Archive: Opinions

For the past several years as the Board of Education and Lansing Central School District officials spent money on security cameras, moving offices to the front of school buildings, installing special locks and other security measures, I couldn't help but think, "Here in little ol' Lansing? Isn't this overkill?"

Sure there were incidents of strangers roaming the school campus, and of course the occasional locker search for illicit substances, but surely the kinds of horrific incidents we read about in the news couldn't happen here. Although, surely that's what parents in the Sandy Hook and Columbine school districts thought before the horrific shootings there and in other schools across the nation. If I had any doubt about 'it' happening here, it was crushed Sunday during the anti-police brutality rally when Steve Page recounted shocking racist incidents against him and his family while he was growing up here in Lansing.

In an emotional speech he told of a rock smashing through his family's window, being chased by white people intent on hurting him (and being saved from them by other white people), and growing up considering that being called 'half breed' was normal because it was better than being called 'nigger'.

Our school's touchy-feely focus on being kind to each other, giving it socially acceptable, politically correct labels like 'Social Emotional Learning', while well intentioned, runs the danger of not having real life impact because the message is institutionalized. That is not to say that it shouldn't be done. Surely it helps.

But when you see discrimination in our little rural town, that despite the stereotype of being conservative, is actually a largely liberal community, it is an ugly reminder that not only can it happen here, but it is happening here.

The focus this weekend was on 'Black Lives Matter' but there have been other acts of discrimination in Lansing including anti-Semitic grafitti and vandalism in our town parks. I remember being called 'a kike' outside our high school cafeteria, growing up near Boston. So I think I do have an idea of what its like. But only a smidgeon of an idea. I'm white, so as long as nobody forces me to wear a yellow badge with the Star of David when I'm walking around town I can pass. People who are not white can't pass -- it is obvious they look different, and Page eloquently illustrated what it is like to be on the inside of a body with dark skin on the outside. In Lansing. Not just in the wide world out there that lets us think "well, that's there, but it can't happen here".

That's why the unexpectedly large turnout Sunday morning was encouraging. Although some Lansing folk like to portray the town as a diverse community, the US Census Bureau reports the town is 81.9% white (78.8% white but not Latino or Hispanic), 2.3% African American alone, 0.2% American Indian and Alaska Native alone, 2.7% mixed race, 4.7% Hispanic or Latino.

We're not that diverse. That means we have to try harder to remember that the very small minorities of people who don't look like us are pretty much just like us. On your birthday or Christmas you may notice the wrapping, but what you really care about is the present inside. That's how we should view everyone. The wrapping shouldn't matter.

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