Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. is coming to St. Louis this weekend to keynote a conference on neighborhoods, but he wants to talk about bad neighbors – the kind who holler at each other rather than those who coexist in harmony.
“In the past 10 years or so, the political discourse has been increasing in volume and anger,” Pitts told The American in a phone interview. “I wonder, can we be neighborhoods? Can we be a country? Can we come together?”
Pitts’ larger frame of reference is 10 years of culture wars, but he notices a sharper change, from some sectors of the community, in the past one year, under the presidency of Barack Obama.
Overt racism, he acknowledges, is now frowned upon, so people with racial resentment or resistance to a black president resort to what Pitts calls “proxy terminology.”
“That’s where we get that he’s a Muslim, or that he was born in Kenya, or that he is a secret terrorist,” Pitts said. “That’s really all a way of saying, ‘He’s black, and I’m not comfortable with that.’”
Pitts said he has been reading Taylor Branch’s masterful history of the Civil Rights Movement Parting the Waters and been struck by how much more overtly racist many people felt they could act in public back then.
“Many may feel that way still, some certainly feel that way still, but they can’t talk about it as freely,” Pitts said. So they talk around the point. “But it always comes to the same point: ‘He’s not one of us. He’s black, and I can’t deal with it,’” Pitts said.
Or, another strategy is to deny that the president is black because he is biracial.
“Now that we have this fantastic accomplishment for African Americans, it seems churlish to snatch it away on a technicality,” Pitts said. “But some people want to find a way for him not to be black.”
Coming back to his theme of hostile neighbors, Pitts finds it terribly frustrating that logic and facts are of no value in resolving the arguments that divide Americans today. Take the so-called “birthers” who refuse to accept that Obama was born in the U.S. and insist that his presidency is therefore illegitimate.
“They scream they want a birth certificate. We have a birth certificate. We have two Hawaii state officials who testify to the birth. We have two simultaneous birth announcements in two Honolulu newspapers,” Pitts said.
“It’s difficult to take them seriously. They have slipped the bonds of reality. That increasingly is the way it is in this country.”
Pitts was surprised to learn that two Republican state representatives in the Missouri Legislature – Tim W. Jones and Cynthia Davis – are parties to a “birther” suit.
“We are told this is a fringe element of the right, but it’s hard to accept as a ‘fringe’ element when they are in office and, presumably, aspire to higher office,” Pitts said. “That’s troubling.”
Pitts comes to us and our neighborhoods with the message to stick to the facts – and listen to one another.
“Once there was a time when the person with the better facts won, but now it’s not about facts or logic but who is yelling the loudest,” Pitts said.
“So many people don’t want to listen. They don’t bother to deal with logic. They are like kids with their hands over their ears saying, ‘La-la-la-la, I’m paying you no attention.’”
Pitts will provide the keynote speech at the 2010 St. Louis Regional Neighborhoods Conference at 9 a.m. Saturday, May 1 in the Main Auditorium of the Dr. Henry Givens Jr. Administration Building at Harris-Stowe State University.
The conference, a joint effort between HSSU, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville Institute for Urban Research and the St. Louis Association of Community Organizations, will run 8 a.m.-4 p.m. The registration fee is $20 per person and includes lunch; to register online, go to www.siue.edu/iur.
For more information, contact the SIUE Institute for Urban Research at (618) 650-5254 or SLACO at (314) 361-9406 or www.slaco.org.