It feels something like the late 1950s and early 1960s to me these days. I’m a white woman, now 60, who sees the signs signaling a new outpouring of racism everywhere, both literally and figuratively - racism combined with virulent red-baiting and other forms of fear-and-smear.
White voices willing to name, expose, and confront racism have been a lifeline for me, and I want to tell you why. And I want to tell you about a particular white person, the late Lillian Smith (1897 – 1966) whose words have spoken to me in a particularly powerful way over the years, and why her voice continues to be so relevant and resonant today. I'm hoping she will also inspire some of you to speak out more powerfully, more often, to other whites about the need to name and challenge white privilege in both its obvious and subtle varieties.
I didn't come to the subject of white supremacy easily or start out on the side of the angels.
I grew up not in a liberal enclave, but in a blue-collar, lunch bucket town where I breathed in racism as normally as I breathed in air. I'm not talking about fire-breathing, wingnut racism, but "ordinary" racism. The kind that doesn't even warrant thinking about if you're on the racially (if not always economically) privileged side of things.
I was a working-class kid in a family that sometimes struggled for economic survival. My folks weren't right-wing bigots; they were "Eisenhower Republicans," good, decent people in so many respects. But they didn't challenge the racial (read: white supremacist) status quo – and so, for a long time, neither did I.
"Teach us to listen to sounds larger than our own heartbeat; that endure longer than our own weeping in the dark." – Lillian Smith
The southern Colorado town I grew up in was pretty evenly divided between Latinos/Chicanos (people identified themselves differently, but most were of Mexican/Indigenous descent) and Anglos. While there was no legal segregation, the social and economic distances between these groups were usually fierce and wide. (That's changed over time, of course, though not nearly enough.) There was a smaller black population, but large enough so that we had segregated orphanages. The white orphanage was in a former mansion with a big green lawn. The black orphanage, funded (1905 – 1963) by the 16 affiliates of the Colorado Federated Colored Women's Clubs, was located a couple of blocks from my house, in a badly-in-need of repair – brick structure where kids played on dirt and gravel.
Nobody ever really questioned these arrangements that I can remember, though I know it made my mother uncomfortable in some way. She expressed her discomfort by occasionally giving the orphanage maintenance man a box of Russell Stover candy (that she couldn't really afford to buy)when he walked by our house – and then she, he, and I would all feel uncomfortable and embarrassed, but no one ever said why.
There were some obvious, rabid racists, of course. The ones who used a lot of anti-Latino slurs and epithets, and who would spit on the street as a Chicana/o passed them. The ones who ran the John Birch Society bookstore in town. The ones who screamed that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a communist and who wanted to impeach U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren for presiding so effectively over the Brown v. Board of Education decision that legally banned racial segregation in public schools.
Later, I came to think of these folks as the ones who gave cover to the rest of us. But at the time, that kind of thinking was way down the line for me.
This photo of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and others – with caption reading "A training school for communists" – (a staple on right-wing websites and one I saw on billboards in my youth) was taken at Highlander Folk School, a social justice education center that has long helped to support struggles for economic justice, civil rights, and immigrant rights. Rosa Parks and Septima Clark, two other giants of the civil rights movement also participated in Highlander initiatives.
My hometown – like others in Colorado, especially along the front range of the Rockies – also had a Klan legacy that rippled silently through generations of lives in unacknowledged ways. In the 1920's, Colorado had a Ku Klux Klan presence so strong that at least one mayor, a U.S. Senator, and a governor were members – along with thousands of others. And for awhile, the Klan heavily influenced the workings of the state legislature. It was never comprised only of working-class white people. Many Klan members were so-called "pillars of the community" – business and civic and faith leaders.
"All we need do is walk over to Main Street and enter a a few modern air-conditioned offices. There, sitting at their desks, are the men who quietly protect the rabble and give it its hidden power. Some of these men are doctors, lawyers, bankers, engineers, newspaper editors and publishers; some are powerful industrial leaders..."
– Lillian Smith, 1957
My mother and grandmother told us stories of how Klan members used to gather in their robes and burn crosses and hold Klan burials in a local cemetery. I got the impression that my mother didn't exactly approve of them - but she didn't say anything against them, either. Her voice grew shaky when she talked about the Klan ceremonies, and then would fade. The firelit nighttime ceremonies of the Klan – and the prominence of its members - frightened her, I think, into a silence that lasted most a lifetime.
"Yet we make a Gestapo of our fears and become cowards at the sound of our own heart-beat, mistaking it for the heavy clump of disaster."
– Lillian Smith, 1941
Somewhere along the line – thanks to the right-wing mother of a friend who knew how to offer the promise of pseudo-community organized around who and what you all agree to hate - I moved harder to the right than my folks and started spouting right-wing rhetoric. Not because I meant to be a bigot. But the sense of community and meaning these folks offered to a kid who felt like a lonely little misfit was so powerful.
"A mob always begins inside us: never is it an outside job. Always it is an inside job; the troublemakers are there, but they are inside you and me."
-Lillian Smith, 1961
It's just a good thing that I also ran into three great high school teachers, white males, who had a different point of view. Each in his own way gently challenged me without ever suggesting I was stupid. Each treated me like a smart, good person who had gotten some of her facts wrong and had narrowed her own vision in ways that weren't helpful.
Most of all, each one reached out with the best in himself to the best that he apparently thought was in me. They even snuck a little Rev. ML King and Gandhi and the racialization of poverty in my hometown into class discussions. Those discussions somehow led me to the writings of Lillian Smith.
Lillian Eugenia Smith (1897 – 1966)
It was an unlikely encounter. In many respects, Lillian Smith and I had little in common, except our whiteness. She was a Southern woman - older than my parents - who had lived with her female partner, Paula Snelling, for more than 40 years (I had no inkling at the time I would one day recognize myself as a lesbian), and who was dead of breast cancer before I ever read a word she wrote or spoke. Unlike me, she came from an upper middle-class white family (that also, as it happened, went through difficult economic times).
Dr. King and Mahatma Gandhi will always be among the most powerful influences in my life - and Thich Nhat Hanh, Caesar Chavez, and Dolores Huerta would join them in my personal pantheon of nonviolent heroes. But my sense of the world and my place in it changed most dramatically because I started to recognize myself in the white world Lillian Smith described growing up and living in.
She talked not only about the evil nature and cost of racial injustice to people of color, but also about how, in the words of Michelle Cliff, white southerners were "taught to act, feel, and become White."
Smith didn't wait until it was fashionable to talk about these things – she started speaking out in the early 1940s, and she caught hell for it throughout the rest of her life.
"I know the dread of change; I know all of the rationalizations by which the white man eases his guilt and conserves his feelings of superiority; how he concentrates not on his own problem of white superiority, not on his own obsession with skin color, but instead on the Negro, hoping that somehow the Negro can be changed to fit the pattern more harmoniously, as though the white man and his pattern could never be changed...And we have sold the idea to the North also."
-Lillian Smith, "Humans in Bondage," an article
published in 1944
The first Lillian Smith book I got my hands on (and hid from my parents) was Killers of the Dream,, accurately described by the New Georgia Encyclopedia as " a brilliant psychological and autobiographical work warning that segregation corrupted the soul; removed any possibility of freedom and decency in the South; and had serious implications for women and children in particular in their developing views of sex, their bodies, and their innermost selves."
Here is what she wrote in the foreword to Killers of the Dream that grabbed me so when I was young
Now, suddenly, shoving out pleasures and games and stinging questions come the TERROR: the Ku Klux Klan and the lynchings I did not see but recreated from the whispers of grownups. . .the gentle back-door cruelties of "nice people" which scared me more than the cross burnings. . .and the singsong voices of politicians who preached their demonic suggestions to us as if elected by Satan to do so: telling us lies about skin color and a culture they were callously ignorant of – lies made of their own fantasies, of their secret deviations..."
– Lillian Smith
Lillian Smith may have been talking about her own childhood, in a different time and place, but she seemed to be describing my childhood, too. A few details were different, but the primal goop of symbolic representations of blackness and whiteness and their translation into systems of subordination and dominance felt so. . .familiar.
She reminded "polite" white folks that our silence served to support the crowds who who screamed and threw rocks at the first black students to integrate white public schools – and it encouraged those who lynched people whose names are no longer known as well as the murderers of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, Viola Liuzzo, and Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman...eventually including Dr. King. She had a unique ability to describe, in vivid detail, the ways in which racism and segregation maimed white people, inside and out, spiritually and emotionally and politically. How these things made it impossible to have real, human relationships across artificially-constructed racial lines. (Hat Tip to Deoliver47 for link.) How racism corrupted both public and private life. How entire institutions embodied this corruption.
The more I read, the more I realized she was describing what had happened, was still happening, to me. Not until I got away to college would I find peers to talk to who were somehow traveling the same path, who were, like me, in some kind of inchoate chrysalis, the full dimension of which we could not possibly grasp.
Works by Lillian Smith
Strange Fruit (1944), an interracial love story, a novel, that later was translated into a Broadway play
Killers of the Dream (1949)
The Journey (1954), autobiographical reflections and social commentary based on a driving tour of coastal Georgia.
Now Is the Time (1955), published in the immediate wake of
Brown v. Board of Education, urging full compliance with the decision and offering a strong defense of America's moral obligation to civil rights.
One Hour (1959), a novel containing a powerful denunciation of McCarthyism
Memory of a Large Christmas (1962)
Our Faces, Our Words (1964), a tribute to the direct nonviolent resistance of the civil rights movement
The Winner Names the Age: A Collection of Writings (1978)
How Am I to be Heard?: Letters of Lillian Smith (1993), ed. by Margaret Rose Gladney
In addition, from 1936 to 1945, Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling edited the small literary magazine, Pseudopodia (later changed to North Georgia Review and then to South Today). meant to promote their anti-racist ideals and publish both black writers.
The reality she helped me see clearly for the first time in my life was both painful and shattering. It was also so so full of fresh possibility, that I hurt from the lack of it. I could never again be precisely who I was before I met Lillian Smith. Even when I tried to walk away from her words, to retreat to unthinking certainty, those words, and their reverberation in my own life, would haunt me again and again and again.
She wasn't just talking about issues. She didn't use political rhetoric. She talked about lives. My life. My soul. My spirit. My imagination. My ability to dream. And she was showing me how much damage had been done to my young, white self – and to my mother, my father, my sister, my friends and neighbors. She wanted me to believe in my capacity for change, for meeting the crisis of racism in a bold, courageous, constructive, and healing way that could ultimately embrace us all.
I could not have heard this message from a person of color, not then. And a person of color could never have described to me so clearly the unexamined ways in which racism was woven into my life.
She wrote that the problem wasn't just the shouters, the obvious bigots, but also the non-action of "polite" people, the people who perhaps recognized a little problem, but denied or downplayed the magnitude of racism and its impact.
It is the apathy of white southerners that disturbs me; and may I add, this apathy is north and west of our region, too. There are so many people who are determined not to do wrong but equally determined not to do right. Thus they walk straight into Nothingness...
-Lillian Smith
When other white moderates in the South were urging "moderation" in challenging racism – and certainly weren't endorsing full-fledged desegregation – she said:
""What do people mean when they use that fuzzy word, moderation? Why do the mass magazines keep talking about it?
. . .[m]ost of these so-called moderates are doing nothing. That does not mean they are not worried. It means they are suffering from temporary moral and psychic paralysis. They are working harder to be moderates than they are working to meet the crisis. They are driving straight down the middle of the road with their eyes shut and you know what happens in traffic when you do that. But they are trying to believe there is no traffic. They are telling themselves nobody is on the road but themselves."
-Lillian Smith
How could we white people really learn the truth about the impact of racism on people of color? Well, we could read history, certainly, although the real history was a bit harder to come by when I was a kid. Lillian Smith told me that the real experts were people of color; that if I took time to build real relationships, not just political marriages of convenience, with people of color, I would learn what I most needed to know. But I would have to be willing to listen deeply, with enormous humility and respect, in order to learn. And I would have to learn to share my thoughts without needing to elevate my own white voice above people of color.
So that's what I've been trying to do, most of my adult life. Sometimes I stumble. Along the way, I have learned that as I speak out more clearly, and more often, to name and challenge racism, I find myself continually transformed by what I experience. I'm on the journey of a lifetime, one that will never be finished.
Today, I believe that the United States faces a particular racial challenge. While not every disagreement with or challenge to President Obama, his ideas, and his administration is intrinsically racist, racism is fueling a broader right-wing agenda in this country. I believe a strong current of racism is always present (though often unacknowledged) in the rise in anti-Obama and anti-government hysteria.
Racism is coded into opposition against health care reform, and all manner of racist hell is going to break loose when immigration reform is front and center.
Moreover, countless public and private institutions still embody racism, still reflect a commitment to white supremacy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the criminal legal/punishment system, where more than 2 million people are in U.S. jails and prisons – and the vast majority are people of color.
I also believe white people have a special responsibility to name, expose, and confront that racism – to confront it in ourselves as well as in others. To confront it in public as well as private institutions. And we have to do that, somehow, without becoming arrogant ideologues who only know how to denounce others; who can no longer reach out to the best in others with the best that is in ourselves.
It's a tall order.
One way to help find the best in ourselves is to educate ourselves about white privilege – and the extent of denial about racism. Tim Wise is a terrific educator and occasionally posts here. Kossack Adept2u wrote a great diary about Tim's work.
Another way to help find the best in ourselves and each other is to hang out on the front porch at Black Kos on Friday mornings, and now also, with the debut of Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Tuesday afternoons. I know I always find good company, good conversation, and serious food for thought here - and the kind of compassionate candor that helps to create and tend a fine community atmosphere and spirit.
I'll end (at last!) with a piece of a love letter I think I've been trying to write for much of my life:
Lillian Smith, thank you, from the bottom of my heart. You probably never imagined that your voice would be a lifeline that even after your death would unfurl through time and space, just in time to help save young RadioGirl from drowning in a sea of white silence about white violence.
But that's the power of your particular voice raised up against racism, and I thank you for it. I wish I had shared your words with my mother before she died, at about your same age; I think that, like me, she would have recognized her own life in them.
Rest in peace, dear warrior. May the relentless persistence and courage in your voice somehow find its way into my own and that of many other white people. Because we need to channel your courage, your refusal to be silent, right now, today, in 2009.
Lillian Smith: 1897 – 1966.
