(Catherine Meeks, editor. Living into God's Dream: Dismantling Racism in America. New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2016.)
"Why is this Black woman still talking about race?" Catherine Meeks, editor of Living into God's Dream, puts that question in the title of one of her essays. People like me -- white, English - speaking -- may ask the question another way: since civil rights laws of the 1960s, can't we all just be colorblind?
People like me need to hear what's expressed in the title of another chapter by Meeks, "It is so Hard to be Black in America." I've read the book for our seminar Education for Ministry (EfM). What follows is a digest of what I read and how I related it to my own experience.
Internalized Oppression
But, internally, people of color carry the burden of white peoples' labels for them. I've seen how it works. When any black man walks into anyplace in America, he knows that everyone who sees him will be judging him by externals -- how he dresses, how he pronounces words, how he moves -- or they're trying not to judge him.
Sure, white people judge white people, too -- they're old, or country, or emo, ex-hippy, or whatever -- but the stakes are higher with a person of color. When our all - white group discussing Meek's book shared our earliest memories of racial awareness, one memory was positive -- about a kind housekeeper -- and all of our other first memories involved fear, anger, and even disgust. None of us were taught those feelings: we picked them up from news, from cues on the playground, from conditions in segregated facilities. (See my blogpost about racial fear.)
I know better, and I'm still guilty of leaping to conclusions. When a black man in jeans and a reflective jacket entered our school's theatre, I nearly redirected him to the maintenance shed out back, realizing just in time that he was father to one of my young actors, coming to the show from work. Black students sitting together for a varsity football home game saw the women in the next row grab up their purses and, after a decent pause, relocate. Every encounter for a black man in America has the potential for a humiliation or altercation.
I've lived days with "internalized oppression" myself, on occasions when my ill - judged reaction to student behavior has been perceived as mean, unfair, or even scary. Until the matter is resolved in some public way, by my apology and students expression of forgiveness, I walk the halls under a burden of the kids' perception. The usual small talk is forced, my mind is distracted when I read or teach, my hands tremble when I open the door to the lunch room, I can't sleep. No wonder, then, that students of color may have stuff on their minds that inhibits their performances on assessments, and measurements of black adults' health show ill - effects of long - term stress, for instance, on blood pressure, and their life expectancy is lower across the board (88).
Colorblindness Isn't the Answer
Being "colorblind" is neither possible nor desirable (45), as it means denying a part of identity that comes from racial experiences -- as bad as imposing an identity on someone based on race. Poet Langston Hughes said it well, in a low - key way, with his essay in verse, "Theme for English B." As "the only colored student" in the class, he responds to his white professor's assignment to tell about himself. Hughes details his long commute back to his room in Harlem before telling of the things he likes, including "being in love" and "Bessie, Bop, and Bach." He muses:I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
A sweet student in my seventh grade class said exactly what being colorblind really means when she summed up this poem: "He wants his professor to know that even though he's black, he's just like normal people."
Instead of trying to be color blind, suppose guys who look like me open up to appreciating what racial and ethnic differences present to us?
As a homeschooling blogger called "Heritage Mom" writes in her article about starting a black homeschool group to do "black things" and to get away, once in awhile, from the judgement of white parents, there are indeed cultural differences in the ways black parents interact with their kids -- involving intimacy, speech, loudness, humor -- that make white people feel uncomfortable. She and her children have to "code switch" among whites, and can relax around each other (see her wonderful article here: "Why I Need a Black Homeschool Group, Part 2.").
Reading that, I was reminded how white American students of mine felt when they attended school in Japan. The culture of the Japanese school involved standing together to bow for any adult who entered the room, and students with wet towels crawling shoulder - to - shoulder across the floor to wipe the cafeteria clean after lunch. (Students of mine for 38 years have reacted as if wiping a table or holding a broom demeaned them.) It occurs to me that disapproving Japanese parents probably looked askance at those American kids for their boisterousness, their selfishness, their lack of discipline, and their resistance to acting normal.
The white mom who said that her group with one black family was just a colorblind group, while meeting with a black group is "reverse racism," speaks from the same place as that seventh grade girl.
Meeks's book reminded me that "White" used to be, not normal, but the superior category on a list of 100 classifications on the US census, ca. 1900. It's been years, but I remember reading that list. As I recall, Irish and Italians barely made it in the top fifty; Jews, Hispanics, Greeks were listed closer to Asians and American Indians; the census listed darkest skins last. The book points out that the post - Reconstruction migration of blacks to the north brought about a new definition of White to be, simply, not black. When "white," with all that encompassed, became the norm, then people of every other racial classification were, by implication, a problem. Federal law and local custom "redlined" non-whites in areas where property values would be low, by trash dumps, dividing highways, factories. While generations of my family built up wealth from property, Black families could not. (See my blogpost, The Privilege is Mine.) We're living with the legacy of all this today.
From first chapter to last, the authors focus on work that must be done internally, by all of us, black and white. Luther E. Smith writes, "The transformation of hearts alone will not undo racism [but is] essential" to the eventual "interpersonal process" (4). Several authors cite Howard Thurman, theologian and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., who convincingly casts Jesus' ministry as one of ending Roman oppression, one heart at a time, through love. (See my blogpost Howard Thurman's Jesus and the Disinherited: Real Prophecy). Philosopher / psychologist William James is at the center of Lerita Coleman Brown's article, "Dissecting Racism: Healing Minds, Cultivating Spirits," as she proposes that we get in touch with our spiritual selves -- something different from identity based on relationships, including race and religion: who are we just in ourselves (23)?
The seventh chapter comes closest to presenting a path forward. Lynn W. Huber writes that telling our stories to each other is the best place to start. That's something I teach to my own students, even while I instruct them in writing "persuasive essays": no matter how eloquent you are and how forceful your ideas, the audience doesn't engage until a sentence begins, "For example, one time …" Our discussion group got into this book via personal stories. In fact, Huber's own example is my strongest takeaway from the book, and it doesn't even concern race. Feeling "angry and impotent" because of a friend who owed her a large sum, she finally wrote the friend that she'd consider payment a present, and, "as of now, you owe me nothing: the debt is cancelled" (116). Huber writes of the huge relief she felt, proving what Nelson Mandela said, "Refusing forgiveness is like taking poison and expecting it to kill the other person."
"Forgiveness" turns out to be part of the answer, but not before Meeks writes of her strong response to the statements of "forgiveness" from families of victims within days after the killing of nine people in a Charleston church:
Of course I believe that forgiveness is important, but three days following the murder of a loved one will not be the day that it happens.
I understand what happened. To the White supremacy constructs at work in our society, forgiveness was the only acceptable emotion for Blacks to express. During slavery, Black people were not allowed to show signs of rage, indignation, or grief because of the prevailing myth of "happy darkies." (55)
For racism, there's a lot of forgiving to do. Black people who've internalized the pressures of being outside the white definition of normal need to forgive themselves; people like me need to "revisit uncomfortable parts of our history." D'Souza writes of such an encounter in Boston where citizens revisited what whites remember as the "busing crisis" of the 1970s, and black residents of Boston remember as one violent blip in a decades - long struggle against enforced inferiority of segregated black schools (92 ff.).
Huber writes what forgiveness is not (114):
Forgiveness is not forgetting. If we could forget the offense, it wouldn't need to be forgiven.
Forgiveness is not condoning. If the offense were excusable, it wouldn't need to be forgiven.
Forgiveness is not reconciliation. The former is a one person job. The latter is a two person job, and requires repentance and amendment of life from the offender in order to be safe for the person mistreated.
Forgiveness is not about the offender. It is really about you and your freedom.
A couple other nuggets of wisdom about changing hearts and minds come up in "Diary of a Spoiled White Guy." Don Mosley quotes a mentor, Clarence Jordan, saying, "faith is not belief in spite of evidence but life in scorn of the consequences!" (70) The context is creation of what would become Habitat for Humanity in Georgia of the early 1970s amid threats and drive - by shootings by white supremacists. About trying to teach respect for others regardless of race, Mosley quotes another mentor, Tom Boone, saying, "People act their way into new ways of thinking far more often than they think their ways into new ways of acting" (71). (See also my blogpost A White Nationalist's Change of Mind: Heart Came First (12/2018).
Our discussion group agreed that our favorite essay was the one by our own Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta, Robert Wright, "The American South is Our Holy Land." Why? All over the continent, there are battlefields where American colonists, British soldiers, and Native Americans clashed and died. In the South, we have a place where oppressed people - including women and children -- stood up empty handed against the State and the Mob. We especially were taken by Wright's observation that the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma is like the Jordan River in being physically unimpressive and yet looming large in our historical imaginations.
Wright's work puts me in mind of Georgia native Flannery O'Connor (read my reflection), who wrote of the American South as "God - haunted," our Christian heritage so deeply ingrained and so at odds with daily reality. He also reminds me of Dr. King's book, The Strength to Love (1963), making explicit what was implied in the Civil Rights movement: That the story of the indignities and violence suffered by black people in America is parallel to the story of that of God's chosen, the Jews, and of Jesus himself. King writes to a white audience in 1963,
But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day, we shall win our freedom, but not only for ourselves. Our victory will be a double victory,
because we shall also win your hearts!
After King wrote that, the legal work began to dismantle institutionalized racism. Fifty - five years later, the cultural and religious and psychological work remains.
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