I grew up in a Catholic environment. When I was a kid, we learned at school that there are sins of commission and sins of omission. To put these notions into the context of racism, a sin of commission would be, say, to put the weight of your body on a person’s neck until they are dead. An act of omission would be to watch this horror happen in front of you, and to do nothing about it.
Now, I’m not religious in any traditional sense, and the word “sin” is not in my everyday vocabulary. But I do think that if it applies anywhere, it applies to racism. And if you still think that “sins” of racism are isolated incidents, or if you think that racism has nothing to with you or the environments you are in, I’d like to invite you to consider that casual, racist behavior happens all around you, every day. I’d like to invite you to consider that we are guilty of it ourselves, perhaps without knowing it. I’m going to give you a couple of examples I’ve observed in my life to illustrate this point. And I’d like to invite you to consider that these patterns help to uphold the racist systems of which we are all a part.
1. A couple of years ago, I was walking with a friend in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. The neighborhood is pretty mixed culturally, but it’s predominantly white. My friend and I had gone to a nearby park, and we were going home. I could walk back to my own apartment, but my friend lived farther away, and he decided to take a cab to get home. (Let me pause here and say that I am a 5’2″ white woman, and my friend is a 6’1″ African American man.) Cabs aren’t extremely common in my neighborhood, but there is a stretch where they’re pretty easy to find, so we walked towards that spot together, split up at an intersection, and both waited for cabs.
It just so happened that a cab came my way first, and so I hailed it, and the driver stopped. My friend came towards me, we said goodbye, and he put his hand on the door handle to get in. Just as he did that, the driver sped away.
My friend looked shocked, and I was immediately suspicious. Could this have been a coincidence, that when the driver saw that my friend was the passenger and not I, he decided to leave? Sure. And you might be thinking, “Let’s not jump to conclusions.” OK. We didn’t say anything about it to each other. We split up again and looked for another cab.
A second cab came by, again towards me. I hailed it. The driver stopped. My friend walked up again. We said goodbye. He went to get in. The driver took off.
It took us three tries before my friend could get into a taxi to get home.
2. This week, after a disaster of a speech from the Rose Garden of the White House, followed by the violent removal of peaceful protestors outside that White House so that the President could walk to St. John’s Church and hold up a Bible for a photo-op, a curfew was imposed on New York City. As the evening wore on, I was more and more alarmed about what was seeming to me like the imposition of martial law, and the creation of an environment that was becoming even more distressing for all of us, and more dangerous for African Americans. I spoke on the phone with a friend about the situation for a long time, and then I decided to go downstairs and check on my door person, a lovely man who has expressed to me how upset he is at the number of people suffering from COVID-19. I’ve been concerned about him and everyone who works in my building, you know, the “essential workers,” who continue to risk their lives so that they can look after our homes. (Note: they are all people of color, and this particular individual is an African American man.) I went downstairs and found him sitting at the front desk. “Matthew,” I said (not his real name), “there’s a curfew beginning at 11 o’clock. How are you getting home?” (It was after 10, and his shift ends at 11.) He told me he was taking the subway. I asked him if anyone from the building, the property manager, the board, had talked to him about the curfew. He said no. He said no one in the building who had passed through even mentioned this issue to him. We spoke for quite a while. I told him I would contact the board and the property manager immediately. I went back to my apartment, and I emailed them, asking what our plan was for the people who work here who have to travel during the curfew. I mentioned the person who was there on site specifically, and asked: “How can we protect him if he is stopped by the police? What is our plan for the duration of the curfew?”
I sent the email and then grabbed a business card of mine, wrote on the back: “Owner”, and the address of the building, and went back downstairs. I said, “Matthew, who are you supposed to call if you have an emergency?” He told me he was supposed to call another staff member from the building who is currently living in our basement during the week because his commute is too difficult, and he’s concerned about COVID (!). While this other staff member is 100% reliable and I have no issue with him being in charge, it didn’t seem fair to them, or sensible from the point of view of “the authorities,” that there wasn’t an owner or manager taking responsibility in case of emergency. So I told Matthew that if he was stopped by the police, he should tell them where he works, and use me as a contact. He told me that he should be fine, and I didn’t want to be overbearing. I said goodbye, and told him I’d check on him the following day.
Checking my email back upstairs, I saw one, very short response to my email, which basically said that essential workers are exempt from the curfew, and that our staff are all essential workers. The section of the executive order that spelled this out was also quoted in the email. I am guessing that eight to ten people received the email, but this was the only response I got.
When I read this response, I was fuming. I wasn’t worried about breaking the rules of the curfew. I was worried about the fact that we were asking people who protect and take care of us, who have black and brown skin, to move around during a curfew and in an environment where violence towards them is so easily inflicted by police.
I was more angry than I can describe, and I decided to pause before answering. I now believe this may have been a mistake on my part, and I believe it was also a mistake to not offer to get Matthew a ride home that night. But let’s move on.
The next day, I greeted Matthew and asked, “How did it go last night?” He told me that the overnight door person was stopped by the police and told rudely to get indoors when he told them he was going to work and pointed to our building (which was in view). They then trailed him in their car. He told me that one of the other owners of the building came down and got Matthew a car. And he said that after that, the property manager had told him that he should take a car home every night and that the building would pay.
I’m guessing (although I can’t be sure, and ultimately, it doesn’t matter) that it was only when I sent that email that others realized the situation we were putting our staff in. And I’m not saying that I’m righteous, or that my neighbors are evil. But I am saying that our collective disregard for the safety and well-being of other human beings, who have black and brown skin, is a problem that inflicts damage every day. And until we can be more mindful of the actions that actively cause this damage, the “sins of commission,” and the thoughtlessness and neglect that lead to it, the “sins of omission,” we will never get out of the patterns of violence we are in, and we can never achieve justice for all.
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