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Lessons in Anti-Racism
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When I was in graduate school, Tom Pettigrew used to remind us that many white Americans hold their racial prejudices and stereotypes at a rather superficial level, mainly as a way of conforming to whites and the white supremacist culture/society around them. (He suggested that a smaller proportion held these views very deeply, as a Freudian-type “crutch” that held their very troubled personalities together.) The clear lesson he was offering is that for many whites some significant change in racial views should not be difficult. The learning context matters.
Recently, one of my former graduate students, now a professor, sent me this comment about a new white student in her class:
I am beginning a new semester of my Race class. I decided to formally introduce your “white racial frame” concept the first week of the semester this time…My students journal free-form every other week or so, and here is the very first journal entry I read. I particularly love the last line of the first paragraph:
White Racial Frame: When first entering this course I never imagined that within the first class session my mindset would be changing about race and the role it has in the world today. The idea of the “white racial frame” is what immediately caught my attention. The idea that there is a term for a frame of mind I never knew existed struck me. I am the typical definition of a “white girl” and I know it. Blonde hair, blue eyes, sheltered lifestyle and never struggled a day in my life, I know I am a white girl. I just never considered that my frame of mind about the world is compromised because of it.
I always thought of my life as fair. I had the ideal mindset that the United States represents all that is fair; everyone has their own chance and makes their own choices from a totally level playing field. It is only now that I can see that things may be set up differently. My view was that my parents work hard for what we have and that anyone can do the same for their families. Maybe it is a naive frame of mind to believe the world to be fair, but it was nice that way. It is only in more recent years I can see the trends that lead me to believe that all is not fair and the world is a tough place. I believe that is partially due to my sheltered life that I grew up with and partially because of the “white racial frame” that I did not know I possessed.
Society prioritizes the white race and does not even realize it. I have done it and only now realize it. Everyday simple situations I find myself choosing someone who is white for a job, or maybe being more comfortable with a white person than anyone else. Even in my relationship preference I have only dated white men. Have had several opportunities to do otherwise, but simply never acted upon it. Before this class I never questioned that the president has always been a white male (until Obama obviously). I am realizing that the “white racial frame” expands into so many things in our lives. It can be as simple as daily life within my own home, and can expand all the way into politics in the world. I am excited to be in this course to help open my mind to more of these situations and to educate myself more on the role of race in society.
Things can change. Excellent teaching and teachers matter.
Anti-Racism Set to Music
Posted by: | CommentsI wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post about racist lyrics set to a holiday song with a counter example, this one of an anti-racist song. “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday, stands out as one of the most notable anti-racist songs ever written.
In 1930, two African-American men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were lynched in Marion, Indiana. Copies of a photograph of their limp bodies hanging grotesquely, surrounded by whites, smiling with satisfaction and pride, were sold as postcards in thousands of drugstores across the nation. News of this lynching moved Abel Meeropol, a New York school teacher, to write a poem, which he published in the New York Teacher, a union magazine. He later set the poem to music. The song began to become famous once Billie Holiday started singing it in Harlem’s Cafe Society, the first racially integrated night club in the US. Holiday’s own father had been lynched, so the song held a powerful, and personal, message for her.
Yet, the song faced opposition from the white power structure in the U.S. According to this account from Barry Healy at Green Left:
Holiday’s record company, Columbia, refused to record the song, fearing a racist backlash. Eventually she managed to record it with Commodore and it became her biggest selling record.
Meeropol, no stranger to struggle having served in the anti-fascist forces in Spain, was targeted because the song was seen as “anti-patriotic”. In 1940, a government investigative committee barred him from teaching because of his political beliefs.
The courage of both Holiday and Meerpol to speak out against the terror of white mobs, the cowardice of record company executives, and the backlash of government reprisals speaks to a special kind of courage required of those who choose to do anti-racism.
William Kunstler and the Active Voice to Discuss Racism
Posted by: | CommentsI saw a new documentary called “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” about the civil rights lawyer. the film was made by his two daughters from his second marriage, Sarah and Emily Kunstler. it was interesting and much of the film was about racism, although none of the promotional materials hint at this. In this way, it’s much like the documentary “The Weather Underground,” which also focuses a good deal on racism.
One of the things that struck me most profoundly about the Kunstler film was the way that the language about institutional racism in the late 1960s early 1970s is so strikingly different from the way we talk about race and racism today. What I mean about the language around institutional racism is that Kunstler would say things like, “the white power structure” or “the racist court system” and “all whites are racist” and “we (whites) are responsible for letting this racist power structure continue.”
This language and way of talking about racism is all in the category of “stuff you just don’t hear anymore.”
The power of calling out the white power structure and the way that individual whites participate in this racism was clearest for me in the film when they were exploring the issue of the uprising at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Kunstler got called in as a negotiator for the prisoners. This attempt failed and dozens of people – both inmates and guards – were killed by the state who went in and shot them. after the uprising was put down, there’s this amazing archival footage of one of the white soldiers (national guard?) who went in to the prison, and he’s got his fist in the air, pumping it victoriously and he says, “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about…. white power!” it’s just a chilling moment that also perfectly illustrates what Kunstler’s been saying throughout the film.
Following soon after that, Kunstler went to the seige at Wounded Knee to serve as a negotiator for Native Americans in AIM who were staging a protest there, demanding that the U.S. Government honor centuries of broken treaties. Kunstler was able to help avoid a massacre there and successfully defended Russell Banks and Dennis Banks, two of the leaders of the protest, at their subsequent trial in federal court.
Kunstler’s daughters (the filmmakers) were thoughtful about racism and their father’s struggle against it. I especially liked when they went back and tried to find out how their dad began to be conscious about racism. They included a brief section in the film that addressed this issue, noting that Kunstler’s race consciousness certainly didn’t come from his parents, who had black servants that used separate toilets and ate apart from the family in the kitchen. This is illustrated by home-movie footage of one of the nameless-black-servants in the family serving the grandmother and one of the filmmakers when she was a child.
The filmmakers were less thoughtful, in my view, in exploring their own racism around their objection to their father’s defending Yusef Salaam, one of the alleged “Central Park jogger rapists.” Years later, of course, Salaam’s conviction was overturned, and thus Kunstler’s defense of him was vindicated, but I wish the filmmakers had done more with this.
Returning to my point about the language around racism, the way the film is advertised and promoted and discussed (i heard a long interview with the filmmakers in which they never mentioned racism even once) is more typical of the way racism gets addressed today, which is in this oblique, passive-voice kind of way.
Today, to the extent that experts and non-experts even acknowledge racism, they may refer to “structural racism” or (in the world of public health where I work) “racial disparites.” But these all happen in the passive voice. Racial disparities just “happen.” There are no actors in today’s language of racial inequality. In Kunstler’s heydey (the civil rights era), there were clearly people who were responsible for the oppression of people of color, and it was white people acting in the interest of a white power structure. Losing that language, we’ve lost some clarity about what is at the root of racial inequality. Today, it seems, no one’s responsible as we live in this ‘racism without racists’ post-civil rights era.
A Belated Pardon for John Brown, Heroic Abolitionist
Posted by: | CommentsDavid Reynolds, the author of an important biography of the white antislavery activist and abolitionist John Brown, did a NYT op-ed piece a few days back noting that this month marks the 150 anniversary of his hanging for organizing an insurrection against slavery. He gives historical background and calls for an official pardon for Brown. In October 1859,
With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsenal there and freed slaves in the area. His plan was to flee with them to nearby mountains and provoke rebellions in the South. But he stalled too long in the arsenal and was captured.
Brown’s group of antislavery band of attackers included whites, including relatives and three Jewish immigrants, and a number of blacks. (Photo: Wikipedia) Radical 
abolitionists constituted one of the first multiracial groups to struggle aggressively against systemic racism in US history.
A state court in Virginia convicted him of treason and insurrection, and the state hanged him on December 2, 1859. Reynolds argues we should revere Brown’s raid and this date as a key milestone in the history of anti-oppression movements. Brown was not the “wild and crazy” man of much historical and textbook writing:
Brown reasonably saw the Appalachians, which stretch deep into the South, as an ideal base for a guerrilla war. He had studied the Maroon rebels of the West Indies, black fugitives who had used mountain camps to battle colonial powers on their islands. His plan was to create panic by arousing fears of a slave rebellion, leading Southerners to view slavery as dangerous and impractical.
We forget today just how extensively revered John Brown was in his day:
Ralph Waldo Emerson compared him to Jesus, declaring that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Henry David Thoreau placed Brown above the freedom fighters of the American Revolution. Frederick Douglass said that while he had lived for black people, John Brown had died for them. A later black reformer, W. E. B. Du Bois, called Brown the white American who had “come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk.” . . . . By the time of his hanging, John Brown was so respected in the North that bells tolled in many cities and towns in his honor.
And then there were the Union troops singing his praises for years in the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Brown’s comments to reporters at his trial and hanging suggest how sharp his antiracist commitment was. For example, Brown’s lucid comment on his sentence of death indicates his commitment to racial justice: “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments,—I submit, so let it be done!”
Reynolds notes that Brown was not a perfect hero, but one with “blotches on his record,” yet none of the heroes of this era is without major blotches. Indeed,
Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, but he shared the era’s racial prejudices, and even after the war started thought that blacks should be shipped out of the country once they were freed. Andrew Jackson was the man of his age, but in addition to being a slaveholder, he has the extra infamy of his callous treatment of Native Americans, for which some hold him guilty of genocide.
Given his brave strike against slavery, Reynolds argues, he should be officially pardoned, first of course by the current governor of Virginia (Kaine). But
A presidential pardon, however, would be more meaningful. Posthumous pardons are by definition symbolic. They’re intended to remove stigma or correct injustice. While the president cannot grant pardons for state crimes, a strong argument can be made for a symbolic exception in Brown’s case. . . . Justice would be served, belatedly, if President Obama and Governor Kaine found a way to pardon a man whose heroic effort to free four million enslaved blacks helped start the war that ended slavery.
Brown did more than lead a raid against slavery. We should remember too that in May 1858, Brown and the great black abolitionist and intellectual Martin Delaney had already gathered together a group of black and white abolitionists for a revolutionary anti-slavery meeting just outside the United States, in the safer area of Chatham, Canada. Nearly four dozen black and white Americans met and formulated a new Declaration of Independence and Constitution (the first truly freedom-oriented one in North America) to govern what they hoped would be a growing band of armed revolutionaries drawn from the enslaved population; these revolutionaries would fight aggressively as guerillas for an end to the U.S. slavery system and to create a new constitutional system where justice and freedom were truly central. (For more, see here)
Today, one needed step in the antiracist cause is for all levels of U.S. education to offer courses that discuss the brave actions of antiracist activists like John Brown and Martin Delaney, and those many other, now nameless heroes who marched with them. And how about a major monument in Washington, DC to celebrate them and all the other abolitionist heroes? We have major monuments there to slaveholders, why not to those who died in trying to overthrow slavery?
Teaching Doctors to Recognize Racism
Posted by: | CommentsRacism and unconscious bias in medicine is a persistent problem in the delivery of medical care in the U.S. Now, it seems there may be a way to use virtual simulations to teach doctors how to recognize racism.
I wrote here recently about the racism in virtual worlds that some researchers. Other researchers at the University of Florida have been using the same technology subvert the trend toward racism among medical doctors.
Take a look at this short video (1:31) about new research using virtual worlds to teach doctors to recognize racism (sorry, no video embed available). Finally, a promising use of new technologies to address racism.
Antiracist Action: Against Tea Party Antics in Minnesota
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The twincities.indymedia.org blog (HT/ Christopher Day) has a post on, “Anti-Racists Steal the Show at White Supremacist ‘Tea Party Against Amnesty,” with some pretty funny and ironic tactics against the anti-immigration folks:
Forty-five anti-immigration activists held a small rally outside the state capitol on Saturday. Counter-protest from members of Anti-Racist Action, Bash Back, the Minnesota Immigrants’ Rights Action Coalition and others was frequent, vigorous and hilarious. (”America is not for Russians! America is not for Germans! Europeans go home!”)
The cheerful crowd of immigrants’ rights activists held a banner reading “Stop the raids and deportations”. In conversation with members of Minnesotans Seeking Immigration Reform, the activists repeatedly pointed out that all non-native people in Minnesota are illegal immigrants–Minnesota was taken by force by whites from the native people who lived here for centuries before white arrival. One activist, under the name “Robert Erickson,” managed to get on the list of speakers and riled the crowd into a frenzy about the theft, murder and disease inflicted by illegal immigrants… from Europe, upon indigenous populations. In a “Yes Men” moment, the anti-immigrant crowd sat in silence, trying to figure out what just happened.
Here is part of Erickson’s speech (see video here):
It’s no secret that with an invasion of immigrants, comes waves of crime. We see them involved in massive theft, in murder, and bringing diseases like smallpox, which is responsible for the death of millions of Americans. These aren’t new problems though, they have been going on for hundreds of years, and continue to this day. I say its time for us to say enough is enough! Are you with me? Are you with me? Lets send these European immigrants back where they came from! I don’t care if they are Polish, Irish, English, Italian, or Norwegian! European immigrants are responsible for the most violent and heinus crimes in the history of the world, including genocide and slavery! Its time to restore the sovereignty of people native to this land! I want more workplace raids, starting with the big banks downtown. There are thousands of illegals working in those buildings, hiding in their offices, and taking Dakota jobs. Let’s round them up and ship them out. Then we need to hit them at home where they sleep, I don’t care if we separate families, they should have known better when they came here illegally!
Rather clever use of lampooning, indeed.
Of Race, Racism and “Flattering” Whites
Posted by: | CommentsIn order to move forward in the push for national health care reform, what we need is less pointing out racism and more flattering whites. At least, that’s what some are arguing.
The racial politics around President Obama and the health care debate continue to rage on without an end in sight. Political conservatives remain stalwart in their assertion that the vitriol directed at President Obama would be hurled at any president who advocated such reform, regardless of race; while many liberals continue to assert that the sharp rise (400% by at least one report) in death threats against President Obama have less to do with health care reform and much more to do with the color of his skin. There does seem to be a growing consensus – or perhaps, weary defeat - among white liberals that efforts to call out the racism among health-care-reform-naysayers is futile.
Here are a couple of examples of what I’m talking about. Lincoln Mitchell, writing at the Huffington Post, calls the whole thing “pointless” :
My point here is not that the attacks on Obama are not racist; it is pretty clear that some are racist. However, it is far less clear what supporters of the president gain from making this argument. It is extremely difficult to convince somebody that racism exists when they don’t want to see it. Moreover, nothing would change if this effort were successful. The right wing and much of the Republican Party have made it clear these last few months that they will stop at almost nothing to cripple the Obama presidency, which indicates that even if they were persuaded that they were racist, they probably wouldn’t stop.
In another instance, Hastings Wyman, in a piece at the Southern Political Report (via @BlackInformant), writes that President Obama declines to point out racism because he is politically savvy enough to know that “white voters like to be flattered, not accused.” Wyman goes on to say:
Whether it’s making a heart-felt address to the nation on race as he distanced himself from his long-time preacher, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, or backtracking on black Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gate’s dispute with a white Cambridge police officer, Obama has consistently taken the high road where charges of white racism are involved. Who knows what his opinion is about such issues in the deepest recesses of his soul, but his political skills are very much in tact. He knows that getting the left — including African-Americans — highly and publicly incensed about white racism is a losing strategy, at least in terms of current political battles.
What both Mitchell and Wyman seem to be saying here is that whites – who obviously hold the power in this society – are put off by being called out on their racism, so better not do that if you want to win their votes or persuade them to support health care reform. A better strategy is to soft-pedal the mention of racism, even flatter whites for their magnanimous support of an African-American president, and then we can get on with other business.
It’s important to point out that this sort of strategy from Mitchell and Wyman (and others) is rooted in the white racial frame that Joe has detailed in his recent book, and that Joe and Adia discuss in their new book, “Yes We Can? White Racial Framing and the 2008 Presidential Campaign.” When Mitchell talks about “Americans” he’s referring to “white Americans.” When Wyman refers to Obama has having “taken the high road where charges of white racism are involved,” he is subscribing to a white point-of-view. The high road, within this frame, means not calling out white racism when it exists, but instead deflecting, ignoring, minimizing. The key to all this is, as Wyman notes earlier in this piece, flattering whites. That need for flattery, that desire to always be right when it comes to matters of race and never be responsible for wrong-doing, that too is a kind of white racism – classic white liberal racism.
Jeremy Levine, writing at Social Science Lite, makes the sociological point that:
To discuss and analyze race is not to revert to an either/or, racist/not racist false dichotomy. Race matters as an everyday reality of inequality, yes, but it’s not as simple as the White Racist Meme suggests. Race matters because it’s always mattered. But racism matters in increasingly complex ways.
Indeed, racism matters in increasingly complex ways in the current era. But, I would argue, that it does not make whites any less culpable for perpetuating – and benefitting from – systems of racial inequality. And, if that makes some whites uncomfortable, well so be it.
Critics like Mitchell and Wyman seem to be making an old point: “sure, there’s racism, but what can you do about it?” As if racism were like gravity – a law of physics that cannot be altered by human behavior.
This is simply false.
Racism was created by human beings (relatively recently in human history), and it can be dismantled, done away with, abolished. But not if we keep ignoring it and flattering those who perpetuate it.
Community-Based Racial Healing
Posted by: | CommentsThere is a new grant opportunity that readers here may want to consider from the Kellogg Foundation:
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation is pleased to announce a new and exciting grant opportunity in response to our commitment to becoming an effective, anti-racist organization that promotes racial equity. Racial Equity refers to principles of fairness and justice. Racial equity work describes actions designed to address historic burdens as well as to remove present day barriers to equal opportunities. This is accomplished by identifying and eliminating systemic discriminatory policies and practices. Specific remediating strategies, policies, and practices are also required. These actions address the effects of historic injustice and prevent present and future inequities. Our approach to racial equity is inclusive. We will focus on priority concerns for vulnerable African American, Native American, Latino/Hispanic American, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Native Hawaiian, Arab American, and European American children and families within the context of their communities.
This grant opportunity seeks to strengthen and bolster community-based approaches for racial healing and racial equity efforts targeting vulnerable and marginalized children. The Kellogg Foundation anticipates awarding grants up to $400,000. You are invited to submit a proposal for our Community-Based Racial Healing work as outlined in the Request for Proposals (RFP).
This is exciting for those of us concerned about racial inequality because it indicates a new funding stream for anti-racist work. Please spread the word, and good luck for those who apply!
Ending Racism in Furniture Sales
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s Monday. Thought I’d start the week off with something light in the form of this truly offbeat commercial that is trying to do its part for ending racism in furniture sales (1:30):
