Last year a fourth grade student of mine, who is black, went out to dinner with a group of other black teens that included at least one twenty year old. The group went to dinner at a swanky restaurant that was built on the riverfront of their city. The police presence on the waterfront is commendable. There are patrol cars through the one strip of martini bars, spas, and restaurants every hour. There is little to no crime there. People pull their yachts up to strips at these restaurants and go inside for dinner. My student is a pretty black girl that looks a bit older for her age. She was retained once so is eleven years old. She and her group went to dinner, ordered beautiful food, then fled the establishment. She was later picked up by the police, at her home in the part of the city that the police normally don't visit. They rarely if ever patrol her street and have stopped "walking the beat" years ago. Children in her city have been murdered at the rate of one a month due to gang violence. Yet they came for her because she cut out on her bill.
Pedophiles, the homeless, and mental patients from surrounding hospitals with no place to go are routinely dumped into the streets of her city which takes the state funding but then doesn't provide services to the increasing population of oppressed peoples that are relocated there. Her city has been ruled the most violent city in our state for several years in a row, and conditions have not improved. But in that one strip things are going very well.
She often comes to visit me, and when I heard about this incident from her classroom teacher I proceeded to lecture her on being a good citizen, laws, and her own self-interest in not being arrested. I have been encouraging her to follow her dream of becoming an obstetrician. When I was done she smiled at me, but her non-response to everything I had said, and the look on her face told me there was something I wasn't reaching there. Today I remembered that smile.
This diary is for her. What I am going to write here is an attempt to explain what took me hours of study and years of soul-searching to understand. To this day, I still get it wrong, which is why I began this diary with one of my failures. When I mentioned in a diary last night that I took courses in Black Studies I was widely ridiculed, but I ask you, how else is someone like me (Hawaiian and Portuguese but white enough due to my English father to walk amongst white people comfortably), how else was I to ever understand and feel right about educating children in my community? Was I supposed to sit down with my black colleagues and ask them, "Please explain to me how racism has affected your life." The reality is we don't have those kinds of conversations if we are white (or pass as white) because we have learned that it is somehow impolite to bring the subject up. We are afraid to ask these questions. And so I went to where it is safe to discuss and progress in these conversations, at first, academia. The conversations I had there and the learning that I did was not pretty, it was screwed up and argumentative and I honestly was so insulted on several occasions that I wanted to drop classes, and on one occasion wanted to change universities. And then I realized that what I was learning was the truth that I needed to base my work on.
Many people have read and disseminated Beverly Tatum on the internet.
the http://en.wikipedia.org/...
You can read what she has written, and you can read other theorists in
same school of thought. What I'm going to attempt to do is to explain how their theory explains, relates to, and can change racism in a person's every day life.
Most of the time people teaching these theories begin with this basic tenet that white people really, really have a hard time with:
Racism is a system in which advantages are given to one race over another based solely on race.
I tried to explain it from that perspective last night, didn't do so wonderfully, I'm not a scholar in this. So today I'm going to do what I am an expert in, I'm going to start with identity development in children and help people to understand why the definition I've posted above about racism is THE only one that will ever eradicate it and needs to be used widely by good people everywhere.
I think we can all stipulate to the idea that we've grown up in a society in which white and black children learned obvious lessons in racism. The portrayal of black people in the media, the whole story of how people react to black people in stores, etc. I'm going to move beyond that level in my stories and leave the conclusion about cultural identity development in a racist society up to you. Try to look for a deeper understanding than the one you have already.
When my now 18 year old daughter was 9 I took her best friend, a black girl on vacation with us. At the time I thought it was wonderful that the kids were all so "colorblind" and was secretly proud of my daughter for having a black best friend. I thought, "This is it, racism is dying." So I packed the kids up and took them on vacation, which at the time was really only a day trip to the beach. Throughout the day I tried to encourage my daughter's friend to do things like go out and play in the water, play in the sand, play volleyball, etc. At some point probably about half way through the morning I realized that she was the only black person on the beach. I had been coming to this beach for years and never noticed it. Me, Ms. Anti-Racism.
So I scooped the kids up and headed to the quaint Victorian town behind the beach (Ocean Grove, NJ) and thought some ice cream at our favorite old-fashioned parlor would cheer her up. Wrong. Amongst the crowd of people licking cones and out parading pedigree pups I realized that once again, there were no black people save her.
What the hell was wrong with me? Later in their years my daughter and she parted ways. She began hanging around with a very tough group of girls, mostly black, that regularly teased and pranked white kids in my daughter's junior high. My daughter began to hang around with a crowd that was mostly white with few minorities. There came a day when my daughter was on line with her friends to pay for food in the cafeteria. A group of black girls walked in front of my daughter, and after a lot of other problems, she found this to be the last straw. My daughter said, "Do you mind, we've been waiting here?" The largest member of that group approached my daughter, screaming ensued, and just as punches were about to be fly that same best friend from years ago stepped forward, having not talked to my daughter in years, and stood between the two. When I've told this story to some white relatives I've heard, "See, it was good she made some black friends." I find the entire story devastatingly sad.
Racism poisons the minds and souls of black children AND white children. The social learning that they do in a racist society in a system of racism occurs in ways and places that polite people don't talk about. I agree with sociologists and theorist that say we must get over being polite about this and start being honest about it. What is at stake? The cultural identities of future Americans who will have the opportunity to change or make worse the condition of racism in this country. I have colleagues that used the election of Barack Obama to argue against magnet schools, which have allowed our rich and poor neighborhoods to blend, to some degree. They want to go back to neighborhood schools. In their minds racism is done, time to move on. In the minds of my daughter, who is now 18, and her former best friend, racism is alive and well and more insidious than ever.
Why is it important to say that racism is a system of advantages based upon race? Because making racism about disliking a group of people becauswe of their race makes it personal and denies the societal structures and norms that have fostered racism for years. This is why there is no such thing as racism against white people. I know that's a hard one to give up. I damn near walked out of a class the first time I heard a professor say it. "Me? I've met people that hate me because they think I'm white, my daughter had a bucket of water dumped over her head because she was white, don't tell me there is no such thing as racism against white people."
But there isn't, and there can't be. People say, "Well, that's the common use of the word." List here for yourself all of the common uses of things and words that became uncommon after thinking people changed them, and measure the importance in using the term racism correctly. I will try to help by explaining it in terms of the stories I've just told you.
In the first story my student is a victim of racism. "What the hell? She walked out on her restaurant bill. Are you kidding me? She has a gripe against white people, SHE is the racist."
Can you see the inadequacy of the above diatribe?
Now change that, change your understanding of racism to it defined as a societal system. Mix in your (hopefully) deeper understanding of identity development of black children in our society. Can you understand now how she is a victim of racism? Could this happen to a white student that walked out on their bill? Absolutely, white student could have been picked up. The racism enters the picture at the point of motivation. Do you think my 11 year old student went to the fanciest restaraunt in town, one she'd never been to, in the "nice section" of town and ordered her meal with her friends and left simply because they were hungry and/or wanted to make trouble? Well, probably. But take it down to another layer, that layer beneath her non-response to me and her smile. What would you say to the satisfaction she experienced in getting over on a white establishment that exists in the center of her city and receives preferential treatment from the police department that is not protecting her and her family elsewhere in the city, which is largely frequented by the white board members who made the decision to drop vagrants and criminals into the streets of the same neighborhoods they aren't forcing police to patrol. Of course my student doesn't know exactly why she feels satisfied in what she did, but she has learned that it feels good to do it. And that is part of black cultural identity development. How do we change this if we won't even recognize it as a system of advantages that prevails to this day in "polite" society everywhere.
We have made progress, but not enough. Changing the laws, making it seem unpopular, going to rallies, giving MLK a holiday, electing a black President, none of this, none of this will change problems that racism wreaks upon the cultural identity development of our kids. I know, because I can see it right in front of me. We have to ask ourselves honest questions: How have I been affected by this system of advantages? What messages do I send the youth of this country in the choices that I make? Can I get over my discomfort with being around people of different races in places that matter, like where I vacation, what I consider nice neighborhoods, etc? How can I change things?
One place we can start is to not add "anti-white" to the term racism in our writing. We haven't experienced racsim because a black minister said stuff about white people that we don't like. We may have experienced prejudice. When we say that white people have experienced racism it is like squeezing the societal aspect of the term out of it and making it less than it is. When we do this, how will we ever get to the point where we address the societal experience of existing and growing up in a racist nation?
I know so many people are working hard every day to make a difference. I am not writing this as a sanctimonious lecture, and I have not studied enough to be an expert. I am writing this as a report from the front lines and asking people who have come so far to do the work and take it the rest of the way, and that work has to come from within us. Yes, you have to take your bleeding heart out again and look at yourself, not to place blame, but to understand and change.