Racism: America's Unfinished Business
Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, January 18, 1998
Last Sunday there was a short article in the New York Times Magazine by a gentleman named Alex Kotlowitz entitled "Colorblind". Mr. Kotlowitz, who is white, wrote a book some years ago called There Are No Children Here about life in a central Chicago housing project. I won't be using the Times article itself today, good as it was. I just want to read a little from its introductory paragraphs:
"One Christmas Day, seven years ago, I'd gone over to visit the Henry Horner Homes in Chicago to visit with Lafayette and Pharoah, the subjects of my book There Are No Children Here. I had brought presents for the boys, as well as a gift for their friend Rickey, who lived on the other side of the housing complex, an area controlled by a rival gang. Lafayette and Pharoah insisted on walking with me...As we neared Damen Avenue, a kind of demilitarized zone, a uniformed police officer, a white woman, approached us. She looked first at the two boys, neither of whom reached my shoulder, and then directly at me. 'Are you OK?' she asked. About a year later, I was with Pharoah on the city's North Side, shopping for high tops. We were walking down the busy street, my hand on Pharoah's shoulder, when a middle-aged black man approached. He looked at me, and then at Pharoah. 'Son,' he asked, 'are you OK?' Both this white police officer and middle-aged black man seemed certain of what they witnessed. The white woman saw a white man, possibly in trouble; the black man saw a black (youth), possibly in trouble."
Mr. Kotlowitz then adds:
"Its all about perspective--which has everything to do with our personal and collective experiences, which are consistently informed by race. From these experiences, from our histories, we build myths, legends which both guide us and constrain us, legends that include both fact and fiction. This is not to say the truth doesn't matter. It does in a big way. Its just that getting there may not be easy, in part because everyone is so quick to choose sides, to refute the other's myths and to pass on their own."
This April--April 4th to be exact--will mark 30 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Thirty years after he gave his life, we still struggle with perspectives--perspectives "informed by race"--as Mr. Kotlowitz puts it. I don't think he's describing an atypical situation: Something as innocuous--on one level--as a young black man (or young men) and an older white adult peacefully walking down a city street prompts, on another level, racially conscious, and mirror image, conclusions on the part of a white law enforcement officer and a middle-aged black man. Each one feeling that a member of "their" race was in possible danger. How did we get here? Why do we seem to remain so stuck here?
I know I will not fully answer these questions in the next 20 minutes or so; indeed, we haven't managed to fully answer them during the past 30 years and more. But I want to at least attempt to respond to something Alex Kotlowitz says at a later point in his article: "We--blacks and whites--need to examine and question our perspectives. Only then can we grasp each others myths and grapple with the truths." While I think the President has done the right thing in calling for a "conversation on race"--even with all the fits and starts that conversation has taken--I also think that this examining of perspectives would serve as a worthy prelude to that conversation. Since I obviously cannot speak in any personal way from an African American, or the various African American, perspectives on race, then I have to do it from who and from where I am, a white American male.
Most of us who are white want and need to see the "success stories" when it come to forming our perspectives on race. We like to see the increased number of black persons taking their place in our country's political life--a phenomenon in large part made possible by the work and the struggles of Dr. King and his followers. We see a black professional class, again in the wake of Dr. King's efforts, that did not exist in an earlier part of many of our lifetimes. We see some of the powers that be of a major political party, in our last Presidential election, come to the conclusion that their best shot at re-capturing the White House would be to nominate a black candidate, General Colin Powell--and they may well have been right. (It's too bad we didn't get a chance to find out. Who knows, it might have caused me to vote Republican in a presidential race for the first time in my life!) These are not "wrong" or "bad" perspectives in and of themselves. The flaw is when we assume that they best, or most correctly, define reality when it comes to race.
From this "success story" perspective, towards which most white folk tend to lean, any troubling events of a racial nature are treated only as unfortunate aberrations. Take these two, for example: A story, also in the Times, ran this past Thursday (Dr. King's birthday, no less) about an apartment referral agency in Worcester, Massachusetts that would write the code word "Archie" (as in Archie Bunker) next to its available apartment listings that were not to be shown to blacks or Hispanics. It was a conscientious, and disgusted, employee of the agency that finally blew the whistle on it. A little over a week ago a story came out of the Los Angeles area concerning a group of white parents who did not want the school their children were attending to be named for Dr. King. Nothing personally racist, of course, it was just that a school named for Martin Luther King would imply a preponderance of racial minority students in the student body, which would further imply that the school's standards were sub-par, which could--in turn--hamper their children's chances of getting into a "good" college.
Perspectives: For most white folks--and I mean whites of good will and fair mindedness here--you know, like us--such incidents as these are unsightly blemishes which, of course, have to be cleaned up because they mess up our basic "success story" landscape. For many African Americans, Hispanics, or persons of other racial minorities these occurances are much more than a smattering of aberrant blemishes. They are instead just a couple of incidents that happened to bubble up to the surface from a underlying reservoir, or swamp, of cultural and institutional racism that we as a society have yet to drain off. The same pair of occurrences yields two different conclusions or inferences. They are differing conclusions, I would submit, that derive from differing ways of understanding the term and concept of "racism" itself.
I realize that I'm overdrawing things a bit when I categorically speak of race based perspectives on race. But I figure that as long as you know that I know that I am so doing we can proceed in a way that I hope may shed some light on an issue that persists in being one of our country's largest items of unfinished business.
I believe one of the chief reasons that many white persons find conversations about race and racism difficult or uncomfortable--either amongst themselves or in an inter-racial setting--is because we largely view it in personal terms, and react as if we are being personally accused of something. We--we whites--also tend to view racism, and the combating of racism, as largely a matter of having our hearts in the right place and not engaging in any kind of behavior or exhibiting attitudes that would demonstrate any kind of personal and overt racism, prejudice, or bigotry on our part. This, of course, is certainly all very well and good, as far as it goes. The problem is that if we confine our understandings of racism to that level then it is very difficult to take a "conversation on race" to any deeper levels. For African Americans and other racial minorities, racism is more that a matter of personal behavior and attitude. Its about how power works, and has worked over time, in a society to maintain certain privileges and prerogatives that remain in place even while personal behavior and attitudes may changs. Personal snubs or slights or dismissals--like trying to get a taxicab to stop for you while seeing others stopping for whites--are, I'm sure, painful enough; but a true conversation on race has to involve the facing of a systemic racism that been built into the very fabric of this country from its earliest days.
It was just at the time that his life was tragically and horribly cut short that Martin Luther King was shifting his focus to this systemic kind of racism. Dr. King had been raised in a comparatively secure black middle class setting, albeit in the midst of a southern American brand of racial apartheid. His initial efforts at confronting racism were largely efforts at desegregation; desegregation of restaurants, busses, and the like; and at securing voting rights for African Americans. Such efforts were extemely crucial, and still need to be honored and valued as such. But they still left unresolved the issue and the reality that as long as certain larger social, economic, and political and cultural structures, systems and assumptions remained in place, as they had over the course of our country's history, then true racial justice, equality and equity would remain a good ways off. It was, as I say, just at the time of his death that Dr. King's own consciousness was beginning to engage with this reality.
So for white people to deal with racism, it means more than examining our personal attitudes. That's a necessary starting place, to be sure; but that is just what it is--a starting place. We also have to honestly own our collective history; not, I would submit, for the sake of guilt, but for the sake, once again, of perspective. When I speak of "collective history" I'm not even going back to slavery, as heinous an institution as that was. Nor do I go back to the post-Reconstruction era, when some potentially promising moves to bring the newly freed slaves into mainstream American life were destroyed by a vicious backlash that resulted in a de facto system of American apartheid that lasted up until the time of Dr. King's life and work. Let's not even go back that far. stay instead with our personal lifetimes, or the lifetimes of our parents--the era following the Second World War. I have a couple of stories or episodes to offer from this much more recent era.
If there was one symbol and harbinger of an emerging and reasonably affluent American middle class following World War II it would have to be Levittown, New York--the original suburb. Returning GIs could put down one hundred dollars and purchase a piece of the quintessential American Dream, a home of one's own and a place to raise a family. As the country recovered from the turmoil and uncertainties of the War, Levittown was seen--quite correctly as it turned out--as the wave of the American future. One piece of the Levittown story that doesn't generally get told is the agreement those returning GIs had to sign, in 1948, along with the $100.00 they put down for their house. It read: "The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race" It did add, however, "But the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted." This was one of the notes on which our modern era of American life began. Does this make you or me a personal racist? No, in and of itself, it does not; and neither does it make the original residents of Levittown "evil people." But that's not the point. What it does mean is that even as our country moved into the post-World War II era--an era which has shaped and defined our contemporary ways of life and living--we were still unable and unwilling, as a society, to rid ourselves of the kind of systemic racism that had characterized our country's life up to that point. What makes this all the more reprehensible is that black Americans had fought and died in the Second World War, only to once again be denied entry into the fullness of American life once the War was over.
Here's another story--a much more personal one: A year or two before I began junior high school in the West Virginia town where I grew up it became apparent to the local Board of Education that the one junior high in St. Albans, WV would not be large enough to hold all of us elementary school age baby boomers who were coming up through pipe line. It so happened that there was another school building available on the east end of town. It was called the Carter Woodson School. Carter Woodson was a combination grammar and junior high school for the "Negro children", as was the term then, of the community. (The polite term, that is.) The space problems arose about a year or so after the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision. So it was decided by the Kanawha County Board of Education that the Carter Woodson School would become a second junior highfor grades 7-9. It became a racially integrated junior high school. Most of the Carter Woodson faculty, who were African American, stayed on to teach at the new, and desegregated, junior high. I'm glad I was able to attend the school. It marked my first encounters and interactions with persons my age who were of a race other than my own.
But here was the hitch: While the name "Carter Woodson" may not be familiar to many of you, he was one of the outstanding educators of his day. A black man, he earned a PhD from Harvard in 1912. He wrote many books on racial issues, founded the Journal of Negro History and worked to establish February as "Black History Month." He was a Dean at Washington DC's Howard University; and was also Dean of a predominately "Negro College" in Institute, West Virginia, a town just across the river from St. Albans. Because of his ties to West Virginia the St. Albans school bore his name; bore his name as long as just black children were attending, that is. Apparently it would not have for white kids to attend a school named for a black man. So the school's name was changed to the William McKinley Junior High. Nobody seemed to give it a thought, and I didn't even learn who Carter Woodson was until I was well into my adulthood.
Institutional racism can be subtle at times--but no less real. What the African American young people of my home town were being told back in the late 1950s was, in effect, your identity, your history, and your potential role models no longer count now that you're going to be going school with white teenagers. And we white teenagers of that time were deprived of learning about the many vital roles that persons of color have played in the story that is called America.
Does this make me a racist? Not in a personal sense. Do I feel guilty about this incident? Again, not personally. I was 10 or 11 years old when the decision about what to call the school was made, and I obviously had no hand in it. But I was also, however unwittingly, part of a system or process that in a very subtle, but very nonetheless real way, delegitimized the experience of being a young person of color because of the kinds of racist assumptions upon which that system operated. Changing the name of a school in a small border-state town some 40 years ago in order to accommodate its incoming white students may sound like a small matter at this point. But it reflected, and reflects, a larger racist cultural mentality which does not die easily.
Perspectives. It sounds so "right" to now say that we should be a "colorblind" society where "racial preferences" have no place. But shift the perspective, and think of how hollow and hypocritical such supposedly high minded sentiments can sound to those who know all too well how this society operated on practically nothing but racial preferences and assumptions right down through the post World War II era. They were the preferences and assumptions that Martin Luther King was just beginning to chip away at at the time of his death in 1968. I am not prepared to defend every single affirmative action program that has ever come down the pike. But I think its a naive perspective--a dangerously naive perspective--to believe that institutional racism, of which I have cited only a few examples this morning, has just up and disappeared in recent years to the point that no more overt or intentional acts and efforts to bring persons of color more fully into the life and workings of our society's institutions are necessary.
One of the more creative African American writers and social commentators I've encountered--via his writings--in recent years is a gentleman named Ellis Cose. He's the author of A Nation of Strangers and The Rage of a Privileged Class. He is also a contributing editor to Newsweek. In an issue of that magazine from about a year ago he authored an article titled "Twelve Steps Toward Racial Harmony." Each of the twelve would make for a whole sermon--and I'm nearly to the end of this one. Among his steps are: "We must realize that race relations is not a zero sum game." That is to say, a gain by one race does not constitute a loss by another. "We must realize that ending hate is the beginning, not the end" and "We must end American apartheid." About his seventh step "We must stop playing the blame game" Dr. Cose says, "Too often America's racial debate is sidetracked by a search for racial scapegoats: 'Its your fault because you are a racist.' 'No its your fault because you expect something for nothing.' 'Its white skin privilege.' 'Its reverse racism.' And on it goes...with bellicose talk-show hosts and pugnacious politicians reward(ing) those who cast aspersions at the top of their lungs..." Mr. Cose then continues."...denying the past is dishonest...(and) obsessing about past wrongs is ultimately futile."
I believe the distinction Ellis Cose draws between the dishonesty of denying our racist history on the one hand, and obsessing about past wrongs on the other is a wise one. What I have tried to say here today is not about scapegoating or obsessing. Those are indeed dead ends. What I am saying is that we cannot afford to duck, run for cover, or change the subject when the subject is racism. I am saying that in order to know where we are going when it comes to race matters we also have to know where we have been and how we got here.
The plain truth is that wherever we are going, we have little choice but to go together. For better or for worse, this is the only country we have and our lives are the only lives we can live. The challenge is how well we will journey together; and how well we will move from varying perspectives to shared perspectives. It is a challenge well stated by Dr. Cornell West in his book Race Matters when he says, "Let us hope and pray that the vast intellegence, imagination, humor, and courage of America will not fail us." Let us not fail Dr. King either in the vision he had for a racially reconciled America.
Copyright © 1998 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.
