recommendations, and again and again, the police still continue in their old ways. They don’t seek to respect life and are prepared to brutalize someone for something as minor as passing a counterfeit $20 bill or jaywalking.

From the perspective of George Floyd, how much progress has really been made in America? An African-American colleague told me he had been stopped for speeding on Decorah’s College Drive on the way to Luther several times his first year. I sped down College Drive most days during my 33 years at Luther and was never once stopped. From the perspective of that black man, how much progress has really been made in America?

Plantation, Plantation, Plantation

“I need everybody to stay on the plantation. I can’t have anybody leave the plantation.” Creighton University men’s basketball coach Greg McDermott about a week ago spoke these words to his players after a loss. McDermott apologized, offered to resign, and was temporarily suspended. America’s institution of slavery and plantation system died in 1865. Moline, Illinois’ Plantation restaurant where I ate many times with my family in the 1950s and 1960s closed in 1983.

Shereef Mitchell spoke these words when asked about his coach’s plantation comment. “For slaves, life on the plantation was filled with mental, emotional, physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Slaves had no rights and no voice. They were branded like cattle, forced from their homeland, and stripped of their culture, language and basic human rights.”

America’s Union Army destroyed slavery and the plantation institution. Restaurants named plantation are unimaginable. Coaches and others who use the word get in trouble. Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd. And with the backing of President Biden, the congress will soon begin debating The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that among other things would ban chokeholds.

But America’s racial history has not gone away. One’s race still impacts too many facets of life, including the chances of dying of COVID and of receiving the vaccine. Historian David Blights puts the power of history this way.

Slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and segregation are never purely historical. They still haunt the air we breathe. or cannot breathe. They are our present-past. They are a history never to be erased.

3. “The Earth needs to be scorched”

New police recruit Leroy continues, “so something good will come of it.” What must it be like to be Leroy? Or Nina Simone? Or George Floyd? Or my African-American colleague? Or Shereef Michell? My 26,107 days have included no race-related insults or degradations. 400 years after the first slave arrived on America’s shores, race still matters, in too many negative ways. Racism is still here but in different disguises. Just as it is in Britain, as the recent Oprah interview with Meghan Markle about the Royal Family’s concern about the skin color of Harry and Meghan’s son Archie suggests.

If I was Leroy, or Nina or George or Shereef or Meghan, or any of the millions of others who still are not as free as I am because of their skin pigmentation, maybe I would see ridding the world of all humans and starting over again as the only way forward. Maybe James Baldwin was right about America when he said a few years before his death in 1979…

America changed all the time without changing at all.

BETTER BUT STILL TOO FAR AWAY

But maybe not. While teaching at Luther College I took six student groups to Northern Ireland to study the peace and reconciliation process. One of my favorite speakers was Reverend Harold Good, a Methodist minister who was the Protestant witness to the decommissioning of arms by the Irish Republican Army. I always asked Rev Goode how far Northern Ireland had come since the peace agreement in 1998. His answer was always the same.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being worst and 10 being best, from where Northern Ireland was during the worst of the Troubles, we are at an 8. From where we want to be as a fully reconciled society, we are at a 3.

I believe this is a reasonable way of thinking about America and the three stories about race. From where America was, it is now much better. From where most of us want America to be – where all, in Nina Simone’s words will “feel what it is like to be free” – America is still too far away.