Some of us were struck at a recent local debate by the lack of questions about the issue of race.
Questions posed to 3rd Hampshire District candidates have been searching and useful in bringing out their interests and attitudes, and yet on one night there were no questions on this important social issue that continues to stand at the center of so much of our community’s life.
Is the racial climate just a question for the interests of a district’s minority population?
I don’t think so.
If you are a reader of the letters column in the Gazette, you’re likely familiar with the continual raising up of Black Lives Matter, and bullying, and the Confederate battle flag, and America’s world leadership in prison incarceration. Though many of us have followed the issues of legalization of marijuana and, more recently, those around opioid addiction, it has been African-Americans, Latinos and Latinas who have been disproportionately criminalized in both these cases, despite all the research showing that their use is no different than that of the majority community.
While these are issues particularly painful in the black community, they affect the larger community. Eighty years after we learned to back away from the Prohibition that criminalized the drinking of alcohol, we’re still locking up hundreds of thousands of white people over drug laws established mainly to criminalize Chinese, blacks and Latinos. The New Jim Crow has been aimed at African-Americans, but it has wreaked havoc on the white community as well.
Is there any doubt we are finally beginning to see opioid addiction as a public health issue, as they do in Europe, since it has become more visibly a white problem?
What has this to do with the election of a state representative in the 3rd Hampshire District?
Massachusetts is the state whose legislature, four years back, created a “three strikes” law, one of the great motors of America’s mass incarceration, the same year California’s voters were beginning to back away from their original three strikes law, as a concept that has largely failed to do what was intended.
And what about bullying in our schools? Hasn’t this been a painful racial issue as long as it has been one of gender orientation? Doesn’t it continue to be?
The issue of immigration was raised by one of the candidates one night, without any reference to race, and surely that was in order to avoid inflaming an already troubling situation. But isn’t race the heart of our immigration controversy? It isn’t fear of the large number of undocumented Irish in Massachusetts that animates the politics of our immigration concerns.
We would much rather talk about almost any other issue than our nation’s still-virulent original fault lines of race, even though these lines run through the 3rd Hampshire District and the state.
They won’t go away until we put them away by continuing to face them publicly.
In terms of race, the 3rd Hampshire District is undoubtedly a much friendlier place to live in than some other parts of the United States, but we have not reached the colorblind Valhalla yet, despite the fact that so many here continue to work for it. The commonwealth needs representatives in its Legislature who understand social injustice and are committed to addressing it.
Many of us would like to know where our candidates stand on the state’s three strikes law, and the conversion of our criminalizing drug laws into public health initiatives.
Our social climate is as crucial to our future as our atmospheric climate. We will not make the progress we need toward a viable future without addressing both.
Gary Michael Tartakov lives in Amherst.