Editor’s Note: For information about the Stockbridge artist, Pops Peterson, and his exhibit this spring at the Sohn Fine Arts Gallery, click here. He has asked the Stockbridge Selectmen for permission to use the Town Clerk’s office in Town Hall this summer for the creation of a new work.
I could hardly be called a journalist these days. I am a storyteller. Journalists, these days, particularly in the mainstream, are more concerned with being entertaining, relatable, and “non-biased” than they are with telling the truth, with thinking critically.
But the truth is never unbiased, if you are willing to believe that there is truth. And there is no point in writing or reading without faith in the truth, and no point in living, either, I would argue.
I prefer to write about the heroin addict, the prisoner, the student, the struggling small business owner, or the nomad. I am not their voice; they are my voice. These are the real American heroes and victims, through whom the consequences and opportunities of American history are manifested.
History is acted out by public figures — and these days in a pop-cultural tone — but history is made and felt by the common man and woman. History is created and lived through by those who control it the least and must endure it the most. These are the most important people in America, indeed in the world.
The poor, the oppressed, the manipulated and/or the disempowered have become the majority of American society, and most of us tend to actively forget this about ourselves and the culture we live in. Indeed, most of us are of this majority.
I did not learn about the Charleston, South Carolina, shooting until the morning after it happened. I do not have a television in my house and try to keep my news reading to once a day. The day of the shooting, before it happened, I went into a shop in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where four reputable colleges and the University of Massachusetts are located, intending to set up an interview with the owner of the store to talk about his business, his trade, and owning a small business in that particular town. We set up an interview for the next morning.
The business owner is an African American man in a mostly white town. When I walked in that morning to begin the interview, I had not yet heard about the shooting in South Carolina. I said to the business owner, upon entering the shop, “How’s it going?” and he said, “Not so good.” Then, to my surprise, he began to question me about The Berkshire Edge, whether it was conservative or liberal, what kind of audience it had, and what the reception might be to the story I intended to write. He seemed more suspicious of me than the day before and I did not understand why.
I told him that our audience is mostly based in Berkshire County and that, as far I could tell, it is a “liberal” audience. The shop owner — I’ll call him Bill for reasons of safety and privacy — then asked me if I had heard about the shootings in the church in South Carolina.
I told him I had not. He gave me a brief overview of what had happened, and proceeded to tell me, for more than an hour, what it felt like and meant to him, for decades upon decades, day to day, to be an African American business owner in a mostly white town. He began to explain to me why he was canceling our interview.
After being interviewed on the radio once about his business and his life, he said, his shop had been vandalized, racial slurs written on the windows, and products destroyed. He told me stories of having been pulled over unjustly by local police, treated inadequately in local hospitals, responded to poorly or not at all on town committees, and disrespected or expected to work for free by his customers.
This occurs in a mostly white town which calls itself liberal and in which, if you asked most locals, they would probably claim it is “tolerant.”
His worry, he said, in the beginning of our discussion about why he did not want to do the story, was that “unfortunately, in most places, the bad outweighs the good.” I agree with him. I could not be an honest writer and disagree. Even though I had only been planning to write an article about his business and his skills, he worried that, as has happened in the past, he would make himself vulnerable to local racism.
Bill explained that when he woke up that morning and heard the news of the shooting, he realized he had forgotten about the safety of himself, his family, and his business when he agreed to do the interview the previous day. He talked about the forced internalization of the African American experience — that to survive as an African American, particularly in a predominantly white town, one has to internalize the oppression he or she experiences much of the time, as speaking out can be, as it has been at times for Bill, quite literally dangerous and locally unacceptable.
He made me realize that, as a fellow American, a fellow human being, my day, too, must be completely changed by this event, that the toxicity of racism and violence are part of the American experience and not just the black experience. If I go through my day without feeling this tragedy, without mourning it in my heart, I am symbolically racist, symbolically a supporter for the enforcers of the racist narrative.
Racism exists from top to bottom. Dylann Storm Roof, the shooter in Charleston, is quoted in an article from Counter Punch as saying about his motive, “You rape our women and you are taking over our country. And you have to go.” This statement was made by Roof during the shooting, a couple of days after Donald Trump said in his presidential announcement speech that Mexican immigrants are “drug dealers and rapists.” I’m not saying that Roof lifted it from Trump or was directly inspired by Trump, but Donald Trump and Dylann Storm Roof apparently share a view of other races, and use very similar rhetoric to describe them.
I write this for The Berkshire Edge, but I am thinking of the town of Great Barrington, in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where I grew up, which claims to be liberal and tolerant, particularly on issues of human rights. Maybe this is getting too edgy (maybe you’re reading the wrong paper), but there are, in fact, minorities in Great Barrington. There are many poor, many drug addicts, many young people whose parents struggle with the same issues, many who must work multiple jobs about which they are not passionate but at which they do exceptionally well, essentially serving you, just so they can survive. You may think these people are in the local shelters, in Construct, at Railroad Street Youth Project, at the Brien Center, or tucked away in other places, but most of them are not.
In fact, they are on Main Street. They are in houses and apartments you will never have to live in, or they are not in houses, or they live with their friends. I watch most Barringtonian’s walk by their minority neighbors without so much as looking in their direction every day. I almost never see locals who have friends in other socioeconomic groups. These are the people I grew up with, whom I became friends with while passing hours in town, who know how to listen because they, too, need to be heard. They are the reason I am a storyteller.
I refuse to live quietly in a culture of ignorant intolerance. It is what creates racism. It is what destroys the planet. It is what makes a small handful of people profit against our best interest while claiming to work on our behalf. Great Barrington, and most of America, has become a culture of looking the other way. Most mainstream news outlets help us do this.
Hate crimes do not occur because one race hates another; they occur because one person or group does not know, and is unwilling to know, another person or group. Hatred and fear are what human beings turn to when they confront the unfamiliar — if they cannot turn to faith, and if they have been taught hatred and fear before faith. I’m not speaking of faith in God necessarily, but faith in the other, faith in your neighbor and yourself.
In the end, it does not matter what the corporate or political figures like Donald Trump say about the shooting, about racism, about any news of this sort. They are part of a mass manipulation of reality. What matters is what Bill, the African American business owner in the white town, thinks and feels. It matters what your neighbor feels. It matters what you feel with your neighbor, and it matters whether or not you truly despair over this event and this recurring cultural abyss.
To be a good Barringtonian, a good American, a good human creature on planet Earth, one must love life so deeply to one’s core that one is willing to despair even more deeply over this kind of death.
