JUNE NINETEENTH

June 19, 2025June 20, 2025 / janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

Juneteenth, also known as Emancipation Day or Freedom Day, celebrates the end of slavery in the United States.*

Years ago, our son’s orthodontist commented to me that our sons were similarly handicapped when applying to college because they were white boys. He smiled, a virtual nudge-nudge, we’re in this together, right? His son’s application to dental school had been denied, he said, to make room for Black students. So he said. I generally had walked away from such comments, and I didn’t want to annoy the man fixing Alan’s teeth, but I didn’t walk away that day. I turned back and told him off with calm reasoning. [Should his son be advantaged in admission to dental school because his father had gone? Because his father was white? Was my son unqualified as Salutatorian for undergraduate study? Had this man looked at the numbers? Who did he think he was? I was angry and it was a long time ago. I don’t remember exactly what we said to one another. I am angry thinking about it now.]

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SIN OF OMISSION

November 24, 2019November 24, 2019 / janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

Many times crows forage beside eagles. The crows cannot pierce the skin of most dead creatures, but the eagle can. (In the wild, ravens hunt in tandem with wolves. The raven spot game, the wolves open the body.) I have seen crows drive raptors from a wounded gull and from their own nests. The smaller birds win their point.

“A man has been arrested after antisemitic abuse was directed towards Jewish children on the London Underground. … Wearing a cap and hoody, the man is seen in the video threatening a man off-camera after he tries to intervene before a woman in a hijab – Asma Shuweikh – confronts him.”—The Guardian

The Muslim woman is a mother of two and wishes more people would intervene in such situations.

“Wilshire Bus,” a short story by Hisaye Yamamoto, concerns a woman taking the bus to visit her husband in a VA hospital post-WW2. Japanese-American herself, Esther says nothing while a drunk harasses an elderly Chinese-American couple on the bus. She bursts into tears when she reaches her husband’s hospital bedside. He believes this is because she misses him, but readers understand that she is suffering from guilt that she failed to defend the couple on the bus. When I first read the story in graduate school, the obvious ironies of the situation and her feelings of guilt reminded me immediately of my own experiences.

I would have been twenty-one or twenty-two, an undergraduate student at the University of Washington and taking the bus home alone. My husband and I had bought a house on the other side of the zoo. I was sitting toward the back and a drunken man began harassing an adolescent child. People nearby looked nervous but avoided eye contact. I thought we all hesitated to say anything because the man was big and we were afraid. A young black man stood up from his seat and told the drunk that he needed to stop what he was doing. It’s been over forty years and I do not remember everything, just that the young man was slender and the drunk outweighed by fifty pounds at least. I remember that the drunk got off the bus at the next stop. I remember we were grateful to the young man. I remember thinking the drunk was twice my size and wishing I had done something myself and trying to think what I should have done.

The next time was also on a bus, and I was also alone, but instead of the route that ran east-west on 45th, I was heading downtown. I can no longer remember the bus numbers, but this one took Eastlake Avenue NE, traveling south from the U District. Again, I was seated near the back and again a man began harassing someone smaller, a racist harangue. I got up from my seat almost immediately and walked to the front to tell the bus driver. By the time I got to the driver, there were three of us. And this is very clear: The bus driver did something I would never have thought could happen. He pulled his bus over the the side of the road, on University Bridge. He stood and walked to the back of the bus and told the drunk, “You’re going to have to get off my bus, or I am calling the police.” And the man got off and passengers clapped and cheered.

Sometimes doing the right thing is frightening. It might even be dangerous. I did not directly confront a drunken man who outweighed me by close to a hundred pounds, but I found a safe way to intervene. In Yamamoto’s story, many people were offended by racist language, and every one remained silent until after the drunk had left the bus. Esther suffers from her sin of omission. She fails to act as she knows she should have.

So did I.

Fortunately, I learned my lesson and I like to think so did Esther. I think the courage to act in such situations sometimes requires rehearsal. We need to think it through in our heads and balance what we know is right with known risks.

Mob rule is not right and speaking up can be dangerous—we mostly all learned that in school. Silence in the face of abuse can be more dangerous. The assumption when we are silent in response to abuse is that we agree with what is being said and done. And that perpetuates the evil.

How many times do we need to learn that lesson?

USE YOUR WORDS

September 4, 2018September 5, 2018 / janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

Last year a student argued that black people were not being unfairly targeted by police because unarmed white people had been killed by police too. Entirely absent from the student’s research was some simple math which would have revealed, that yes, it’s true Whites as well as Blacks are killed, but black people are disproportionately likely to die, even while unarmed, at the hands of police. According to research by a Nebraska criminologist, in 2016, “police killed 38 unarmed blacks and 32 unarmed whites. Whites accounted for 49 percent of all 2015 fatal police shootings, while blacks constituted 26 percent.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 12.3% of the U.S. population is black, over 76% are white. Being Black in America is dangerous.

Black Lives Matter was formed to address this terrible reality.

I think most people know this, unless they just don’t want to know it.

Beyond that, I am a person committed to language, to the use of “every day” when I mean something that happens each day, and “everyday” when I mean it is ordinary.

How we use our words matters. I have thought a lot about the “All Lives Matter” slogan, which entirely misses the point, and other wording that is offensive. My husband has called a Portland television station when he heard the term “gypped” used. He explained patiently that it is a racist and bigoted term.

On the other hand, sometimes a little knowledge is a tricky thing. A video on Facebook declared “Gypsy” so offensive that it was written “G—y” and bleeped. Well, maybe, but some Romani people actually embrace that term, and the video utterly failed to address the many other self-proclaimed terms used by Romani around the world.

And then there is “white trash” which is definitely a bigoted slur against poor white people during a period when many Americans have been told that their poverty is their own fault. “White trash” is also something else, perhaps something worse than a slam against poor whites. Think about how it sounds when someone says it: “white trash.” The emphasis (the accent) is on “white” as if distinguishing between this poor “trashy” person from all other trashy people? from others who are not white? “Don’t be trashy like . . . ?” You might think I am being picky here, but I don’t think so. The use of the term and the way it is said implies a depth of insensitivity and racism that even the user might not recognize.

I know, I know, I am going to have to hear about “political correctness” which is itself a misunderstood and misused word. The left brought it to America as satire fifty years ago, adopting a communist term and using it ironically. It was a joke. Today, almost no one uses it except as a slam against people choosing language and ideas intended to be courteous. Notice, next time you hear it used. “You are being politically correct.” Hear that sneer? Someone is trying to shut up another person, most often a person who is merely attempting to be polite.

Language matters. We misspeak, we are rude out of ignorance . . . and we apologize. We try to avoid offense because it matters that we not hurt others’ feeling. That is at the basis of a civil society.

It is an everyday struggle. If you are at all astute about political realities, you do not say what Ron DeSantis said the other day. An ordinary person in some all-white rural backwater might hear such a thing without immediately recognizing the loaded language DeSantis used. It is impossible to believe a smart politician was unaware.

“At a dinner with Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others, Trump lashed out at a vocal critic, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He painted the former Navy pilot as cowardly, falsely suggesting he took an early release from a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam because of his father’s military rank and left others behind.

“Mattis swiftly corrected his boss: ‘No, Mr. President, I think you’ve got it reversed.’ The defense secretary explained that McCain, who died Aug. 25, had in fact turned down early release and was brutally tortured during his five years at the ‘Hanoi Hilton.’ ”

For an ordinary person to have gotten this story wrong is one thing, for the leader of our country, it is pathetic. The rest of the world is paying attention.

That is, ordinary people in their own homes are allowed to misspeak—we all make mistakes and inevitably will. Our leaders are supposed to be better than this. Public speakers are supposed to think first. Every day.