Answering
by Anton Zuiker on June 15, 2020
Manton added a new feature to Micro.blog, the quoteback. Here’s a test:
I went for a job interview today.
The interviewer asked me, “What’s your biggest weakness?”
I said, “Answering the semantics of a question but ignoring the pragmatics.”
The interviewer asked, “Could you give me an example?”
I said, “Yes, I could.”
BOOM BOOM
My silence
by Anton Zuiker on June 14, 2020
Next month will mark my 20 years as a blogger. It’s an anniversary I have been looking forward to for a long time, and something for which I thought I could rightfully be proud. I’ve used this blog to chronicle my Peace Corps service and to reflect on my family, to organize events and to continue my education, to refine my tastes (in food and music, at least) and to detail my observations of the natural world. It’s my writing on my space on the web about my place in the world.
But, this week, spurred by the national outrage about the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and so many other persons of color, I searched my mistersugar archives (15 years of my blog) for the word racism.
There is not a single instance of the word.
Here on Zuiker Chronicles (the last five years), I found the word once, in this post I wrote about wondering what my great-grandmother, Frances Link Zuiker, may have thought about race.
News sites these last weeks have shown historical photos of police dogs terrifying African Americans, and the man who occupies the White House gleefully threatened to be just as aggressive and horrible.
So I searched the archives to see if I’d ever written about a certain incident early in my life when I witnessed racism up close. As a six-year-old boy, I was playing outside the Phoenix apartment building where my family briefly lived. I heard a dog begin to bark ferociously, and I looked around to see a German shepherd running straight at me. Petrified in fear, I watched it come closer and closer, louder and louder…but then it raced right by me. I pivoted my head to see the dog chasing a younger black boy; luckily, the boy made it to his doorstep and just inside before the dog could snap. I pivoted my head back around to see an older white boy, who’d let the dog loose, laughing. I was still frozen in place, but my brain registered the naked racism.
That memory isn’t in my blog.
I searched the archives again, remembering my few, mundane encounters with police.
Had I written about that incident when I was in my early twenties and working on the John Carroll University campus over the summer? One evening, I was out for a run through the University Heights neighborhood when a patrol car slowed down and a voice told me to stop. An officer rolled down the window, told me there was an ongoing search for a robbery suspect and while I didn’t match the suspect’s description, he had some questions. I didn’t have identification on me, but I told him I had memorized my Illinois driver’s license number. He was amazed, or amused, I think. A few minutes later, background check complete, I was back on my own, free to keep running. I was aware of the deep racial disparities in Cleveland and its suburbs, but safe in my own skin. By the time I graduated from JCU, I knew that a friend of mine, also a JCU student, had opposite experiences with campus security and local police—he was often harassed simply because he was black.
Not in my blog.
Nor was my memory of my very first day at JCU. I was in an elevator in a nearby department store, and when I glanced over at an older woman, I noticed a concentration-camp number tattooed on her arm.
I searched the archives for a mention of the playground slurs, aimed at the children of Mexican immigrants, that I heard in Idaho.
Nothing.
I searched for the history of slavery in this country or in the U.S. Virgin Islands where I’m lucky to visit so often. Four mentions: Mount Vernon and Estate Mount Washington, Amistad and Bislama.
I did find my Northern Ohio Live innovations column from August 2001, Dealing with our differences, which opens with this:
When Cincinnati erupted in social unrest last Spring after the police killing of an African-American suspect, Marlene Feder was prepared to make a difference.
Suspect was not the right word then, or now. Timothy Thomas should not have been killed in 2001, just as George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor should not have been killed in 2020.
I had been a blogger for a year when I wrote that article about what others were doing to confront structural racism and an inequitable justice system. And in the 19 years since, regardless of my past memories and current knowledge of how real and entrenched racism is, I’ve been silent.
That’s my white privilege.
It makes me complicit.
I’m ashamed by this.
+++
In 2015, for my last post over at mistersugar.com, I defined my creed:
To be kind to others. To stand up, stand tall, and stand for something good.
This I still believe. But given all that I didn’t find in my blog archives, and all that is still not right in this world, such a passive creed is simply not adequate for my next 20 years. I expect more from myself.
I intend to keep living and keep blogging, and to make both matter.
I swear now to make this blog reflect not just my memories and my family, and the books I read and meals I eat, and the narrative initiatives and community events I organize, but also the protests I will join, the bystander training I will take, the justice I will advocate, and the racism we will defeat.
Screams, squawks, silence
by Anton Zuiker on May 31, 2020
When the hens start to squawk in competition for their favorite egg box, I wonder what the neighbors might say. But then the crows start in with their warnings, and the hawks circle above screaming, a wren tribbles in the pear tree, and a train whistle sounds in the distance. This is a noisy world.
I am on the porch, reading Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, and I pass over pages in which he writes about composer John Cage’s 4’33”: ‘Cage’s piece was not just about the nature of silence, but also about all the sounds that could be heard within the silence…’
For a few minutes this morning I added the sounds of a typewriter, my Triumph Tippa 1 on my lap, half a page of words about satyagraha, civil disobedience and public protest and nonviolent witness in the very faces of those who corrupt and kill and steal justice.
Now it is the wind in the treetops in crescendo.
Rain day, May day
by Anton Zuiker on May 29, 2020
It is the last Friday in May, and it came in and stayed with torrents of rain. From my desk in the library here at the house, I worked from before 7 a.m. all the way through to 6 p.m. Now it is the weekend, and I must rest.
But rest does not come easily. The world is in turmoil still with COVID-19, and the United States is torn apart again with tension and corruption. We cannot pause in the march to freedom and justice.
Let June arrive with sunshine and hope.
Fifty
by Anton Zuiker on April 2, 2020
I thought about writing a failure resume for today, my birthday. There’s certainly plenty for me to look back on—five decades of projects and teams and conferences and communities and jobs and personal goals, fifty years of announcing my ambitions and grand ideas and promises, a long list of ways I tried, succeeded or failed, let people down or built them up, how I wised up and what I learned.
But I woke up this morning knowing it was to be a day off of work and a sliver of a moment to put these pandemic anxieties aside (I’ve been sheltering in place for two weeks now, and following global and national news carefully, and working 12 hours a day to do my part for the Duke Department of Medicine). Erin was beside me, wishing me a special day, and I felt nothing but fortunate.
“What do you want to do today?” she asked.
“I want to run, blog, read, and garden,” I said.
So off I went for a run in the cool, sunny morning, and as I made my way west down the gravel road, my long shadow ran in front of me. It seemed to be telling me something about that failure resume.
“You’ve already been blogging for nearly 20 years, and you’ve chronicled your life and your learning. You’re right where you need to be, in the moment, the road and the rest of your life ahead. Yol bolsun!”
I was supposed to be in New Orleans for a conference, speaking on a panel and receiving an honorable mention award for Voices of Duke Health, then flying to St. Croix to meet the family for spring break. But all that’s changed, and here I was staying home in Chapel Hill.
I ran on, onto the trail near the lake, in the moment, up and down, and back to the house, where I sat with Oliver at the table, listening to his presentations about Atlantic salmon and Shanghai skyscrapers, then reading more of Apeirogon by Colum McCann.
Now, it’s time to plant wildflowers.