December 17, 2024
Some aspects of one’s own environment are more visible in contrast. An incident on our Miami to Philadelphia flight spoke to me about American history and the pain and conflict built into it.
The regular boarding had finished and there were still a number of empty seats around us in the Comfort section. The standbys started to move up the aisle, with an African American family coming first with several small children. The father saw two empty seats, middle and window, and asked the white woman on the aisle to let him and his young son reach them. She demanded to see their boarding passes.
The scene escalated. Voices rose. No flight attendants showed up to mediate. The frustrated father lifted his son into the middle seat and began to climb over the woman. The voice of the captain came over the speakers telling the father to calm down or he would be ejected.
People in the area started to shift around to help. A boarding agent appeared, not to facilitate, but to reiterate the warning and remind the family that they were told when they were given boarding passes that only center seats were available. White folks gave up aisle seats for the father with the one-year-old in his lap and for the mother so that the three-year-old could sit next to her. Peace emerged, although the original perpetrator, the white woman who wanted to see the boarding passes, continued to insist that the mother switch places with her and tried to get flight attendants to intervene. Wisely, they ignored her.
The racial history of the United States called out from every moment of this drama. Whatever made the family late carried some element of all their history with it. Their need to care for their family somehow became the source of threatening them with being expelled. White arrogance set the fire and fanned the flames. Thankfully, those who had a way to help responded.
This is no way to live in a country that belongs to all of us.
Now, downtown Philadelphia. We saw beggars in Santiago, mostly people missing limbs. Here, we were asked for a dollar multiple times while walking to a restaurant for dinner, by men with less visible disabilities. Last night, all were black [the next day we saw white beggars, too]. U.S. cities where homelessness is endemic have a very different feel than downtown Santiago or Montevideo.
I have worked on issues of global inequality for decades. I gave a talk on that topic in Uruguay. To my longtime colleague there, I explained that in retirement I had decided it was time to look at the issues at home and made a discovery. In the United States, we deliberately create our poverty, with low wages, runaway housing markets, weak protections – and individual racism. Who is the “we” that does this? On the one hand, it is people with wealth and privilege, who have the power to create legal structures and cultural images. On the other, it is people with less power but enough to cling to the seats they have been given and call down authority on their side.
I hold all this in my heart as our journey continues.
Finding My Place 