So, what’s anti-racism, equity and inclusion look like from the inside? Now stop and wait a minute or two. This is not an academic treatise on race and racism and this is clearly not an example of CRT but this is as real as it gets for everyday people trying to work towards equity in a small town located in the Upper Valley of Vermont, the second whitest state in the nation.
The place is Hartford VT with five villages comprising the town of a bit more than ten thousand residents, 96% white, give or take a percentage point or half. In 2017, one of the town’s Selectboard members, Mike Morris, decided to share a racist cartoon. Following is the perspective of a local journalist Jim Kenyon for the Valley News:
“A photo titled ‘Movin’ Day’ showed a rusted-out truck loaded down with bedding, a wash basin and other belongings. A wooden barrel was strapped to the front bumper.
Four people are pictured in the jalopy, though, in fact, only three of them actually moved out of the White House on Friday — Barack and Michelle Obama, and Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama’s mother. The fourth occupant, former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, never lived in the White House and left the administration in 2015. The one thing the four people have in common is that they’re all black, and they all look ridiculous. Also in the car is the Obamas’ dog, who also happens to be black.
Get it?”
Hence begins my saga with Hartford and its knee-jerk response to this cartoon that was widely circulated. The communities outcry was fast and furious. A meeting was held at a local library where over a hundred residents attended. Trust me, for this small, rural community, there were a lot of people upset. The Hartford Selectboard decided almost immediately to create a town committee to address and ‘research’ such incidents of racial animus. Applications went out, people applied and within a few months a committee of nine was selected to shoulder the work of anti-racism, equality and inclusion in the town of Hartford. I was one of the selected to serve on this committee, hence my inside knowledge. Out of the nine there were four BIPOCS (in those days we were still known as POCS) two women and two men. I was the oldest Black woman on the committee. At the time I was sixty-nine and a transplant from southern California.
Our first meeting required us to choose a Chair, Vice Chair and a Secretary. Although I was the oldest, my background and experience would have encumbered the goals of the committee. I applied primarily to make a contribution having been Black for many, many decades. The chosen Chair was a young Black woman who had originally been born in Ethiopia, but had been raised by a white couple in the Northeast Kingdom; a very, very white space.
Let’s see, for privacy sake, let’s call her Sherry. Sherry was a firebrand. She had spearheaded the meetings at the local library protesting and demanding change within our local government and schools after the dissemination of that Morris cartoon.
Sherry had recently graduated from a college in Northern Vermont University with a BA degree in Race and Gender. Our first meeting, as did all future meetings, began with “what is your pronoun?”
Now, for the younger ones who might read this and feel that it is perfectly normal to identify someone by ‘their’ pronoun, for those of us who are older than fifty, the concept is new and not fungible. In other words, my pronoun does not comprise my being. Nor does our inability or reluctance to “choosing” a pronoun demonstrate any disrespect towards the LBGTQ+ or transgender community. Words choices, the idea of trigger words in college courses or just words in daily conversations that turn people into enemies without knowing anything about them and their motivations, is a practice, in itself, that is divisive.
So, after most of the nine newly seated Equality and Inclusion Committee members struggled with their pronouns, our first meeting essentially came to an end.