Suburban Blindness:

Reflections on Depolarizing Race Relations

Frederick Douglass Statue in Highland Park, Rochester, New York from Wikimedia Commons. Daniel Penfield / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

“We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.” Frederick Douglass¹

For the past four years I have been asking myself the same question, what country do I live in? It should be easy to answer. We call it the United States of America. I have lived in the United States except for a semester abroad in college.

As a veteran high school US History teacher, I believed I knew our past very well. But what happens when your narrative shatters and lies in a thousand shards strewn across the floor? I had believed that we were making progress on race relations. That is much harder to accept now.

The cascade of revelations in the death of Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York has hit close to home. When the top brass in the police department became aware of the coroner’s report and the body cam images of Prude’s death, they chose to protect themselves and hide the evidence from the victim’s family and the media. Now the police chief has been fired and state Attorney General, Letitia James, has empaneled a grand jury.

One of the oldest lessons of political scandals is to acknowledge the facts, take responsibility, discipline wrong doers, and begin the work of healing. Cover-ups exacerbate the problem if they…