I was scrubbing the underside rim of the master bedroom toilet recently when my mind whispered, “I bet Johnny Depp isn’t spending his Saturday morning cleaning bathroom porcelain.”

That is not to malign Depp or imply he is too snooty, stuck-up or lazy to clean his own home; I am just guessing that with his millions of dollars and scores of creative preoccupations, he has someone else using the toilet brush and a bottle of Lysol Deep Reach Toilet Cleaner to keep the Chez Depp bathroom winter-minty fresh and the unsightly stains off Johnny’s john.

Once a certain financial station is reached, a person can be expected to say goodbye to such mundane chores. Can you imagine Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe or Meryl Streep on their hands and knees, sanitizing the potty, especially one being used as a training site for a 2-year-old boy and an aiming range for a 4-year-old boy? I can’t. I can picture Steve Carrell still getting down and dirty to keep the can clean, but that’s just because he seems like such a nice, ordinary, average, multimillionaire household-name type of guy.

My first thought as an example of a celebrity who may still maintain his own facilities was Cuba Gooding Jr. But I thought, “If I give examples of four white people who don’t clean their own toilets, then toss out one example of an actor who does, and that sole illustration is a black person, will that look racist?”

What an odd thought to derail such a whimsical train of thought. But sensitivity to race and how one communicates about racial issues are intellectually crucial — albeit creatively inhibiting — concerns.

The radio on my desk is tuned to news all day, so I can keep up with anything that breaks. That means bouncing back and forth between WSPD 1370 and WGTE 91, with an occasional detour through Shores & Steele on K100 or Andrew Z on 92.5 KISS FM. For the past two weeks, one of the main topics on WSPD’s midday schedule has been race and its use as a dividing factor in politics.

I never invoke the concept of innocence when choosing self-descriptive words, but I do not understood the human impulse to categorize and despise based on race.

Without going all “Ebony and Ivory” on you, it has never made sense to me to judge and dismiss an entire group of people based on the supposed behavior and traits of a few.

I might understand racism if, for example, there were a race of green people whose only reason for existing was to kill and eat all other people. If all green people made homicide and cannibalism their imperative, I would understand if everyone else said, “I don’t like green people. Can’t stand them and I am afraid of them. They kill and eat the rest of us, you know.”

That version of racism I would understand, as it would be based on empirical evidence, not emotional prejudice.

From kindergarten to the middle of my freshman year, I attended school in the Walbridge and Lake systems. There were not many black students in the classrooms. Midstream in my freshman year, I transferred to Libbey High School, where black and Hispanic students were the majority. I assimilated fairly quickly, but I will always remember one hallway incident that left me rattled. During a between-class hallway rush, as students pushed through narrow gaps between bodies and navigated the gauntlet, one black student shook his bookbag in frustration and said, “I hate white people!”

We made eye contact as he said it, and while I was speechless and shocked into standing still in the middle of the rush, his gaze burned into mine with a “yes, you” look as he shoved past.

I was plunged back into that memory recently as some of the WSPD talk radio shows repeatedly played an audio cut of Minister King Samir Shabazz, also known as Maurice Heath, the New Black Panther Party’s Philadelphia leader, saying, “You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You’re gonna have to kill some of their babies! I hate white people — all of them! Every last iota of a cracker, I hate ’em.”

While I give Shabazz credit for speaking his views in public without the obscuring benefit of a white sheet or any other tool of anonymity, the quick and easy response is that if any white person stood up and expressed reverse sentiments, he or she would be rightfully escorted into the hall of shame and exile. Ask Mel Gibson and Michael Richards how open racism has helped their careers and lives.

But Shabazz’s seething hatred, so reflective of that young Libbey student’s back in 1984, has galvanized conversation for many of the wrong reasons. Instead of examining the anger for inroads to communication and insight, it seems it is being used to inspire fear and alienation, which just cycles back to the original seeds of hatred. No Pollyanna blindness here; I know Shabazz is not going to sit across from Glenn Beck, listen intently and say, “Well, I had you folks all wrong. My bad. Wanna grab a beer?”

It is sad and disheartening that in the first term of our country’s first black president, the racial divide seems to be growing, with jagged tears along a fault line of distrust and outright fear. Maybe it seems exaggerated to me because I spend so much time with my ears to the radio and eyes on news websites, but it strikes me that an honest discussion about race in America is like scrubbing a toilet; you have to be willing to face some ugly truths, and it is not a job for the weak of stomach.

Michael S. Miller is editor in chief of Toledo Free Press and Toledo Free Press Star. E-mail: mmiller@toledofreepress.com.

Tags: Lighting The Fuse, Michael S. Miller

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Lighting The Fuse, Opinion.
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