The deep investment that many Americans have in the US exceptionalism,

in the belief that their nation has a providential mission to spread liberty

around the world, prevents them from seeing US history clearly.

Claudio Saunt

Neil Degrasse Tyson (NDT): If you’ve seen the sun in the middle of the day, it’s white. That’s the proper color of the sun in the middle of the day.”

Chuck Nice (CN): Let’s not get racist. Don’t have to be the proper color.

(NDT): It’s just…

(CN):...the color.

(NDT): Damn, Chuck, why is everything about race with you?

(CN): ‘Cause I live in America!

I was struggling to manage trips to the hospital for blood tests and PET Scan with the medical transportation services. I have Multiple Myeloma. Like so many Americans and fellow humans around the world, I’d like to find the dollar store or the grocery store with toilet paper and then toilet paper that isn’t pure bark or costing a third of my income. Paper towel is up to two dollars and, if I’m not careful, one roll might last just two days. We live in the days of Coronavirus and everything from the store has to be wiped down and the counters cleaned at least twice a day.

For two weeks, I tried to order groceries online only to realized that the whole town of Kenosha is ordering food online. Instacart charged nine dollars for $38.00 worth of food—well, mainly two packages of boneless chicken. Five bags of blueberry and a tub of butter.

But finally, just last week, a transport service has come through for us senior with compromised health issues. Finally.

We have a stay-at-home order and we clean our hands and we clean our kitchen counter tops and we clean our bathroom surfaces and our clothes—every outfit and even the jacket is thrown into the washing machine after we return home. We are careful to discard the latex gloves and clean the masks with soap and water or hydrogen peroxide, if you have the later. Like the hand sanitizes, you are limited to two bottles of hydrogen peroxide. Wash and clean for your life!

Washing, cleaning. Don’t tough the face! I think my cat thinks I’m crazy.

Keep the physical distance! Keep the physical distance! It’s a dance of sorts, as we pay close attention to the closest person to our left and to our right. Who’s in front of me and should I slow down to keep the six feet between us?

There’s a young, twenty-something somewhat close and without a mask. How we stare at the unmasked these days!

Life is so different. Surreal. Because there’s a pandemic happening in the world! Really that’s the reality we humans are in at this time.

In the building where I live, a new senior complex, there’s no gathering in the community room. No gathering in the halls, please. Or by the mailbox. No exercising in the exercise room. Please keep the traffic down, and if you have to have family, friends, if you think it’s necessary and safe—there are compromised neighbors here—then these guests must use the stairway, not the elevator. Please. Let’s think about the Other.

We are still a community. Still in this together.

But in the last week, I have felt cut off from the world in which the pandemic is a struggle for those who come down with it and those trying to recover and those family members who’ve lost loved ones. We know what’s happening in the hospitals with doctors and nurses begging for PEP and witnessing the extinguishing of life on the ventilators.

Cut off—not the same as isolated. As a writer, I’m used to spending a good part of my day alone. I can fill a day easily with reading and writing, keeping up with the news, the art world and science. That’s not isolation, it’s solitude which I treasure.

But now, all of a sudden last week, I became cut off. Cut off from the world where my fellow human beings are wearing masks, latex gloves, washing and cleaning everything obsessively. I have been pulled into a world consisting of one individual, a woman, possibly in her fifties. But youngish. White.

After over a month of stay-at-home, cabin fever has kicked in, and there’s a ready-made object to toy with—a subject obsessed with “race.” In a “community” where people assume that an educated black (and woman to boot, with no children!) has had all the help from government programs, Affirmative Action programs, give-away programs, to talk about “race” is equivalent to talking about the greatness of “commies.”

The target of resentment, I became an “enemy” in my home.

I went to bed one night, experiencing sharp chest pains. Earlier in the month, I had been told by my oncologist that the PET Scan taken a few days before revealed an aneurysm in the middle of my chest. But I suppose I was too disoriented that night as I shifted my attention from my own health to what I was meant to perceive—an interruption of that “intellectual” lifestyle, too bizarre to be normal, let alone, acceptable in our “working class” community.

I went to bed and tried to sleep. A sound system had been set to bass and low enough for me to feel it underneath my bed. It could only be emanating from below, I thought. I was told that the man was mentally challenged. Little did I know, my next door neighbor may very well have been responsible for the noise; she had been the noisiest person on the floor for months. At any rate, the man below is more physically challenged, and incapable to the disturbance I experienced for a week or so.

After a night of chest pains, I woke up and prepared to take my first Car-A-Van ride to pick up groceries.

I remember thinking of the conversation I had with my sister about being careful not to use too much curry or thyme in my food, and no sooner had I remembered this conversation, I felt my chest an arms feeling so heavy, as if someone was pressing down on my chest with another was pulling my arms by the hands down to the floor.

None of this matters in a building and in a town and in a country where I’m looked at suspiciously. I can’t step out my apartment door and ask for help.

Sometimes I dream that Americans wake up one morning collectively decide with wrangling to read. To learn something about themselves. About the foundation of this country arising not of innocence and goodwill but, instead of sheer greed and brutal violence. To dream that Americans would one day wake up a collectively decide, yes, it’s time, let’s do it, let’s read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Or read An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Dunbar-Ortiz, or Slave Nation or Race for Profit. Just read and read. Learn.

How simple it would be to know and not turn away in anger, not attack with club, sword, bayonets, semi-automatics, drones? How simple would it be to not turn people into scapegoats to marginalize, to punish, to kill? How simple would it be to not commit to the same response to hearing the truth by “addressing” racism with a determination to see to the removal of black Americans asking for rights to be protected and respected?

Corporate slogans are best when served with a straight face, mouthing the words, “we’ll address the problem directly.” Which means, we’ll remove the one who dared pose the question, dared disturb the “peace.”

That’s more in line with how living in a “community” operates in America!

The word racism, I imagine, must buzz annoyingly in the ears of those who don’t want to hear the word. The ship isn’t being steered anywhere close to calmer waters.

There’s a feeling of being cut off that has nothing to do with isolation. Or the COVID-19 pandemic.

A few months ago, I reached out to management on behalf of a white woman below another white woman who, for whatever reason, found it necessary to stomp when she walked and drop as many heavy items as she could over this older woman’s head. She told us, she walks dogs, or, at least she did before the stay-at-home order.

She told me that she was about “peace,” and, on three occasions, she took it upon herself to offer me food. On the first occasion, it was a brick of something frozen that might have been rice and beans. The second time, it was a bag of greens left on the mat in front of my apartment door—all night. Neighbors said they noticed it the evening before. The last time, this year, I opened my door to discover a head of cabbage with brownish leaves. On all three occasions, I threw the food away.

I suppose these food items were “peace offers” to hint that I should keep my silence about the ratchet she finds necessary to keep up on my wall and over this older woman’s apartment.

I spoke out about the pounding, finally—pounding often so sudden and loud that it was enough to cause my heart to “jump” every time and my cat to run off the next room.

So for little over a week, I was to think the behavior of the man below changed drastically.

The neighbor below is intellectually oriented. His apartment has books. He has a tall bookcase filled with books. He reads. He has art on the wall. He sat in an armchair and, in front of him, a laptop on a stand.

He doesn’t socialize, he said, because neighbors seemed to business trying to figure out what he’s about. He’s has nurses and other assistance coming to the apartment. Otherwise, it was clear, he’s a quiet man.

He hears the pounding, even what sounds like a “bowling” ball, he thought, dropped above him—from my apartment! And yes, he has felt the heat, as I have—emanating I now know, not from him, but from this woman next door.

Well are you sure? How do you know? Maybe that’s not what’s happening to you at all!

I remember stopping by the office after a resident, possibly a friend of the woman next door, coughed on me. It was a few days after the lockdown, and I wasn’t wearing a mask yet. I just stepped out of my apartment to toss my trash out. The resident, a white woman in her fifties, could have taken the elevator, but she saw me, and decided to come up the stairs. I was walking down and saw her and stopped. She approached my landing and coughed in my direction.

I got rid of my garbage and stood by the office door.

“How can I help you?” But is she looking at me? Not at all. Eyes on the screen in front of her, the fingers continue to move along her keyboard. How can I help you—just the right words delivered to welcome me and make me feel intimidated.

I told this 30- or maybe early 40-something what happened.

“Well, just stay away from her.”

What?

I left the office. Intellectually, I understand the resentment, but, on a personal level, I know I’m helpless alone. And she knows that.

Some weeks before, the woman who coughed on me told me she noticed that the manager didn’t respect. She doesn’t respect you!

And people take note of how local managerial figures respond to the presence of black people in a town such as Kenosha, Wisconsin.

We are all women but I’m the one representing a difference that is perceive collectively by them to be a threat to their existence.

In America, pretending to be ignorant is a lifestyle. But for any corporation to thrive in America it does so with the violence of resentment that is present in the board rooms where the planning and construction of the building is imagined. It travels to the site of groundbreaking and ribbon cutting, to the selection of managerial staff and opening day. Resentment and hate determines who will serve as loyal staff and who will become a member of the “community.” The corporate mindset controls what will and will not consist of a community.

It has nothing to do with love.

Collecting rent and looking professional isn’t enough. Speaking within the corporate narrative to communicate with fellow human beings only reveals a personal focus on self-promotion with the goal of rising to the top tier of the corporate ladder.

It’s no coincidence that this behavior from the neighbor next door began in the week in which America discovered that black Americans made up a disproportionate number of Coronavirus victims. “It has been observed that (largely white) Republicans have escalated their calls to reopen the economy soon after it has become clear that COVID-19 hits the black communities and vulnerable people the most, and I do think there are Nazi-ish undertones to some of the anti-lockdown protests, which seem to operate on the premise that it doesn’t matter how many members of the underclass die to save the privileges of the rich,” writes journalist Nathan J. Robinson.

The protests and the buzz is about the economy—not the people. No one from the larger community is coming up with creative ways on Zoom or whatever to stage a protest (virtual protest) expressing outrage on behalf of black and Latinx dying from COVID-19. The economy is embattled. The disadvantaging the economy is hurting America! Don’t worry about the disadvantaged populations of Americans.

“Community”?

Until the corporate mindset is eliminated from the way we relate to one another to the world around us, until we create communities based on compassion, cooperation, justice, love, calls to local managers, refusing to understand race and respond to it’s presence among residents, will fail to effect change. Letters to corporate headquarters will become evidence of someone not “happy” with life in the “community”--a community intended foremost to provide a profit for owners.

Let’s hope the younger generation has had enough of corporate communities.