The Ingredients of Change (Part 1)

Harry Belafonte spoke at my university this afternoon.  My wife decided to go, but I was feeling exhausted so I hung out in her lab and helped a physics grad student install equipment into a vacuum chamber.  About ten minutes after the talk was supposed to have started my wife returned to the lab and said that the place was mobbed and there was no chance she could get a seat.  Instead we watched the talk on RealPlayer.  Of the complicated mush of feelings resulting from the talk, the two most relevant were: One, a sense of shirked social responsibility, and two, a sense that the story or race in America hasn't changed in as long as I have been alive.   I'm 35.

My introduction to race in America came in high school, studying the civil war and the civil rights movement, and then living in south side Chicago for four years.  I had been in Chicago for less than an hour when I realized that my high school had glossed over the fundamental reality of the issues at hand.  My Dad drove south on Lake Shore Drive and turned right too early, somewhere north of 47th.   I simply stared out the passenger-side window.  Shop windows were boarded up.  Burned out cars and trash sat by the curb.  People wandered down the middle of the street.  The familiar signs of commercialism one expects in a city were absent.  My Dad didn't say anything.  Our destination was an uneasy oasis in an economic desert. The student body was almost entirely white, and the only thing that could conceivably have passed as race relations were dealing with people asking for money and trying not to get mugged.  In our classes we were taught a wide range intellectual tools, all of which were hopelessly insufficient to come to terms with the magnitude of the inequality all around us. I didn't understand the first time I heard the Martin Luther King quote, "No one is free until everyone is free."  After a short time looking at poverty up close I understood. Although, some, as a defense mechanism, opted for various intellectual contortions that allowed them to go on not understanding.

Mr. Belafonte talked about gathering young people together to talk about pressing social issues and it left me feeling depressed.