The Difficult Conversation Americans Must Learn To Have
Last week, Virginia First Lady Pam Northam allegedly handed out cotton and tobacco to black students during a presentation about Virginia's past as a slave-owning state.
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by Justin Rosario
Last week, Virginia First Lady Pam Northam allegedly handed out cotton and tobacco to black students during a presentation about Virginia's past as a slave-owning state. The story was originally told that she only handed them out to the black students but this turned out to not be true at all:
On Friday, the Post, citing accounts from 10 pages given either directly to the paper or through the page's parents, said the pages claimed the first lady "conducted their tours with sensitivity and with no special focus on the black pages." The pages were part of a larger group of about 100 teenagers who toured the mansion in late February. Four of those who spoke to the post were in the group with Walker's daughter and the rest were part of different groups.
"Nobody was singled out," said Democratic state Sen. Chap Petersen, whose teenage son attended a tour of the mansion, according to the paper. Petersen, who is white, told the Post that when he asked his son, who was on the same tour as Walker's daughter, about the alleged incident, "He said, 'That did not happen.' He could not have been more adamant."
The freak out was a result of the recent discovery that the college yearbook page of Northam's husband, Gov. Ralph Northam, was incredibly racist. Thus, Pam Northam's actions were viewed through that lens. But was what she did wrong outside of that? Should white people even talk to black people, much less black children, about racism and slavery?
Of course we should. The fact that we don't is 90% of the problem in the first place. Slavery is America's original sin. We've compounded on it for over 150 years by refusing to acknowledge its lingering stench. We're actually still having a national debate over whether flying the Confederate flag is racist or not. Millions of white people still insist that the Civil War wasn't about slavery when several of the states that started the war explicitly stated that it was as did the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens. We watch a bunch of high school kids rant about how "niggers and Jews" should be sent to "concentration camps." White nationalists openly march in the streets and run for office. A sitting congressman demands to know when white nationalism became a bad thing. Hate crimes continue to rise while right wing media continues to insist there is no such thing as a hate crime. And then White America pretends that this country doesn't have a massive problem with racism.
It's this unwillingness to openly talk about how fucking awful white people can be that allows this kind of filth to fester.
But it doesn't have to be this way. What Pam Northam did is exactly what white people, especially ones in position of authority, should be doing. She talked about it openly and frankly, not sugarcoating the ugly parts because America's history is ugly. Extremely ugly. White people spent literally centuries murdering, enslaving, raping, etc., pretty much anyone and everyone. We have to face our past and own it. That's the only way we're ever going to move on.
We, white people, are forever telling Latinos that they have to "assimilate" and when they do, we still treat them like invaders. We tell Muslims that they have to denounce "radical Islam" and when they do, we tell them they're not doing it loudly enough. We tell black people that they have to act more respectable and we still call the first black president and the richest black woman in the country "niggers." What we don't do is demand anything from ourselves. Everyone has to live up to our expectations but we refuse to hold ourselves accountable for anything at all.
When I was in my teens, this idea was presented to me as "white guilt." The idea was that I, as a nominally white person, should feel guilty about America's racist past. I found the idea offensive. I was a third generation American so why should I feel guilty about something my ancestors weren't even here for? That, of course, was the idea; to present the weight of that responsibility as offensive to white people so they would shirk it.
Now, as an adult who has been paying attention to the real issues instead of misleading slogans and catchphrases, I understand that "white guilt" is not a real thing. Oh, I'm sure there are some well-meaning white people with a "white savior" complex that suffer from something they think is white guilt but, collectively, that is not what White America needs to engage in order to confront our past.
What we actually need is to not feel guilty about it. Don't be ashamed of it. Don't be afraid of it. Talk to your children about it so they understand from a young age that America did and does terrible things to black and brown people. Don't do this so they will feel bad but so they will understand that their life experience is radically different than what other people live through.
When my daughter Anastasia was in first grade, I chaperoned her field trip to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Inside the museum is the Woolworth's lunch counter from Greensboro, North Carolina. Being a bit of a history nerd, I had been acting as tour guide for my daughter's very grateful teacher, Mrs. Hall, and I gathered the entire class around the counter. We live on the west end of Alexandria, Virgina in a very immigrant-heavy community. Out of the (at that time), roughly 950 students in the schools, at most 25 of them were white and Anastasia was the only white kid in her class. That didn't stop me from explaining to the almost two dozen black, Latino, and Arabic children that 60 years ago, children who looked like them weren't allowed to go school with children that looked like me or Anastasia. They weren't even allowed to sit at the same counter and eat lunch with us because people that looked like me and Anastasia thought they were better.
I explained to them that those people were wrong and we passed laws to make sure they could never do that kind of thing again and that's why we all get to be together now for this awesome field trip. My only fear was that MAGA hat wearing jackass would hear what I was saying (I had to project to reach all 20 something kids in the group in a noisy museum) and give me a hassle. But fortunately, no one did. Mrs. Hall told me later that a black couple was nearby, listening, and nodded their approval through my entire ad-libbed presentation. I never saw them but it was nice to know.
That brings us to possibly the most important thing when it comes to how white people need to confront racism: Don't be defensive; especially when a black person talks to you about it. White fragility is a serious problem. We tend to fall to the ground in a fetal position when a black person tells us we did or said something racially insensitive. Stop that. If you're in someone's house and you say or do something they don't like, would you really take offense if they politely asked you to not do it again? Probably not. When it comes to race, you really are in someone else's house. You haven't lived their experience so you need to listen when they tell you something. It's their experience, not yours. That's the point.
If that makes you uncomfortable because it gives a black or brown person power over you, think really hard about that. That's what life is like for black and brown people pretty much every day when it comes to white people. We have all the power all the time. Most of us are not directly aware of that privilege but the worst of us abuse it with relish. BBQ Becky? Permit Patty? All the white people, mostly women for some reason, who call the police on black people for doing outrageous things like babysitting, studying, cashing a check, mowing the lawn, etc.? If black people can survive that (and sometimes they don't), you can survive a minor admonishment when you commit an innocent racial faux pas. Don't touch a black person's hair unless you're braiding it. Don't say "you people" or "my nigga." Don't fucking wear black face. Ever.
On the flip side, that means that maybe the outrage machine needs to be toned down a little bit. If white people are going to ever be adults about America's racism, we have to have some room to have these uncomfortable conversations. Maybe when a white woman hands out cotton to black and white students to honestly discuss the horrors of slavery, we don't bite her head off. Save that for the white teacher that has black students actually pick cotton in the field and sing slave songs or splits the gym class into black and white students plays "Runaway Slaves."
The ultimate goal here for white people is not to be "color blind" like Howard Schultz claims to be. "Color blind" is another way of saying "I don't acknowledge all of the shit you go through because it doesn't affect me." It's a cheap cop out and it's insulting. For now, and for the foreseeable future, race matters because we, white people, make it matter. When we stop doing that, we can stop confronting America's racist past because we'll have finally moved beyond it. Until then, it's our responsibility to deal with the mess we created and continue to perpetuate on a daily basis.
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Here’s what you missed out on this week!:
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