Overpass Light Brigade, "Unlearn Racism"
When the
Overpass Light Brigade brought the message of "
Unlearn Racism" to Milwaukee, they held up lights on a subject that we are confronted with daily, but are not always sure how to address as individuals. We know that
anthropologists and other scientists have made it clear for years that biological "
race" exists as only
a social construct, but that "racism" is alive and well and none of us are unaffected by the miasma from the racial swamp we breathe in daily.
So many of our efforts are focusing on protesting the more obvious deleterious effects of systemic racism—via protests and legislation—that we don't always have time to have a conversation about what to do about it, person by person. This is what Ricky Sherover-Marcuse called "attitudinal racism."
Because racism is both institutional and attitudinal, effective strategies against it must recognize this dual character. The undoing of institutionalized racism must be accompanied by the unlearning of racists attitudes and beliefs. The unlearning of racists patterns of thought and action must guide the practice of political and social change.
As a black person, I'm always interested in trying to figure out in conversations with my close friends who are not black—what makes them tick? How did they shake off the shackles of ostensible racial superiority and change? What was it in their upbringing, surrounds, faith, ethical teachings, incidents that took place along the road of life that allowed them to scour out racism or at least start the cleansing? Perhaps if more people would talk about how they unlearned racism, it would help direct others onto that path.
Follow me below the fold to begin that conversation.
Over the years here at Daily Kos, many posters have talked about this—in scattered comments and diaries, and shared what shaped them into becoming anti-racist. Let's be clear. I'm not talking about the Big R racism of cross-burners and lynchers, or about people who throw racial epithets like the N-word around. Those people are easy to point a finger at. This isn't a left-right issue either. A person can hold liberal or left or progressive values dear and still hold and espouse racist attitudes—conscious and or unconscious.
Nor is this a North-South issue. Talk to black people, and you'll find that many of us are far more likely to trust anti-racists who are southern born, than those people who were raised in the North, Midwest or West in lily-white enclaves who talk liberal but who react based on deep-rooted racial attitudes. This holds true for beliefs about immigrants, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians. It does not exclude racism built into religious attitudes either. I've heard too many Islamophobic or anti-Semitic remarks made by acquaintances who pride themselves on their liberalism.
Growing up in a home with a white grandmother from Kansas, whose family was horrified by her marriage to a black man and scratched her out of the family Bible, I was always puzzled by what made her different from her parents, stepmother and siblings who washed their hands of her, of her son (my dad), my mom, my brother and me.
How did she become the anti-racist cuckoo in a nest of jayhawks? I don't know, and she died before I could ask her. I know she denounced the faith tradition of her childhood and as an adult embraced a religion that accepted interracial marriage, but I have no clear idea what made her different as a young adult. I've made guesses, going over her history, and remembering snatches of stories she told me. She was the oldest child of 12 siblings and step-siblings. She was rebellious and refused to stay in the house doing women's work, and preferred to do plowing alongside her dad. When her mother died, and her new stepmother was around her age, she left the farm and went into domestic service in a nearby city. She had never seen a black person prior to that move. She had been exposed to racist comments from her stepmother about "dirty Indians" and resented her constant harping about her long straight hair and sunburned complexion due to working outside on the farm. Working in service, she met my grandfather who was chauffeur to the same white family she was employed by. The rest is history—they left Kansas and had to marry in another state. They moved to Chicago, and could not settle in a white neighborhood. At that time, there were few whites who would accept an interracial couple, and I remember her telling me that the only exhibition of Christian kindness she received was from members of the black community, not all of whom welcomed, but most of whom embraced her as a fellow human being.
I remember watching her watch television during the early days of the civil rights movement as dogs and firehoses were used to quell black struggle. One day, she even shouted at the screen, face turning red, and said, "Oh how I hate white people." I was puzzled and said, "But Bobby (my nickname for her) you are white." She replied, "Lord knows, can't tell you how many times I wish I wasn't."
She taught me that there were white people who could transcend racism and was a major influence on my future efforts to build racial bridges. If Bobby could see us, marry us, be my devoted nurturing grandmother, then the cause was not hopeless, only difficult.
Part of my own search for understanding has been to listen to the stories of other people who remind me of her, to perhaps gain more insight. To find other white people who somehow, someway, have fought to overcome the deep rooted racism which is a norm of our society—not a quirk or aberration.
Many readers are familiar with anti-racist activist Tim Wise, who is white, and grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and went to college in Louisiana. Older than Wise, and less well-known, is civil-rights attorney, NAACP member, and Moral Mondays activist Al McSurely.
Al McSurely, civil rights attorney, activist, and member of of the North Carolina NAACP and Moral Mondays movement
McSurely has been involved in anti-racism civil rights work for many decades.
Some of his story is told in this focus piece, "Al McSurely. Fighting racism—and winning—with real-life consequences"
McSurely saw his first glimpse of his life's work in 1957, the summer before his senior year at UNC-Chapel Hill. He hitchhiked from his home in northern Virginia to Texas, stopping at towns and cities along the way, including Little Rock, Ark., where he saw "this whole segregated system in a fairly large capital town." He hasn't been the same since.
After graduation, he worked as a juvenile court counselor in Virginia and then at a Washington, D.C.-area anti-poverty program. He joined the Northern Virginia Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, in 1962. "What really made me committed for life was getting to know as very close friends some poor, African-American people that were trying to make sense out of this situation that they had been born into," McSurely says. "If white people ever allow themselves to become real good friends with poor black people and identify with them as brothers and sisters, then it's hard not to become a member of the antiracist movement."
In 1967, McSurely moved with his then-wife and a handful of white organizers to eastern Kentucky to bring white working people into the movement. A few months after they arrived, the county sheriff arrested both of them and ransacked their home. The county prosecutor charged them with sedition, a federal crime that carries a 20-year prison sentence. The Center for Constitutional Rights took the case, arguing in federal court the prosecution would have a chilling effect on First Amendment rights. McSurely and his wife won, but later that year, Democratic Sen. John McClellan subpoenaed them to turn over the addresses and information of their friends in the movement. They refused and sued the senator and other committee members. They won in 1983 when a Washington, D.C., jury awarded them a $1.6 million judgment. McSurely used his portion of the money to pay his way through law school at N.C. Central University and support his family until he launched his civil rights law practice. He took his first case when he was 51.
A deeper view into McSurely's development can be heard in a North Carolina Public Radio program interview, hosted by Frank Stasio,
Lawyer and Organizer Reflects On 50 Years Of Civil Rights Action:
Al McSurely has spent more than five decades fighting racism, poverty and discrimination.
In the 1960s, he was arrested for sedition in Kentucky and then for Contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents to the McClellan Committee. His experience in the legal system led him to start law school at the age of 48. McSurely worked for many civil rights clients, including a landmark case on behalf of UNC housekeepers.
I am currently reading a book I highly recommend: How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood, released on April 14, 2015, which is a powerful narrative memoir about unlearning racism.
Critically acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley was eleven years old in 1966 when federally mandated integration of schools went into effect in the state and the school in his small eastern North Carolina town was first integrated. Until then, blacks and whites didn’t sit next to one another in a public space or eat in the same restaurants, and they certainly didn’t go to school together.
Going to one of the private schools that almost immediately sprang up was not an option for Jim: his family was too poor to pay tuition, and while they shared the community’s dismay over the mixing of the races, they had no choice but to be on the front lines of his school’s desegregation. What he did not realize until he began to meet these new students was just how deeply ingrained his own prejudices were and how those prejudices had developed in him despite the fact that prior to starting sixth grade, he had actually never known any black people.
Now, more than forty years later, Grimsley looks back at that school and those times—remembering his own first real encounters with black children and their culture. The result is a narrative both true and deeply moving. Jim takes readers into those classrooms and onto the playing fields as, ever so tentatively, alliances were forged and friendships established. And looking back from today’s perspective, he examines how far we have really come.
This
Amazon reader review, by Barbara Bamberger Scott gives more detail:
Award-winning novelist Grimsley (WINTER BIRDS, DREAM BOY) has composed something akin to a confession—the confession of the innocence of childhood overshadowed by place and race. In Jones County in 1850, the black population outnumbered the white, and yet it was considered a wealthy region—a place where whites owed their wealth to the enslavement of blacks. Fast forward just over 100 years: in 1966, Jones County still had a substantial black population, was no longer considered a wealthy place, and was confronting the federal mandate that black and white children learn together in schools that once had been completely segregated. Grimsley was white and, at 11 years old, accustomed to contact only with other white children. Gradually, he and his fellow white students would become a racial minority.
Grimsley admits that for no reason he could have explained, he was initially fearful of being in a classroom with black children. “To the extent that I understood the fear, I knew it came from a feeling that the world was rearranging itself, the shift being bigger than I could take in.” He makes the point that racism is never specifically taught, yet it’s something everyone knows. In Jones County, everyone knew his or her place in a complex hierarchy of skin color and varying degrees of wealth, inheritance and education. But as the school years passed, Grimsley had the chance to confront his own racism, and that of his white classmates, in ways that were both subtle and, at times, extremely jarring. When a black girl kissed him, it was a turning point.
In high school, even some of the poorest white parents managed to scrape together the funds to send their children to private whites-only schools. Grimsley’s dysfunctional family made no such efforts. And though the melding of the public schools had its challenges, at a certain moment in high school, it started to take with Grimsley. He began to see his black acquaintances as “telling the truth about racism” in a way that his white cohort did not; he started siding with the black kids on parlous issues, though at this remove, he does not credit himself with special insights, only stating that “integration happened,” and he had to make his accommodation to it. The fact that he was also realizing he was gay perhaps made him more sensitive to issues of discrimination, but more significantly, he believes, it was simple propinquity that turned the key: “I had…grown to know black people as friends and equals.” In that way, for that conflicted young man, integration worked. In a poignant final episode, Grimsley, who had not been back to Jones County since high school, returned for a class reunion. He found there both the sweetness of reminiscing with one of his black female friends and the bitterness of hearing voiced once again some of the old, ugly rhetoric of race among the whites. He concludes that, despite the continued crossfire, he and his classmates—“cool and slouched, shy and lost”—desegregated the schools of Jones County and became instruments of its history.
There are many
anti-racist groups and conferences here in the U.S. Our northern neighbors in British Columbia have an activist program targeting young people, built around
unlearning racism, including
interactive sites, and guides.
This isn't the first time I've written about this particular topic, and it won't be the last. When I wrote, Ending racism—one person at a time, three years ago, some other resources were provided, which I won't repeat here. In the previous article, I also discuss white privilege, which is connected to this issue.
I hope you will join me today and share your stories—successes, barriers, and failures, in the struggle to transform yourself, and shed the skin of both racism and privilege.
