This Week Taught Me How Out of Touch I Am About Race

This has been a week that’s felt overwhelming. Here, in Santa Monica, my wife and I and our 22 year old daughter Natasha, all stayed at home. Although there was no looting or vandalism in our immediate vicinity, the street where my office is in downtown Santa Monica was completely rampaged – with my local candy/soda shop, Japanese restaurant, and retail stores on the block, including REI and Patagonia and a family owned jewelry store, completely burned out and looted.

It’s good that Natasha was at home because she was reporting to us every few minutes on what she was seeing from her friends who were posting video on their social feeds. Her outrage, her questions, her challenges, and our arguments taught me so much this week.

Basically they made me realize that I’m now an old fart. Whereas some 40 years ago, I was marching in the streets protesting the Vietnam War and President Nixon and, later, marching for No Nukes, now I’m the one who was saying “property must be protected.” These last few days, I have learned a lot about this moment, these protests, and what needs to change – beginning with me.

I’ve seen how my own thinking needed to expand, grow and embrace what this last week has revealed not only about the plight of African-Americans in the United States, but also about structural racism in policing and criminal justice. What I discovered is that my opinions on these subjects, although well-meaning and no doubt PC, were nonetheless shallow and didn’t reflect the extent of the problem societally and historically. Beyond that, I thought that it was not my place to speak out on this subject, but now I understand that I must. This is all of our fight.

This is a moment that requires all of us to exercise great empathy and consciously apply it when considering George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breanna Taylor, Philando Castile, Eric Garner – and how these tragedies reveal a failed system – not just of policing and criminal justice but of health, education, opportunity, access – a failure reaching back 400 years to America’s original sin of slavery. It is not our citizens of color who have failed, it is we who have failed them.

This week’s protests have taught me that we need to open our eyes, we need to be listening to what is being said. We need to pay attention.

I’ve seen how my own thinking needed to expand, grow and embrace what this last week has revealed not only about the plight of African-Americans in the United States, but also about structural racism in policing and criminal justice.

Even in those moments we condemn, of opportunistic looting and vandalism, there is a message: If these actions upset you, that is because you are meant to be upset. Not about lawlessness, but about the lack of Justice and equity for African-Americans. The fight is being brought to you – in the wealthiest commercial enclaves of our cities throughout this country because that is exactly where change needs to begin.

I confess that I have always believed that empathy is our birthright and one of Judaism’s great contributions to humankind. Where else were humans first told to treat others as we would like ourselves to be treated, or to have to imagine, as we are commanded to do yearly at our seder, that we were once slaves living in Egypt? But that is a command, not an exemption. Being Jewish, and in my case being a journalist, does not grant any exemption from insular thinking, from living in a bubble of our own assumptions and, yes, of whatever privileges limit our ability to listen to what this moment is saying and has to teach all of us.

This week has taught me how little I knew and how shallow my thinking has been. My teachers have been Kamasi Washington, LL Cool J, Reggie Watts, Michael Che, Amber Ruffin, who spoke on social media and on television so honestly and openly about what they are feeling in this moment; as well as President Obama in his town hall who, along with Brittany Packett Cunningham of Campaign Zero challenged Mayors and City Councils to pledge to address police use of force policies in their cities, as well as providing their own concrete achievable policies to provide a check on police intervention, improve community interactions and ensure greater accountability. This was all the more powerful because it showed that not only was progress possible, it was obtainable– right now.

By this morning, the Mayors of Atlanta, Nashville, Dallas, Columbia (South Carolina), San Francisco, Sacramento, West Hollywood and Washington, D.C. had all accepted the Obama challenge. In Los Angeles last night Mayor Eric Garcetti announced major changes to the city government, policing and justice departments.

This is a hinge moment, where things will have to change, and will. Take a look at the protesters marching. Read the signs they are carrying. They are the future. If you are not among them, then ask your children about them. Or just ask yourself what “Black Lives Matter” means to you. Because what I learned this week is that, as we used to say when marching in the Seventies, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Tom Teicholz, an award-winning journalist and best-selling author, is an old white guy who lives in Santa Monica but is listening to his daughter.