The summer my father graduated from high school, 1964, race-related riots began ripping through American cities. It started in Harlem following the shooting of a Black 15-year-old by a white, off-duty police officer on July 18. Six days later, there was a riot in Rochester, the city where he lived. Like most riots in the 1960s, it began with a police incident that spun out of control: (White) police officers arrested a 19-year-old (Black) man at a street party in the Corn Hill neighborhood (largely Black), and simmering tensions boiled over.
Rochester’s Black community had grown exponentially since the beginning of the 1950s, ballooning from nearly 8,000 to 32,000 in 1964. Many had fled from the racism of the South in search of a better life, but new arrivals found dilapidated housing, prejudice, and high unemployment—joblessness for Blacks was over 16 percent while white unemployment was 2.5 percent.
The Rochester riot lasted three days. Governor Nelson Rockefeller called out the National Guard—1,500 troops occupied the city, the first such use of troops in the North since the Civil War. Two hundred and fifty stores were looted or burned in Corn Hill. Nearly 1,000 people (predominantly Black) were arrested. Five people died and 350 were injured.
One of the casualties was my grandfather, Patrick Mahoney. Patrick had immigrated to the US in 1924 to escape the sectarian violence in Ireland, where a Protestant militia had burned down the family store, nearly killing everyone inside. He made his way to Rochester, got a job at the Genesee Brewery, met a girl (an Italian-German immigrant), and had a couple kids. By 1964, Patrick had settled into a quiet alcoholism that required his younger son, my father, to pick him up most evenings from bars near the brewery and drive him home across the city.
On the night of July 24, Patrick was struck by a brick thrown through the windshield of my father’s car as they drove through Corn Hill. Already anesthetized, my grandfather required a dozen stitches but was otherwise unharmed.
The incident played a pivotal role in my father’s life but not in the way you might expect. Rather than react with anger or resentment toward the rioters who had injured his father and broken the windshield of his Ford Galaxie, it sparked empathy in him. (Though I’m not sure empathy as we understand it was a thing yet in 1964.)
My father wondered what magnitude of despair would drive people to destroy their own neighborhood as a form of protest. It kindled within him a thirst for social justice and led him to a life of public service. He became a social worker, working in the Corn Hill-like neighborhoods of Bed-Stuy and East New York in Brooklyn in the 1970s where despair was thick on the ground. He then went into public health, crusading for awareness and treatment of the AIDS epidemic in the ’80s from within the New York City Public Health Department.
I’m a late learner when it comes to empathy. It would take several lifetimes of therapy to unpack why, but let’s just say that some who know me well have suggested that I suffer from Empathy Deficit Disorder. (For the record: I’m not a psychopath. I’m an asshole.) Recently, out hiking with my bestie Tim, I said “I’m sorry” after hearing him relate a vexing anecdote.
“Did you fart?” Tim asked.
“No,” I said, “I was trying to be empathetic.”
“Don’t do that,” Tim said. “It’s confusing when you do that.”
The turning point for me, empathy-wise, was 2016. As shocked and appalled as any other libtard by Trump’s election, I saw no way forward except through engagement. Here’s what I wrote in these pages in December 2016:
It starts by listening, methinks. What if we started to have informed and honest conversations about what’s most important to us? What if we found out that what we had in common was more powerful than our differences? What if we tried engagement? Knee-jerk opposition and blind hatred can’t be the only option. What if we started by affording the political other the same treatment we hope for ourselves: not assuming that they are the shittiest people imaginable. What’s the worst-case scenario? That we find out that our deepest fears are true and the 60 million Americans who voted for Trump [76 million in 2024] are really terrible people? That feels a lot like where we are now, and that’s a nonstarter for the longevity of the republic. Because folks, what happened in the 2016 presidential election was not about Donald Trump. It was about upending the status quo. There is new energy percolating in the country. We can choose to hate it or we can help try and shape it. Our choice.
Here we are again. I could have written that just as easily today. And, after a brief interregnum of government as usual, it’s back to government as deeply unusual. (Let’s not get into the Matt Gaetz of it all.) The people who voted for Trump may not be the shittiest people imaginable, but it’s difficult for me to understand why anyone would make that choice, because the level of cruelty it enables against so many people is so great.
There’s my lack of empathy staring into the empathetic void of 76 million. It reminds me of something the philosopher Alain de Botton wrote after the 2016 election: “We shouldn’t be surprised by our fellow citizens. That is what the human animal is really like: very sweet at points from close up, usually generous to small children and the elderly, hard-working, but highly prone to delusion, tribal, offended by strangers, disinclined to rational analysis, and with a fondness for slaughter and reckless messianic plans.”
When I woke up on November 6 to find out that Trump had won the election, the story of the Rochester riots came flooding back to me. America is just like Corn Hill in 1964. There’s clearly some despair, and the majority of the neighborhood is so disillusioned with the status quo that they’ve decided to burn down their own neighborhood. Again.
Bruciamo tutto, from the Italian:
Let’s burn everything.
This article appears in December 2024.
