Race in American is having its moment, for better or worse.

Like most people of goodwill, I’m trying to figure out where I stand and we stand when it comes to race. It’s complex, perhaps the most complicated social issue in American history.

It’s so easy to say the wrong thing, spout self-effacing clothes,  do nothing, or simply add to the din.

I am so tired or right-wing hate and liberal guilt. Each deserves the other.

I believe Black Lives Matter is the most important social movement of my life, and yet I struggle with a number of their positions and goals. For me, it’s so easy to support this movement, yet sometimes hard to love.

They are under no obligation to please me, and I don’t need to agree with everything a movement says or does to support it. I joined Black Lives Matter as soon as I could, and I can’t imagine quitting.

When I read about the many hundreds of young Blacks being murdered and maimed in big cities all over the country, I wonder what the logic is of a movement that wants to defund the police rather than reform them, no matter what it costs.

And yet it is this group, more than any other in more than a generation, that is getting white people to understand that racism is so very much alive and deeply embedded in our history, culture, and country.

Those videos have changed the way I think, the unimaginable is not only imaginable, but it is also commonplace to millions of Americans, who live in dread of losing their children too frightened police officers trained to kill rather than reason or run.

Apart from me, I just did not believe all of those stories until I saw them with my own eyes, and Black Lives Matter keeps the heat on all of us. They are upsetting many people, which I guess is their job, but there is a good chance that they might just get something done.

The President and his Attorney General both say America does not have a problem with systemic racism, and our police do not have a problem with how they treat Blacks.

I guess they don’t watch the news or see the same videos I see. President Trump says he doesn’t need to watch them.  It’s good to know the White House feels so safe to the people who live around there in their fortresses and with their bodyguards.

Once again – this is a tiresome theme for me – Trump has sailed off in a dumb direction. What he most needs to do is increase the number of people who will vote for him. What he does almost every day is to defeat himself by spoking only to one part of America.

His is the worst and most incompetent political campaign I have ever witnessed in my life and the clock is running out on him when it comes to turning things around.

Trump has turned out to be grossly more inept at campaigning than I thought, and Biden is equally surprising with his discipline, clarity, and focus.

If America doesn’t have a race problem, I guess I don’t have one either.

I am not afraid of the police; there is little likelihood of my going to jail in my lifetime, I have never been evicted from an apartment, my great grandparents were not slaves, I’ve never felt the need to have “the talk” with my daughter about how to behave when a police officer pulls her over or gone to an underfunded and overcrowded public school, demeaned by unknowing bigots, and been ignored at the highest levels of most American corporations.

My neighborhood does not ring out with the sound of gunfire day and night, and Maria and I do not need to fear for our lives when we step outside.

There are plenty of guns around here, but none of them have ever been pointed at us.

My grandparents came to America happily and willingly.

They were nothing but grateful to America for giving them a desperately needed haven to raise their families and live and die in peace.

I wonder now what they would have been like if their very lives had been stolen from them, and they came here to a new kind of hell as slaves.

Their children and grandchildren feel the same way; we saw America at its best.

Black people and now immigrants see America at its worst. They have every right to carry big chips on their shoulders.

When it comes to race, we have been rushing backward. Our national leader is suggesting that the idea of racism is just another hoax concocted by his enemies.

What are we supposed to feel and do now? There is really no one to guide us.

I do not feel the need to say I am a racist or not one.

Pious proclamations or righteous declarations sound hypocritical even to me. Words really are cheap.

I’ve never thought of myself as a racist, but neither have I done much to stop the racism I see is no longer debatable by people of conscience.

And much of the time – most of the time – I really don’t know what to do. Charles Blow, A Black New York Times columnist, said in an interview that sentiments are not enough anymore. Good point.

What I am getting from the Black Americans I read about is that it’s time for America to put up or shut up. Even he didn’t know exactly what that means.

That, I believe, is why those demonstrations continue night after night. They aren’t buying the old promises and platitudes.  They won’t stop until we really change.

So where do I fit in here?

The truth is, I’m really not sure if I’m a racist, and who cares, really?

Walking around with my BLM bracelet feels pathetic and woefully inadequate. How much change is that going to bring about?

Nor do I think what white people say matters much to Black Americans these days. They’ve heard it all before, many times. I get the sense that many Blacks are still trying to figure out what they want from the rest of us.

From what I see and hear what they want is for the country’s power structure to change, and for new policies to be put into law. Normally, what I do is write and vote. I’m not effective at protests.

I’m not comfortable with continuing violence and unrest, and the idea of defunding police departments when shootings are double what they were last year seems insane to me, the kind of self-destructive madness that always grips some liberals when they get the opportunity.

I don’t accept the idea that all police officers wake up in the morning looking to murder young black men.

But it is clear to me that policing needs to change, and radically so. It’s time.

A former colleague and friend – he teaches in college – tells me he doesn’t care whether white people think they’re racist or not; he’s been hearing liberals say that all of his life and nothing has changed.

What would have to change? I asked.

He said a lot of policy,  a structural reformation of police, and a ton of legislation to help young black men stay away from guns, bad schools,  joblessness, and jail.  Banking has to change, so does education and the moral values of corporations.

That would be a good start, he said. It makes sense to me.

Politicians love to rail against the chaos and looting in our cities, but they never ask where all these guns are coming from, and why it is so easy for children to get them.

There is nothing in my mind more brazenly racist than that.

Imagine if white suburban teenagers were getting shot and killed as often as black children are.

In one weekend in July, 65 people were shot over one weekend in New York, and  87 in Chicago and homicides are soaring from Miami to Milwaukee.  Every one of those dead people, many of them children, were Black.

“You shot and killed a baby,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said at a news conference after Secoriea Turner, an 8-year-old, was shot and killed during the holiday weekend while riding in a car with her mother.

I think we are all of us,  black and white, becoming allergic to platitudes, gestures,  the denial of conservatives, and the self-flagellations of liberals.  And much of the country – except people with big trucks and showy boats – are sick of Donald Trump.

President Trump has done the unthinkable; he’s made me wary of talking about anything. And under the guise of being honest, he is legitimizing white nationalism and racism, both of which are the same thing.

At least Trump, who has chosen to become the de facto spokesperson and cheerleader for White Nationalism, is now open about how he feels. That is a moral challenge for his supporters to sort out. No one else can help them.

Trump puts the old Sheriff Bull Connor from Alabama to shame with his race-baiting and fear-mongering about Blacks invading the cities and suburbs and raping white women.

It’s not cool to lynch Black men for hanging around white women anymore, but it’s okay to use them to spread fresh racial hatred, just at the very moment when we are really beginning to talk about it.

When I was at a Black Lives Matter rally in my town, a man with a bright red MAGA hat, and a Confederate bandana around his neck and no mask, made a point of sticking his face in the faces of the demonstrators and daring them to  “say all lives matter.”

I was hoping he would come to me. I was ready when he did. I said, “I’m happy to say all lives matter, to me, that the whole point of the demonstration today.”

“Even your life matters,” I said, unable to resist. The crack went sailing over his head.

He breathed on me a bit and glowered and moved on.

What a shithead, I thought.

I didn’t grow up rich; I’m sensitive to the idea of elitism.

I don’t know if I’m racist or not, but I know I am one of the educated, privileged, media elitists who are believed to look down on honest,  hard-working people.

But still, hatred is hatred, and ignorance is ignorance. I can’t rationalize that one away.

I understand Black intellectuals’ cynicism and despair. Many have come to believe that it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, nothing will really change for Blacks in America.

That’s a little cold for me. Donald Trump has proven it very much matters who is the President of the United States when it comes to dealing with race.

This Fall, as a candidate, Donald Trump is failing on almost every level a candidate can fail on. The Doomsday Chorus is reminding us daily that our democracy is in peril, and this President will do everything he can to steal the election.

I can’t join the Doomsday Chorus. As of Labor Day, 2020, Donald Trump has presided over the worst presidential election campaign in memory. I’m sticking with today, nobody I know can predict tomorrow.

As of now, according to 538, the most respected polling operation in the country,  Joe Biden is keeping his lead in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, three states Trump must win. That’s a big reason, says 528,  why Biden still has a 69 in 100 chance of winning the Electoral College overall — almost exactly the same position he was in before the conventions.

Trump’s slight bump after the Republican Convention is beginning to erode.

I would bet on those odds any day of the week.