Tonight we kick off Episode 19 of the weekly Guest Post series: Medium Cool with BGinCHI.
In case you missed the introduction to the series: Culture as a Hedge Against this Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We’re Living In
You can find the whole series here: Medium Cool with BGinCHI
Tonight’s Topic: Race & Cultural Influences – What Woke You Up?
Take it away, BG!
In this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about race. We started MC as a break from all the political and social static in the air around us, but as the BLM movement has reminded us, the cultural work of racial and social justice isn’t a matter of convenience.
So, what I want to discuss this evening is what we, for shorthand, refer to as “woke.” In particular, let’s hear about the cultural influences on your wokeness (or your path to becoming ever more awake). Was there a book, or writer, or class you took that woke you up? Was it film or music, a part of the city you grew up in? For those of you who’ve always been awake, what are the cultural markers that reinforced this, or gave you a vocabulary, or a style, or a venue?
BGinCHI
For me it was undergrad.
Growing up in rural IN did not exactly lead to political enlightenment. While my family wasn’t conservative, or even really politically-aware at all, I just followed the cultural rightwardness of the 80s without much reflection.
My second year of undergrad I started taking humanities and social science courses, and bang, it all opened up to me. Right wingers think this is about “adopting a left-wing ideology,” but it’s nothing like that (since that would be to trade one lack of knowing for another). Instead, it was about learning how much I had to learn, how ignorant I was, how broken the narratives I was taught in K-12 were.
I’ve been learning ever since.
Old Dan and Little Ann
I watched far too much tv as a kid but I feel like I learned a ton through osmosis. The Jeffersons, Good Times, Different Strokes, Webster, All in The Family, The Cosby Show, Benson.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Talking to black coworkers and finding out Oakland, California utterly terrified them so much they considered it a no go zone.
BGinCHI
@Old Dan and Little Ann: I wish I’d had better history teachers (and content) in middle and high school.
So lackluster.
MrSnrub
For me it was adopting a biracial child.
WaterGirl
I read Five Smooth Stones when I was in 8th grade. I would say that book did it for me – I was pretty woke for a white girl. But it turns out I was hardly woke at all compared to what happened for me when Trayvon Martin was killed. Turns out, once you see something, you can’t un-see it
edit: I think BJ played a part, also.
edit: also in 8th grade, my sister’s best friend fostered a black baby in our lily-white suburb of chicago (we had one Jewish girl in high school for diversity!) and someone firebombed her garage and burned it to the ground. that got my attention, too.
Also, yes to To Kill A Mockingbird!
MobiusKlein
I personally don’t like the woke descriptor or label.
Myself, I’m a human that is sometimes fair and just, other times a loudmouthed jackal.
The moment I think of myself as woke is the moment I stop introspection about my behaviors.
Jay Essel
My moment (’cause it’s only a moment, and a process) was when I realized the context of an adjective my (wonderful, loving, big D Democrat) grandma used constantly – ‘cotton-pickin’ as in ‘I couldn’t get that cotton-pickin jar open,’ etc. My antenna have been up since.
NotMax
Being one of two (IIRC) Caucasians in a college class of twenty-something on the political, cultural and geographic history of the Lakota, taught by a Native American Ph.D., was a valuable lesson in perspective.
Also, so far as also honing sensitivity, was a different class (grad school this time) taught by a long time agoraphobic, which met at his house. (Happened to be the gentleman behind the famous “Daisy” ad.)
West of the Rockies
For me, the concept of straight racism came with To Kill a Mockingbird. I saw it on TV when I was probably about 6. It was clear who the bad guys were. I know that the story is imperfect, but it was a start. I wore an eye patch from age 4 to 11, so I knew name-calling hurt. I liked Scout and Jeb and Atticus.
I knew who I did not want to be like.
Josie
As a librarian, I always read everything I could on a variety of subjects. I read Black Like Me and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee back in the 70’s and later writings by James Baldwin and Malcolm X. I thought I understood how things were, but I was still not fully educated. It wasn’t until I started reading BJ and paid close attention to the brave, honest comments on this blog that I began to really get it. I’m sure I still have a lot to learn, but John’s blog has been a real education for me in so many ways.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
Watching “Roots” on TV as a child in the 70s.
BGinCHI
@MobiusKlein: I just used that term as shorthand. I certainly don’t mean to imply that we get some insight and then our work is over.
It’s a lifelong process, about race and class and gender and so on.
But it does apply to the roughly 40% of Americans who need to wake the fuck up, and haven’t done anything about it.
UncleEbeneezer
My journey began right here at BJ when Imani Gandy started posting as AngryBlackLady way back when. I found her posts incredibly honest, funny and enlightening and loved that she didn’t take shit from anyone and didn’t pull any punches. Followed her and Elon James White over to TWiB and became a regular listener of that podcast all the way until it ended. In the meantime I also started listening to The Black Guy Who Tips podcast and have been listening every day, ever since. Just listening to Black people talk about Race, even in a comedic way, opened my world to countless writers, podcasters, artists, tv shows, films, FB groups, YT videos etc. The real wake up came from the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown killings and the protests/uprisings they spawned. I’d say about 50% of my learning came from the afore-mentioned podcasts, with the other 50% coming from various other media, arts etc. I could name countless books, articles etc., that have heavily influenced my thinking, but really it was just listening to Black perspectives on stuff, REGULARLY and mostly through an Intersectional Feminist lens, that did most of the work. Now when I look for a podcast/book/tv show/movie etc. on any topic (politics, sports, pop culture, whatever) I try to steer towards ones featuring PoC, Women, LGBTQ etc., voices. It’s really amazing how much this simple thing in practice, can change your perspective for the better.
Leto
This will probably be laughed at but a combination of “gansta” rap and Rage Against the Machine. My high school years were 1990-1994 so just as groups like NWA, Wu-Tang, Rage, Public Enemy were emerging, I listened to all of that. Not just bopping my head along, but listening to the lyrics and trying understand what they were saying. Something else: the movie Boyz n the Hood. My best friend, a Philippino kid, and I went to the local theater opening night and saw that. I’m 99.9% sure we were the two lightest skinned people in the theater. It was a transformative experience.
Also TV shows: Cosby Show, A Different World, and Fresh Prince of Bel Air. They were smart, funny, and they covered topics that I simply didn’t know anything about. Fast forward to when I joined the military. I had black co-workers as well as black supervisors, both male/female. They would talk to me about so many different things, mainly because I’d just sit there and listen. I’d ask questions about different topics, but for the most part it was just living/working with them. Also during that time: Dave Chapelle’s Show.
Later it was Balloon Juice and then doing my own research via reading as much as I could. Ta-Nehisi Coates was my gateway. Coates, like so many others, let me know just how much I didn’t know, which meant more reading because I really hate not knowing about shit. Especially things as fundamental/foundational as what’s the lived experience of half my countrymen?
And a lot of this applies to LGBTQ, women’s rights, and so many other things. A lot of my overall “wokeness” spans from my time in Iraq. Iraq, more than anything else, fundamentally transformed me. Most people who knew me saw it, though I’m not sure they knew fully why. That’s a story for another time though.
BGinCHI
@NotMax: Perspective. And getting jarred out of a white, normative world view are key.
Those classes sound amazing.
MattF
It was my dad. The only book he ever specifically asked me to read was An American Dilemma, and he used to say that if he was black, he’d be a Black Panther. He was a radiologist, and was head of radiology of a group practice— and every technician in the department, who he personally hired and trained, was black. His immediate family (and my mother) was pretty much on the opposite side of the fence, and I regret never sitting down with him to talk about it, to find out what led him to his views.
MomSense
It is difficult for me to point to one thing, but I would like to direct people to the work of Rev. Thandeka. Her book Learning To Be White: Money Race and God in America is a treasure. She sometimes offers classes through UU Churches. If she ever comes to your town- GO!
A Good Woman
When I was graduating from HS and was told if I had a party I couldn’t invite any black kids. I was already arguing at the dinner table about racist jokes, to the point my Dad would preface comments with something along the lines of “I am not being a racist, but….”. It was the start of a very long journey.
I had some unhappy surprises along the way in discovering how much further I need to go. Interracial dating didn’t do it, it took more encounters. Now, I have 6 bi-racial grand nieces and nephews, which makes it personal because I have family in the game. It’s no longer a matter of theory and pious navel gazing about possible futures.
Ruckus
For me, it was one of my dad’s employees when I was a kid and started my apprenticeship at 11-12 years old. Richard was a gentle bear of man, black as anyone I’ve ever seen, and as nice. He treated me like he wanted to be treated and I reciprocated. I hadn’t met many black people but Richard set the tone, and that was one of the best educational and human experiences for me, ever. All the racist bullshit I’ve heard through the rest of my life has been obvious bullshit because of Richard. I have it on good authority that the color of someone’s skin is just a trait of birth – humanity is learned – Richard.
rivers
In 1988 or 89 Peggy McIntosh published an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” A few years later I was in a workshop where this was assigned reading. McIntosh makes a list of the things she realizes she can do because she’s white. Just one example, “If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t a racial issue at hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a person of color will have.” After I read this article, I started to think about advantages I’d had because of my race – When I was 21 and working as a secretary, I was fortunate enough to get a rent-controlled apartment. About a year later I discovered from a neighbor that a black couple had applied for the same apartment and been turned down before it was rented to me. Having this very cheap apartment in a safe area made it possible for me to travel overseas on a very small salary and later to go back to school. In fact, it changed my life and continued to change it forever. When I first got the apartment, I just thought of myself as very lucky. But it was Peggy McIntosh’s essay that made me assess how much of the luck in my life had simply been my whiteness.
BGinCHI
@UncleEbeneezer: I miss her presence here. Those combative years were really something, and I was so amazed at her smarts and grace under pressure.
Interesting that podcasts have made such a difference. I’m not a podcast listener, but I can certainly see how they’ve grown and how much skill is put into them.
Mike in Pasadena
Ten years and ten days in the USAF that had a zero tolerance policy on racial discrimination.
gwangung
I grew up in Arizona. And if I had stayed there, I might have become Republican or, at best, moderate.
But going to college at an elite university and living in an Asian American theme dorm really attuned my sense at how tilted the social, economic and cultural landscape was for white people. And I couldn’t ever get away from it, having once see it…
And being in the Bay Area In the 70s, it was a very ecumenical movement that embraced all the Third World people (black, Chicano, Asian American, Native) as all one people.
UncleEbeneezer
Oh, if we are gonna go WAY BACK, the earliest seed of changing my thinking on race was probably planted in 1988 when I went to see the Swarzenegger/Devito comedy Twins. You see, my buddy’s brother had to drive us to the movie theater since we didn’t have our license yet, and he repeatedly played Living Colour’s Cult of Personality, full blast on the stereo of the station wagon. We must have heard that song 20 times on the round trip to the mall and back. Anyways, I got WAY INTO the band and listened to them obsessively. They are still probably in my top 5 bands of all time, and still one of the best live concerts I’ve ever seen. Their lyrics were so on point with heavy discussions of racism, poverty, war on drugs and numerous other issues burdening Black America. Thirty years later their lyrics are every bit as relevant. A lot of what they were saying went over my head at the time, but I think it was the very first moment of a gradual awakening to the reality of my blindness and privilege, even if I didn’t realize it until many years later.
Mike J
When I was a kid, for some bizarre reason I was not allowed into bars to see rock bands play. As an alternative, I had two other outlets.
I’d go to the Lucy Opry, which was a bluegrass hoedown out in a field, and I’d go to blues shows put on by the local community radio station (I often had to sit in the sound booth as I was still underage, but it was less of a big deal.) Like every other 12 year old I loved rock and top 40 and r&b and soul, but my live music was hillbilly pickin’ and blues. Both places were full of joy and love of music.
I wondered why I had to go out past the furthest suburb to see bluegrass and ride the bus into the city core where my parents didn’t dare to go to see blues. Why couldn’t I see all this great music together? And then I figured it out.
Raven
Shit, I just wrote a long post about my experiences with race in the Army In Korea and Vietnam and it got ate. I was a 17 year old punk from the Chicago burbs and race in the Army was as prominent as it was stateside. Here’s the ammo platoon of HHB 1/79th Arty in Korea in 67.
BGinCHI
@A Good Woman: I keep wondering how Obama’s presidency and BLM have forced more family conversations in places where there’s little diversity. Here in the city we’re in the middle of it all the time, but for families who’ve never had someone who did what you did (stand up and say no, that’s not right), there’s got to be a lot of pressure right now.
I have hope in the younger generations. Not naive, but thinking they for the most part aren’t buying what the old white folks are selling.
UncleEbeneezer
@BGinCHI: Me too. The way Imani was treated here, was also a real eye-opener for me about the incredibly toxic Whiteness of even well-meaning liberal spaces.
I got into podcasts mainly to help kill the time on our drives up to the Eastern Sierra from LA. I found that they were much better than listening to music. Then I started listening during my 45 minute commutes, and eventually even at home. They are great for when I’m cleaning or cooking etc.
Martin
There was twitter exercise that asked to name that in 2 words.
For me it was mostly college dorms. Spending time around people with different backgrounds, hearing their stories, seeing their obstacles, making mistakes and being called out on them. And frankly, that’s what college is for to a large degree. You’re going to have a roommate who is black or gay or an immigrant. You’re going to have to learn to get along with that person.
What I didn’t understand was how growing up in NYC made me an outlier in terms of not having hangups on race and language and so on those fronts I was surprised how many of why white classmates were just terrified of minorities and how hung up they were on religion, while I’m here hanging out with the few black students on campus because, well, they were easier for me to talk to than the kids who just came off the farm. I certainly didn’t understand how the world looked from their perspective (any of their perspectives, actually), but I was at least open enough with them that we could learn from each other, and I had a lot to learn. I didn’t learn about Tulsa from class, I learned about it from them. The best reading recommendations I got were from my classmates, not from my professors.
It’s important to get out into the world, and college does break down at least a few of the segregating walls.
BGinCHI
@rivers: Wow. Thanks for this.
Spot on.
E.
Frederick motherf*ing Douglass as a freshman in college. Knocked the top of my head off and I havent been the same since. Also, fun fact to boast about: Winona LaDuke was my babysitter!
BGinCHI
@Mike J: Great story.
Memphis?
debbie
The Boston busing riots. I’d just moved away from there, and I remember being surprised that this would happen there. I’d seen lots of ethnic antagonisms (Southie vs. Dorchester; Italians vs. Irish; Armenian vs. everybody; etc.) but not racism. I don’t remember hearing about any problems when Columbus, OH integrated, so I had no reason to think busing would be an issue in Boston.
Raven
I will say that the inequity I saw in the military was the driving force behind my doctoral work looking at the GED. Project 100,000 saw that many troops a YEAR from 66-69 taken into the military that did not meet basic educational, mental and physical requirements as a counterbalance to draft deferments.
BGinCHI
@Raven: You seen Spike’s new film yet?
AnneWith
I think it started with the scrapbook my mother kept of the Little Rock Central High Crisis, & my childhood worship of JFK & MLK, Jr (I loved reading biographies). Roots aired when I was 12, which led me to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Reading Malcolm X was pretty shattering for a well-intentioned white girl.
Edited to add: I read about Frederick Douglass as a child, too. And a host of other people. I read a *ton* of biographies, & there was black history mixed in with the rest.
BGinCHI
@UncleEbeneezer: Ha. Only time I’ve ever really listened was when I was commuting one night a week, out to the burbs to teach.
Best way to fill that time, for sure.
Miss Bianca
I still don’t think I’m woke. All I can say is that I’m listening.
That said, probably the first book I ever read that got me really thinking about race relations in America was Mary Jane by Dorothy Sterling, about an African-American girl who’s one of two students chosen to integrate an all-white school. It was written in 1959, and I read it probably in 1972 when I was eight or nine.
I really empathized with how it highlighted her experiences not just with racism in her new school, but how going to “the white school” starts to separate her from her old friends in the hood, and how she feels about that. It was never preachy, just matter-of-fact about how her experiences with white people ranged from well-meaning if ignorant to malicious and hateful. Really held a mirror up to me and mine in my all-white suburb.
(Oh, and lest you think it was all bleak, Mary Jane does make one good friend at her new school, which also spoke to my experience when I transferred schools later on: how having one good friend will make all the difference between giving up and going on in a hostile environment).
James E Powell
When I was a kid all my heroes were professional athletes and the greatest in my eyes was Jim Brown. I got his Off My Chest for my birthday right after the Browns won the NFL championship. It was an eye-opener.
NotMax
Aside:
First real unchaperoned date I had with anyone of the other sex was me and a black girl, in grade school. Met up for a movie and a malt*. No trepidation from her or my parents, nor anyone else that I can recall.
Oh, the movie? Of all things, the newly released Taras Bulba. Trust me, not a date film.
*It’s a stereotype with ample good reason.
Eric S.
The journey has been long and not illustrious. Im from a rural river town where racism runs rampant still. My parents moving us to the Chicago Suburbs, as lily white as they are, was a corner stone I didn’t understand for a long time. I could repeat much pop culture above and definitely Angry Black Lady here. One thing that changed my world view dramatically was learning one of my best friends (RIP) was gay. I wasn’t homophobic but I didn’t know any. Learning that changed my outlook on everyone. It changed everything but it didn’t. He was no different than he ever was but now I just knew something else. His difference was inside. Obviously the outside differences couldn’t matter more than that. 25+ years on I continue to learn.
BGinCHI
@NotMax: That’s a sitcom episode, right there.
Raven
@BGinCHI: Yes and it’s part of what I wrote. I say yes but I couldn’t finish it because it is so bad. The part that did ring a bell is when MLK is killed and some of the brothers want to start killing white guys then and there. My experience of that day was different. We were out in the field in Korea and the word came down at night. I clearly recall one really militant brother saying “it’s surprising it took them that long to kill that Tom, they killed Malcom a couple of years ago”. Shit knocked me on my ass.
Leto
@Martin: You see a lot of the same things in the military. I was an instructor for 5 years, so got to see young people up close as they were thrown into an unknowable pressure cooker. We had kids from all over and it was always interesting watching friendships form.
BC in Illinois
For me, a moment that sticks with me through the decades (in the middle of a long process of “education of the suburban white liberal teenager”) was an article in the St Louis Post Dispatch in the 1970s (my 20s). It was one of many articles we all have seen, how white couples looking for a house are shown the house, and the black couples are not. Send the same application for insurance/job interview/bank loan with a white name or picture and you get a different response than a black request. As Pres Obama said, “Johnny gets called back for the second interview but Jamal does not.”
I think it was the combination of “that’s wrong” with “I don’t want that” with “I don’t know what to do to change that.” It has stuck with me through the years as the epitome of structural racism.
It’s still wrong, I still don’t want it, but it takes lots of work and pushing in from the edges and pushing in from where I am, to make any changes.
One thing I do know is that my kids and (age -appropriate) my grandkids have grown up with the knowledge of that system, and didn’t have to wait until their 20s to see it for what it is.
Benw
I was pretty sheltered before reading James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Chief Seattle, Black Elk and John Dos Passos in my wonderful 11th grade American English lit class (holla Ms. Weiss!) in 91-92. They got me primed. And then the Rodney King riots in April 92 opened my eyes to the ongoing racism, brutality, and injustice.
Martin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Heh. I go to Oakland all the time, and remember going to a conference with a (white) coworker who I recently hired from a Midwest university and was equally terrified. “Can we get an Uber at the airport?” “No, we’re taking BART because it goes directly to where we’re going, it’ll be faster, and it’s cheaper, and the taxpayers are paying for this”. She trusted that I considered all of this to be perfectly fine, but she was still nervous the whole way. I would talk to strangers, and make jokes, and laugh with them, and wasn’t afraid to stand on the train. She was more relaxed on the way back and we had a nice chat on the flight home about the whole experience.
Josie
Seeing commenters refer to college experiences reminded me of a formative experience. I entered the University of Texas in 1961. During those years the dorms had to be integrated because the football team was integrated. My dorm was not since it was private, a Methodist dorm. One evening, my roommate and I were late for our sit down dinner due to a late class and sat without realizing it at a table with a black girl who was a guest of another resident. Late that night we were visited by a parade of older girls with lit candles and pillowcases over their heads. We were harangued and threatened for quite a while before they filed out. The message was clear. We were really surprised and frightened. It was my first experience with racism and I’ve never forgotten it.
Amir Khalid
Racial tension in Malaysia, between Malay political power and Chinese economic power, is not quite like racial tension in America. The latter I started to learn about when I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which was around the same time I saw the film of his life starring Denzel Washington (not in a cinema, by the way, but at a screening at the US Embassy).
American Skin (41 Shots) is the work of music that has most affected my thinking and feelings about race. But upon reflection, Springsteen may have let the police off lightly on that one: he describes the police violence against Amadou Diallo as merely thoughtless rather than malicious.
BGinCHI
@Josie: Damn.
Mary G
I’m not sure I’ve ever told anybody this story, because it so horrified me and made me doubt my judgment of character. My dad was a former Jesuit who became an Episcopalian priest after meeting my mom and having me. Both their families, from Texas and Kentucky, who ranged from typical Southern Lost Causers to deep red racist Deplorables, took violent exception to their marriage, causing them to move to California for physical distancing and having little contact with my mom’s family, except for my grandmother, who tried but often failed not to say the “n word” that my mother forbade in my hearing, and no contact at all with my dad’s family.
My mother, who had at age 16 rejected the arranged marriage my Swedish illegal immigrant grandfather proposed and instead put herself through the University of Texas, was engaged in 1950 to a guy who was in law school there.
That was the year that Heman Sweatt, a Black man who Thurgood Marshall had won a case for in the Supreme Court on the basis of separate and unequal schools, started at the regular traditionally all-white law school. Needless to say, it didn’t go well. Mom’s fiance and a few of his friends tried to walk Mr. Sweatt to and from classes and take him to basketball games. My mom participated at first and the local KKK came to her house and told my grandfather they would rape her and burn a cross on his lawn if she kept it up. He cussed them out in Swedish, but demanded she stop. She didn’t want to, but her fiance and his friends agreed that she could no longer do it. Mr. Sweatt eventually had to drop out due to stress and health problems, but he had gotten the first foot in the door and made a huge impression on my mother, who stayed “woke” the rest of her life.
My dad got sick with cancer in 1962 and my mom started spending almost all her time taking him to doctors and hospitals for the next five years, so I was left in the charge of the next door neighbor, who I called Grandma Edie. I loved her dearly because she would take me to the beach for all the hours I wanted, and if we were not at the beach she would leave the house for hours, so I was able to watch any TV I wanted, hang out with their dog Sam, eat any number of foods my mom would have had a heart attack if she knew about, and sneak into her son’s room and read issues of Playboy cover to cover. Grandma Edie’s absences were our little secret, because I wouldn’t have been able to stay if my parents knew. She was a massive late stage alcoholic, but I had no clue.
After my dad died in November 1967, my mom was gone even more trying to figure out what to do with a ton of debts and no money and no house. My dad didn’t like being called “Father G,” so since he had a PhD in theology, he had everyone call him “Doctor G” instead. We watched a lot of MLK’s earlier speeches and I looked up to him because he was like my dad, a preacher who went by Dr. His kids were my age.
So one day in April 1968 I was lying on the living room floor with Sam watching TV, pretending to do homework, and hoping Grandma Edie would take off so I could read the latest issue of Playboy I had stashed under an open volume of the encyclopedia. The phone rang, it was my mother and she said something and Grandma Edie said in a vicious voice I had never heard from her before “Good. I’m glad the son of a bitch is dead.” She was talking about MLK. They had a screaming match, my mom came and got me and I never saw Grandma Edie again, as we moved the next month. I didn’t want to see her, but at the same time I was lost and missed Sam so much. That was my first experience with how two-faced some people are around race, at least with my mom in the picture, and it was shocking and awful.
Leto
This thread is appropriate so I’ll drop this here:
Matthew A. Cherry @MatthewACherry · Jun 5
Here’s the entire interview with @kimlatricejones and David Jones Media. Take a second to watch the whole thing because she makes even greater points throughout the entire interview than she does in the viral clip that is circulating. Her Monopoly comparison is spot on.
WaterGirl
@A Good Woman:
Yeah, the summer I was home after my freshman year this nice guy i was (really) just friends with lived in the suburb next door and we would talk on the phone. My mom liked his voice, didn’t accept the “we’re just friends” part and was sure there was some romance.
Anyway… at some point she learned that he was black and she forbade me to get together with him because we lived in berwyn – a totally segregated suburb (see previous comment about friends house being firebombed for taking in a black foster baby) – and she was worried that our business would get firebombed and we lived in apartments upstairs.
When you’re young you don’t always understand the whole picture, but I was appalled and said I was going to get together with him anyway. My mom threw the lid of the pot she was boiling potatoes in – across the room in my direction – and said that if she was paying for my college education that she could tell me what I could and could not do. Long story short, I paid for the next 3 years of college myself.
WaterGirl
@Mike in Pasadena:
But who’s counting? :-)
Miss Bianca
@Josie: Yow. That’s intense.
narya
My family has very lefty roots though they vary in their sources. My small hometown was/is very working class and very white, but we were not allowed to use the N-word, for example (this is early-60s, so that was unusual). Partly as a result of that, the college I chose was the first to educate blacks and whites side by side (and the first co-ed college as well), and my choice was in part based on those factoids. But my real learning has been and continues to be in fits and starts. I remember seeing “Do the Right Thing” and feeling like so many reviewers missed what I saw as a major point. Spike Lee, Imani Gandy, Ta-Nahisi Coates–they educate me (even though it is not the obligation of them to do so, and often not the point of what I’m reading). The discussion my team had of the 1619 project was the latest thing–I chose four pieces for us to read/discuss, and then discuss how we can incorporate what we learned into our work. I find that a quasi-Marxist lens can be useful, because of the analyses of labor, capital, etc. And intersectionality makes me think. And actually STFU and listening to what folks are saying (e.g., at work). Oh! and NK Jemison’s trilogy was fking brilliant. I like to think of it as the Constantly Trying to Waken project, because it’s a process, not an event.
FlyingToaster
Grade School.
I grew up in Kansas City (Waldo, if you’re familiar with the city and its neighborhoods) and the first round of court-ordered bussing started the same year as I started Kindergarten. So from first through 3rd grade, my classes were ~1/3 black kids bussed in from Kumpf school, which was being rebuilt. My best friends were all black or Jewish. My neighborhood was almost totally white, with two synagogues and a JCC. We had a few hispanic families, and one black chemist snuck his family past the redlining. It seemed totally normal.
Then the schools decided to mix things up, and gave teachers the ability to “recommend” kids to be bussed. So several white kids with behavioral issues were to be bussed out, and we got an amazing set of kids with every damn thing wrong in return. 1/3 of my 4th grade class was black, and 1/6th (roughly) was hispanic, as they bussed in from two different schools that year. 16 year olds in 6th grade (having failed 3rd, 4th, 5th & 6th once and then been socially promoted). Kids living with their grandma who was working two jobs. My 4th grade teacher was old and nuts, and scared to death of the black kids in the class. We were all “what is wrong with that woman?” and couldn’t predict what stupid Nazi shit she would pull next. She’d send kids to the principal’s office for asking to go to the toilet, unless they were white. Which was only half of us.
My neighborhood started emptying out. The retirees stayed, but everyone with kids started house hunting. Except us.
And then I got placed in the “Academically Talented” pilot program for 5th Grade. There were 0 people of color in that classroom of 14 5th graders and 15 6th graders. We were sequestered from the rest of the building. The teacher was Satan. In the rest of the school, things went further down the drain, as teachers retired or quit, families moved to Kansas or north of the river. When the local junior high instituted locker searches for guns in November, my parents gave up and started house hunting.
We moved 25 miles to the newly annexed land up near the airport, into a neighborhood without red-lining. I had black, asian and native american neighbors. We had immigrants around the corner. My classrooms were 80-90% white (which I still find weird), but the teachers didn’t single out students for being black or hispanic. We were the only Jews (except for my junior high math teacher). The “white” southern baptists considered me a “mud person” and the “white” catholics told me I’d killed Christ. My friends were those other “not white” kids, as well as the usual science, language, and music geeks until I left home for college.
Culture was less important than just growing up among people who hated my and my friends’ guts.
Raven
Race relations, Dong Tam 1969
Eric S.
@UncleEbeneezer: and I just put Living Color on. I loved them but had kind if forgot about them.
Martin
@Leto: That was part of the joy of growing up in NYC when I did. It was the late 70s early 80s, and there were a few radio stations in NYC that would have dedicated show to local artists like, late at night, and so was listening to Run-DMC, and Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa as well as Madonna, Beastie Boys, TMBG, and others. Not all of it was good, these were artists that maybe got a single out but not an LP and were performing in local clubs, but it was all kind of exciting. None of it sounded like what you heard on the radio during the day, but it did sound like some of what you heard around the city from buskers. I still like discovering new music.
BGinCHI
@Mary G: Great story.
I think all the time about the difference between what we thought we knew about people when we were kids, and what they were actually like out in the world.
RSA
Half my ancestors are from Asia, the other half from Europe. I grew up in a predominantly Asian extended family, and I identify as mixed race. I experienced racism as a kid, but since I hit adulthood I look pretty white, so that’s gone away. (Funny thing, sometimes people will ask me about my ethnic background, and they’re almost always part Asian as well.) I’ve always had some awareness of racism in our society. I don’t think that makes me “woke”, though.
Roger Moore
I got woke gradually, and most of it came through politics rather than through popular culture. Seeing how politicians targeted minority groups to try to stay in power was a big part of it for me. Prop 187 and Prop 8 here in California were big examples, but the way the Republicans treated Obama really cemented it for me.
One cultural experience that really opened my eyes was going to Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles for Sunday lunch with a friend while we were in college. We were a couple of sloppily dressed White kids, and at least as I remember it the whole rest of the place was filled with Black families who were still wearing church clothes. I have never felt more out of place in my life. More importantly, it made me recognize that the Black people around must feel like that any time they are surrounded by Whites.
narya
@WaterGirl: I also read Five Smooth Stones!
Matt McIrvin
I do not call myself “woke”. I don’t think that word is for me–I think that as a white guy in comfortable circumstances I can only ever aspire to that condition and try not to be too foolish. There are things I’m not going to be able to viscerally understand.
Miss Bianca
@WaterGirl: My mother was a shocking racist – I mean, even by the standards of 1970s white suburbia – and she practically disowned one of my older sisters when she discovered that not only was sis pregnant out of wedlock (remember when that was a huge deal?) but pregnant by *gasp* A BLACK MAN, which made it about 1000 times worse as far as she was concerned.
She wasn’t as bad as she could have been – I mean, we did get to *see* my sister and my niece – but Lord, the excuses my mother used to make about why she didn’t want to invite them up to our summer house in Maine. It was always all about “what will the neighbors think” and I kept making myself unpopular by pointing out that our neighbors would probably take their cue about “what to think” from *her*, and that if she acted cool with it, they would be polite enough to at least pretend that they were, too.
Surprisingly, that argument never went over too well.
BGinCHI
@Matt McIrvin: I hear you. It’s work, and has to be done constantly.
narya
@Amir Khalid: I think of the police reaction in 41 Shots as based on fear–fear of a person’s skin color. And I am glad that he continued/continues to play it.
Martin
As far as I’m concerned that’s woke. You gotta listen. I mean, really listen. Everyone gets it wrong somewhere, and you can’t appreciate everyone’s experience until you hear them, and sometimes you gotta fuck up before they’ll tell you what you need to hear.
The problem is the people who won’t listen.
BGinCHI
@Miss Bianca: This is almost a Tennessee Williams play.
Same thing happened in my family, but a secret adoption and then repression of all memory of it have wiped it out.
I think I’m the only one who knows.
Matt McIrvin
@BGinCHI: For all the defects of social media, one thing that it actually affords is the ability to read what lots and lots of different black people in America are saying about their lives, constantly. Shutting up and listening has never been practically easier.
Drdavechemist
I’m in the camp of gradual awakening over a lifetime of white privilege. Went to school with a cohort that included only two black kids out of a thousand in exurban Cleveland. Ran in academic circles where POC were equally scarce, and to this day I can’t say that I’ve ever worked closely with a black person. I have, however, worked for the last twenty years at a school that is introspective about how we promote all kinds of diversity. As a result, I have been forced to confront the fact that I come out on the privileged end of every identifier our society recognizes. I’m fortunate, however, that I was raised to think about people other than myself and to be able to extend that to people who don’t look like me, so I do my feeble best to leverage my position and work on being an ally.
BGinCHI
@Matt McIrvin: Absolutely.
One reason I’d like to throw David Brooks into a volcano.
That brand of dipshit pundit can’t disappear fast enough.
JPL
The author of Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkenson has a new book coming out in August, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
JPL
The author of Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkenson has a new book coming out in August, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
JPL
The author of Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkenson has a new book coming out in August, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Martin
@Miss Bianca: That’s how my bit of the family tree got splintered off. My aunt married a black man, which was NOT OK with the extended family, so my grandmother packed everyone up and moved to the west coast. The marriage didn’t work out and rather than raise a daughter as a young single mother, she had her adopted.
I never learned that story until after college, when I was introduced to a cousin I never knew about after she and my aunt finally reunited.
Not long before that I learned that this was not my grandmothers first rodeo, as when she was in the Army she married a doctor who happened to be Jewish, and that was NOT OK with the immediate or extended Catholic family. And that marriage got annulled, and the daughter she was carrying was adopted by her sister who couldn’t have kids. So she helped raise her daughter without anyone being able to reveal that relationship until the necessary relatives died off. So that’s when I learned my great-aunts daughter was really my aunt, and that explained why she was the only one of the extended family that would really talk to me.
Jay
Mom, used to travel several times a year from the Crowsnest Pass, down to Seattle on shopping trips, dress clothes and banned in Canada Race Records. Her Dad topped up his Coal Miner wages by having a Big Band and a Jazz Band, which in the summer, held dances at the Pavillion, just across the creek and by the walking bridge to the Brothel. In the spring, fall and winter, Gyms.
That didn’t stop my Mom from being racist and homophobic, she just wasn’t racist against Black People.
As a kid growing up in the Maritimes, out of my love for being in the wild, I found and read Ernest Thomas Seton’s 1 Little,Two Little, Three Little Indians. Grade 3.
Full on Cultural Appropriation where the whitest protagenists thrive in the woods by appropriating Indigenous bush skills.
The summer after Grade 3, my bestfriend and girlfriend was a slightly older Indigenous girl, who taught me butterfly kisses and gentle semi chaste kisses on a woven sweetgrass mattress under a lean too I had built, hidden in a wild meadow.
Through my Father, a bully, I learned to hate bullies with a passion and defend others. When we moved to Vancouver, both my Junior High School and High School had handfulls of POC, Differently Abled and other people of different Spectrums. I engaged with them, we had a mutually supporting friends group in a sea of white faces, often physically hostile.
During the Volker Recession I became a Punk, and joined SHARP, which was highly involved and active in Community Defence on behalf of a very broad based Community.
WaterGirl
FYI – you may know that BJ was down with a 502 error, and I’m talking with the developers to figure out what happened.
Buckeye
I grew up in a very white suburb of Chicago, back in the 70’s. I don’t think I had any ‘aha’ moment about race, though. My Mom did, though. Both parents grew up in very white southern Illinois in the 40’s and 50’s. Maternal grandma was what I’d today realize as the ‘normal’ racist of her time, but apparently did try to not pass it on to Mom. But for Mom her realization of racism came from moving to St. Louis for college and the lynching of Emmett Till. She would mention how much that shocked her. Neither parent was the type to go off and march for civil rights, but I think they tried to expose themselves, and us kids, to black artists, musicians, actors, even if on a small scale. I think I became more aware in college, even if just through more general attentiveness.
Entering the work world has helped, since a great many of co-workers over the years have been BIPOC. And since I have no family in the area, my best friend has me over to his family holiday gatherings, and as mentioned in other comments, sometimes just listening to what my friend’s family’s life experiences has been helpful.
Zelma
I’m close to 80 and I’m still a work in progress when it comes to “woke-ness.” I’ve known how racist this country is since childhood. I saw Little Rock and Selma on TV. But “knowing” isn’t appreciating and it’s certainly not understanding. I did history for a living but I don’t think I fully grasped the implications of the role of race in America until I became a participant (usually silent) in Ta-nehisi Coates’ blog at Atlantic. That was a special time and place in the history of social media.
Amir Khalid
@WaterGirl:
Just like old times.
FlyingToaster
@WaterGirl: It was like 3 minutes long; I’d gone to worldometers to check current COVID #s and came back to a 502.
I then ran over to Twitter to see if anything was up, came back, and the 502 was gone.
In my experience, you can assume a backhoe was involved.
Omnes Omnibus
Right there with you.
MoxieM
I was lucky to take a class as an undergraduate in what was then called “Black Women Writers”. (this was in the early ’80s, since I got to college late. We read Sula, and The Bluest Eye, Passing (Greta Larsen), Their Eyes Were Watching God, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Harriet Jacobs), and tons more amazing stuff. It’s surely the only class where I can reel off the names of the books we read, and still have them all!. Our Prof was a student of Skip Gates, who was then a Lit Professor at Yale, and not yet famous. It was just an amazing, life altering experience.
JPL
@WaterGirl: It was at the time that I tried to post comment at 75 and then when it came back up, it posted two more times.
mrmoshpotato
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001! Always knew the armed forces were a meat grinder for the poor hoping to improve their situation. Fuck Dick, Donnie and W!
ETA – Also To Kill A Mockingbird read in grade school (twice?) and I somewhat remember the Rodney King riots.
Penty
Some background; I was raised in central and northern Minnesota, probably one of the whitest regions you can find. After high school I enlisted in Navy; boot camp started it, but it really hit home at my first duty station Washington D.C. This was in 1989 and I still remember walking out of Bolling AFB and up the street to catch the bus and being the only white guy on it.
BGinCHI
@JPL: Can’t wait to read that.
schrodingers_cat
Who is the you in the question and how does one define race? Also what does wake up mean?
MoxieM
@rivers: FWIW, I worked for several years at the Wellesley Centers for Research on Women, where Peggy McIntosh was ensconced. I always chuckle when people name check her essay, since of all the many, eminent, scholars there, she was the haughtiest, snottiest, most entitled, meanest and most self-important person I can remember.
I know a lot of people have learned a lot from her essay, and I think that’s terrific, but My God! feet of clay. The way she browbeat her secretary, it was like Dobby in the Harry Potter stories.
narya
Actually, there’s one more thing that also nudged me: my parents are atheists, and my hometown had a significant Catholic population, and everyone else went to some other religious institution. That experience of being a minority–everyone just assumed that of course you went to church, believed in a deity, etc.–was a kind of starting point for recognizing what it meant to be Other. Obviously not exactly the same, given that you can’t “see” religion, but it was a start, and one from which I could extrapolate.
Delk
@WaterGirl: it took my post with it.
J R in WV
@WaterGirl:
I got a 524, if that helps. Maybe just more confused!
BGinCHI
@Zelma: TnC has done so much amazing cultural & racial work in this country, and Donald Fucking Trump is President.
What a time to be alive.
Barbara
I don’t remember any specific book or movie waking me up. My parents were committed Democrats who hated Nixon and Reagan and made sure we did not emulate the casual racism that infected many of our neighbors. A book that affected me deeply recently is Jesmyn Ward’s “Men We Reaped.” It is a series of portraits of young Black men in the author’s life who all died young. It built on me slowly and then pow, one of the chapters was so devastating I had to put it down for a while. The pain comes through raw and wild.
Immanentize
So. I was born into a working class white family in a rural part of upstate NY. Five in the family, two bedrooms (four rooms and a bathroom). We burned garbage. We grew our own veggies. I was the youngest of three and we never had enough hot water there for more than one bath for the three of us. That stuff is memorable.
My dad was from a Czech immigrant family, my mom was a Methodist whose family went back to the Mayflower. When they fell in love and planned to get married, shit got real. To my Mother’s people, my father was an animal and a “gear” (odd derogatory for factory workers there). My Mom’s family, as poor as they were, that they had never suffered such “pollution” (think the shades of Pemberly).
But the Catholics were no better. A cousin who was a priest refused to marry them — supposedly because my Mom wasn’t Catholic, but in fact because she wasn’t Slovak.
This was after WWII where my Dad served in the final year of the war in the Navy. His class had white and black and Jews and etc. His ship did too, but the blacks mostly had to work and stay in the engine rooms. He liked the mechanics, except the Chief (white) was the guy most likely to drink Aquavelva strained through bread. Stationed in Norfolk, he saw the difference between Southern racism and Northern racism. He hated both. “Norfolk, Norfolk. We don’t drink, we don’t smoke, Norfolk.”
— part the second below —
Charluckles
The outrageous and disgusting treatment of the most graceful, intelligent, charismatic and ethical First Lady to serve during my lifetime and maybe ever. Take her race out of the picture and she is everything Americans would say they want in a First Lady. Still pisses me off to think about it.
Rivers
@MoxieM: so interesting-but yeah I’d say it’s probably the most important thing I read for many years. I think this shows how unbelievably complicated human beings are. She was able to see these things so clearly and yet evidently it didn’t affect her own behavior to other people.I also think it’s a good reminder to check our own behavior particularly when we feel we’re On the right team
Eric S.
@Matt McIrvin: this! I’m a well paid middle age white man with small town and suburban roots. I know I’m better. I definitively know my journey will never be complete.
Omnes Omnibus
@Raven: I was lucky in my choice of parents. My dad was still in school when I was a kid so I was around the campus a lot. One day, I was trying to decide between some candies or shit and I used eenie meenie mine moe. Apparently, as l launched into it, the largely AA group of people around tensed up. When I said “catch a tiger by the toe,” they relaxed. He, my dad, had passed a test. Also, my dad’s 25th birthday was the day MLK was shot. We were supposed to pick up an African friend of his from a house near the campus. Most of the people in the house were Black activists. My dad says he went quietly to the door and knocked – a white dude standing there on that day. Someone answered the door and then went and got another guy who said “he’s okay.” They were sitting around the house armed to the teeth, not sure if people were going to be coming for them or if they should hit the streets. Dad picked up his friend and left quickly. He’s still kind of proud of the “he’s okay” though.
Omnes Omnibus
@narya: Oberlin?
Immanentize
So I started life in the Eisenhower world, with parents with plenty of experience with bigotry. My Mom’s side was soggy with Union soldier families, proud of the boys they hurried to end slavery…. And yet. As wonderful as my Mom’s parents were to my Dad and my Mom — enlightened Methodists — still I have a picture of their community “Country Revue” and there in the front row is my ever-so supportuve Grandfather in blackface. 1934. That photo was printed in the nearby big city (Binghamton) paper by the way!
But in my family, there was no racist joke tolerated. No talk of this group or that being lesser. But that didn’t stop uncles and workmates from taking shit. No one in fact tried to stop it. But it was not done in our house!
We finally left the rural life and moved to a suburb when I was still in grade school. Much better school. Still white as hell. But my friends were the outcasts — nerds, the Jewish few, the very few blacks. Then music! First R&B. Then Soul! Then Reggae. But my personal moment of enlightenment? Came with the song Love and Affection by Joan Armatrading.
Eric S.
@narya: this is an interesting point. I didn’t identify as atheist until college but I was non religious and my parents were non practicing. If these conservative white churches are half as racist as I read (and believe) my indoctrination would have been much deeper and harder to break.
Kirk Spencer
Several lesser events, but one that stands out. Late 20s, married, both with graduate degrees. We roll into our new town, research places to live, take a tour, everything is going great with a great apartment selected. “Oh. You’re army. We can’t let you have an apartment with us. We’ve met our quota.”
I was far enough along that I soon thought “So this is what it’s like.” After I got past the gut punch, that is.
Immanentize
@Immanentize:
Part 3
Love and Affection was released in 1976. I was a sophmore in High School I think. I went to Recordland in the Mall to buy the album and when I found it — OMG it was a black woman singer! I didn’t expect that! Why not?! I felt so ashamed…. And so began my journey.
But — happy ending(s) — I did serve a subpoena on the grand Wizard of the Imperial Knights of the Ku Klux Klan for the Southern Poverty Law Center during a Klan March in Roanoke Alabama just six years after I found out I couldn’t imagine a black woman singer created such great folk/rock/soul music. So, win?
Roger Moore
@narya:
Family background can make a big difference. I grew up with stories about why Grandpa Kurt left Germany in 1933 and how much trouble he went through to help his extended family get out a few years later, and that kind of thing definitely has an effect.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kirk Spencer: I had a moment like that with sexual harassment. I was in my mid-20s and an army officer and I needed to get some housing paperwork done or one of my soldiers. The housing office on base was entirely staffed by women and they launched into the crudest comments about what they wanted to do to and with me. It was horrible. It is something that happened to me me once; I can’t imagine it being an every day thing.
patrick II
My father was a WW II marine veteran, twice wounded in the war and raised in an Irish working-class neighborhood. We lived in an all-white town in Indiana, kind of the standard back in the day. We went to a public park for a picnic. It was about 1956 and I was about eight. As I raced to the picnic table I yelled to my sister “Last one there is a dirty rotten n*****” It was just a word to me, it had no meaning. There was a black family at a nearby table. (pretty rare in my experience). My father pulled me aside, pointed at them, and asked: “Do you see those people over there? You have just hurt their feelings”. He was very gentle about it, I still remember it vividly.
He went over and talked to them, I assume to apologize.
Looking back that was not what I would expect for someone raised in his circumstances, but I never forgot, and I thank him still.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
For me it was the city and the time I grew up in. I was born in 1970 in Memphis, TN. A Americans were bused to our school. Many came from what we called The Projects but some others lived near us and walked to school like me. In Kindergarten my best friend was Claudia. She was African American. I kept pestering my mom to let her come over but she never would let her. She let my white friends come over but never Claudia. I figured it out pretty quick. I think that was the beginning for me. A few years later, when I was about 7 or 8 people broke into our church and I overheard the Pastor saying “those n—- from the Projects down the street had probably done it”. He didn’t know I was lurking around in the hall. I thought about the poster of Jesus in our Sunday school room. Jesus was surrounded by children of all different races. That was the second biggest point for me. Throughout Middle School I continued to have AA friends but there was tremendous pressure on me and on them to discourage it. By the beginning of Junior High in 7th grade we had self segregated. I wasn’t brave enough to buck the system. But in truth I had few, if any friends, regardless of race. There were lots of fights between white and AA students….they called them rumbles. I refused to participate. I left Memphis when I 13 and moved to central PA. My new school had about a thousand students but only three AA students. The first friend I ever made there was the only AA girl in my grade. I was a proud, outspoken liberal by then. Memphis taught me a lot about the subtle and not so subtle signs of racism.
middlelee
I was born in 1940 in a small town in Colorado near Four Corners. Their were many Navajo and Ute Native Americans in the area, very segregated. My family was poor and mostly farmers. Racism was the sea I swam in and the air I breathed. In 1944 we moved to Southern California. I don’t remember any Black people but there were some Asian families. There was one Japanese girl in our second grade class and no one in my group of friends acknowledged her existence. I can still see her sitting alone on a bench. My family was all registered Democrats and they all voted. We lived in Orange County so I’m not certain how that happened. By high school I was questioning racism because books were starting to be published, schools in the south were being integrated, TV was in most of our houses. Intellectually I was beginning to understand but I’m sad to admit I said things that were unforgivable simply because I had grown up thinking white was the superior race without ever articulating it. Then I married a complete asshole who was racist as were most of his friends. Through it all I was reading constantly and in 1970 I read Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” It was devastating and so painful I still want to double over just thinking about the young girl and her experience in this terrible world.
I’ve been outraged so many times since Martin Luther King was murdered but until now I haven’t done the work. I’ve never had to because I have always lived in predominately white towns and neighborhoods. And, it’s time no matter where I live. I have support from all my friends who are also realizing it’s time so we are doing it together. It’s become very clear that we either deal with racism or it will bring the country down.
I doubt I will live long enough to be a full-fledged anti-racist citizen but I’m taking it on.
Barbara
@Immanentize: Squeeeeeal! I love Joan Armatrading! “Somebody Who Loves You” is one of my all time favorite songs.
I always attributed my father’s fair mindedness to being the child of immigrants, attending a school district that was comprised of the children of poor coal miners whose English was sketchy, from one side of the river, and from the other, the children of wealthy professionals and merchants. He never felt like he belonged and he empathized with others who he thought had similar experiences.
Amir Khalid
The thing to remember about being woke is that, if you’re doing it right, you will always be finding things about which you still need to get woke. There is never a point where you get to say, “I’ve ticked all the boxes, and now I’m completely woke. Yay me!” When at any point you congratulate yourself for being woke, you risk forgetting that you can still do better.
Being woke is always perfectible; but because we humans are flawed, it never reaches perfection.
Laura Too
I was 10 when Billy Jack came out. I saw it in the theater with my Mom and Dad. It was formative. Mod Squad was another (the original). I am still on the journey to discover what it means to be white in this world, and how much work there is to do around it. The last month + have taught me a lot.
stacib
@JPL: I love “The Warmth of Other Suns”! Ida Mae’s story was my grandmother’s story – the sharecropping, running from the South, their experiences here in Chicago – all of it. My grandparents were born in 1905, and escaped sharecropping in Mississippi in 1934. She died in 1999, and I miss her dearly. I gotta say, holy cow did she have amazing stories.
Immanentize
@Barbara: I heart Joan. She makes me tremble. And she is a small package! Big voice. Sometimes, though, it is the orchestration….
Raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Whoa!
eddie blake
@Jay:
nice! i worked with some SHARP and RASH guys in NYC in the nineties
me? mom was a trekkie. IDIC is the way to live.
but also? when i went to midwood high school after yeshiva. public school in nyc is WAY more diverse than yeshiva.
moonbat
Moved from the nearly all white suburb of North Kansas City, MO to Greenville, MS in the Delta when I was 13 years old. Went from an all white junior high school (I swear there was like one kid enrolled there who was a person of color) to a public school where the Black to white ratio was 80/20. Was a “minority” for the first time in my life. My initial panic, alienation and downright certainty that I would never fit in changed my perspective forever. Probably the single most valuable life lesson I have ever had.
But the journey is never over. I learn new things every day that I never knew before. You just have to keep trying. Don’t get complacent. Don’t assume you know.
Raven
@stacib: Great book!
Spanish Moss
I grew up in Alabama (I am a white female, graduated from HS in 79), so racial issues were always there, but I wasn’t really exposed to the complexities, or things happening behind the scenes, until I came home for the summer after my first year of college. I was a professor’s kid and in HS I hung out with other professor’s kids and we were all liberal, etc. Not “prejudiced”, but not really friends across racial lines, nobody really was in our HS.
That summer I dated Steve, a black college student from Panama, introduced by my best friend’s family, and it was an eye opening experience. My mother was upset, despite raising me to think that all races are equal, because she was worried that her friends would think less of me if they found out. Total shocker. I learned about the trouble Steve had renting an apartment because he was black in Alabama, he had to get my best friend’s father to go with him to view apartments and participate in the lease process to get considered. And so on.
In short, it wasn’t until I actually got close to a black person that I got visibility into some of the indignities and hurdles he faced. And to my mother’s credit, what her friends would think really was what she was upset about, and after her first “unfiltered” reaction to me, she had no issue. But even so, when initially faced with reality meeting her ideals, she took some time to reconcile them. Not at all what I expected when I accepted that first date, and just a preview of what is lurking beneath the surface where race is concerned.
Ruckus
@Martin:
Before the “troubles” I rode buses, the metro and metrolink trains all the time, going to and from the VA, as I live on the far east side of the San Gabriel Valley and the VA hospital is in West LA at Wilshire and the 405. I’ve had some fun discussions with people of color on the trains.
Ladyraxterinok
@Zelma:
I loved that blog and the comments. (I could only read, not participate because of the device I had.)
That long, long discussion by the various black commenters about how all whites eat x, or all whites do y. And then they’d argue b/c THEIR white friend didn’t do that, but something else.
And the ongoing discussions that revealed how many, many different Latino grouos their are in NYC. Their different cuisines, dress preferences, etc. And their often bitter ‘inger tribal’ conflicts.
Then his extended articles on different small periods of the general pre, during, and post civil war era.
I learned a tremendous amount. Wish there was someone else who could ride herd on such a free flowing discussion today
bluefoot
I want to talk about the flipside. I grew up multiracial and multiethnic in an pretty much all-white town. There were something like 5 non-white families in the entire school district. Despite everything I and my family endured, and the experiences I’ve had in the cities I’ve lived, I never really realized how easy white people have it (like John Scalzi’s easiest difficulty setting) until I took a vacation to Hawaii in my 30s. Through the randomness of genetics, apparently I look Hawaiian, despite not having any Pacific Islander in my background.
For two weeks I was treated as a full person everywhere I went. It was _really_ eye-opening. I could get a drink easily at a bar, people talked to me and were relaxed, no one gave me side eye in the store or on the street. I was treated like I belonged – visible but totally unremarkable. I remember thinking then, “Is this how white people have it all the time?” Every time I walk out the door, I have to brace myself for what’s out there. It’s so natural and part of my existence, I don’t even realize I do it. Until those two weeks in Hawaii where I didn’t have to. Mind-blowing.
Narya
@Omnes Omnibus: yup
J R in WV
@FlyingToaster:
Yesterday morning I fired up our tractor, with backhoe mounted on the back. One of the bigger culverts was clogged with silt and leaves in a really heavy storm series Saturday 3 weeks ago.
So I dug all that out, and then trammed more gravel to repair the road over that culvert, nearly all the gravel pile left. I’ll call the farm supply guys and see if they can truck a few loads out soon. Tailgate a few on the road, pile a couple up by the shop.
But I DID NOT break any fiber bits of the Internet! Nope, I did not, because we live a long way away from any fiber whatsoever. Even though errors thrown by the innertubes are often caused by plumbers with a backhow. We use orbital networks, not fiber, out here.
I’m pretty tired and sore today, too, from all that tractor work.
Miss Bianca
@BGinCHI: Oh, I could write a book.
Ironically, since I grew up in one of the original “redline” communities (hello and goodbye, Grosse Pointe!), my parents actually did me a favor by insisting that I transfer to a fancy private school instead of going to public school – my private WASP-Y school was integrated in a way that the public schools just weren’t. Black kids, Jewish and Muslim kids, Asian-American and Hispanic kids – they were all there, many of them much smarter and all of them much hipper than I was.
I have to imagine that it influenced me in ways I still don’t entirely fathom to this day.
Barbara
@Zelma: I agree that TNC’s blog was special. It was where I (like many) first encountered him, and could tell even by reading his most casual, short posts that he had great insight conveyed with striking originality.
Omnes Omnibus
@Narya: Mine was second. You bastards.
Laura Too
@bluefoot: I am so sorry. I wish it wasn’t like that for you or anyone. We have so much work to do to make this world better for everyone.
Spanish Moss
@Zelma: I am a big Ta-Nehisi fan, and I was so sad to see his Atlantic blog come to an end, not only for the blog entries themselves but for the thoughtful commenting community as well. I particularly loved the Jane “Awesome” series.
I read “Between the World and Me” (a few times) and his view of America was shocking and has really made me think: that the foundation of our country is exploitation rather than freedom, even today. Not at all what I expected, and I am still grappling with it.
Narya
@Omnes Omnibus: okay, I give up; where?
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
I had a wonderful brunch in Oakland one Sunday about a decade ago. I was just starting to date a very nice woman and she suggested we go. About a dozen folks of all descriptions at the table, with one black gay gentleman sitting across from me. Being the only person at the table that didn’t know everyone he kept trying to make a huge deal out of being gay, overt stereotyping comments and all of them directed at me. Not trying to impress me or pick me up but trying to get me pissed off that I had to sit at a table with a black gay man. I finally told him he didn’t have to work so hard to show that he’s gay, everyone at the table knows, everyone at every other table knows, all the wait staff knows and if you want to know I don’t care. It wasn’t the response he was expecting. He invited the two of us to his house after brunch and we went. Had a great day and told him that my sister was gay and had lived with a black gay girl who had introduced me to the woman I was with and I’ve been around gay white people and gay black people for decades. We ended up spending most of the day there and had a great time.
I can’t say all of this was because of Richard, the man from my story above, but he sure did have a way of being an exemplary human being, by just being one. I didn’t realize it fully at the time I was around him, but the more I was exposed to the world the more obvious it became that people can be good without a lot of work, or the can work like hell to be shitty. I can see that, I’ve just never been able to see any valid reason for it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Narya: Lawrence University in Appleton, WI. It was 1847, so you guys had a bit of a head start.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: Oh, my – “catch a tiger by the toe” was certainly the way I grew up with that chant. I didn’t even realize what the original was, till a lot later. I remember that shocking me.
ETA: I’m just about to start This Non-Violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed by Charles E. Cobb, Jr, which covers the role that “the right to bear arms” played in the Civil Rights movement. I expect it to be eye-opening.
Narya
@Omnes Omnibus: which makes the town being the home of the Birchers all the weirder. My best friend is moving there in the next year.
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca: I learned of the other version is school. I was actually shocked.
Omnes Omnibus
@Narya: Woah, the JBS started in Indianapolis. Appleton gave the world Joe McCarthy (but also Harry Houdini, Rocky Bleier, and Willem Dafoe), but not the JBS.
bluefoot
@Laura Too: Thanks. It’s hard to get non-POC people to understand how _tiring_ it can be to live in the US.
Here’s an example of how life is: You’ve heard of “Black People Time”? When stop-and-frisk was really prevalent in NYC, every Black person I knew always gave themselves at least 30 extra minutes when they had to be somewhere. Because of the high likelihood of getting stopped by the cops and you had to budget in time so you wouldn’t be late. Even for my Black friends living working in finance downtown, wearing their Brooks Brothers (or handmade in Italy) suits. That extra travel time – is BPT. It might take 20 minutes on the subway to get to work, but they’d need an hour so they’re not late. Assuming they don’t end up dead. You live that *every day* if you’re Black.
FlyingToaster
@J R in WV:
I live one town west from Cambridge, MA. Nearly every ‘net outage involves either a) a backhoe hitting the fiber or b) a manhole explosion which also knocks out power to Kendall/Central/Harvard/Porter Square.
They’re laying new fiber in Belmont and Waltham (I saw the big yellow tubes on the medians of Rt 2, among other places), so I’m predisposed to suspect backhoes right now.
Miss Bianca
@Laura Too: Oh, wow, I had forgotten about hip images of Black folk on TV in the late 60s-early 70s. That definitely had an effect on me. Mod Squad, Julia, I Spy (whatever we think of Bill Cosby now, man back then he was just COOL. And FUNNY as hell. And I loved him, or what he seemed to be, anyway.) Hell, even Hogan’s Heroes, problematic as that was, had a cool Black character.
Narya
@Omnes Omnibus: current HQ is there, though
i only know because my friend has grandkids there and Madison, and was deciding btwn those places. Madison is cool, Appleton is more bang for the buck plus your Alma mater is a draw as well.
Miss Bianca
@bluefoot:
Wow
That’s all I got.
Omnes Omnibus
@Narya: Wha?
ETA: Wiki says it’s in Grand Chute which is an unincorporated township nearby. Not that than makes it right.
Narya
@bluefoot: coworkers were talking about this at an all-staff; one said that her son’s skin color is seen as a threat which puts him at risk. I realized that as someone who presents as female I know a little what it’s like to be under threat, but that is NOT the same as being under threat because I am seen as threatening
Narya
@Omnes Omnibus: JBS HQ is in Appleton
edit: ah, I thought Appleton
Miss Bianca
@Spanish Moss: You know, now that I think about it, TNC had a big effect on me, as well – his writings on the Civil War and his case for reparations, particularly. In fact, I think I can safely say he was single-handedly responsible for changing my attitude on reparations to African-Americans from “Wha’?!” to “Fuck yeah, we owe it.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Narya: Wisconsin is purple because it is a mix of bright red and deep, deep blue. It isn’t really the home of moderate independents.
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca: Yeah, after reading him, the question becomes how to do it not whether it should be done.
HumboldtBlue
I’ll never forget the last time I used to the word ni**** directed at another.
I was 11 or so years old on a pass from Mr. Holden’s class (black man, beloved teacher, respected, had taught seven of my brothers and sisters) and as I was coming back from the band room and passed another student, black kid I knew but not in the same class rotation and said something like “what’s up n*****?” and he punched me in the face and by the time I got back to Mr. Holden’s classroom the blood had completely stained the white collar of my favorite football shirt at the time.
I don’t remember what I told Mr. Holden at the moment but I know I couldn’t look at him in the eye and slinked my stupid ass to the nurse.
Now that comes from a kid literally surrounded by black mentors, teachers, coaches and classmates. I wasn’t some isolated dipshit and it boggles me to this day what the fuck I was thinking.
Easiest cultural lesson I ever learned.
Omnes Omnibus
@Narya: Grand Chute is the actual birthplace of McCarthy.
TheRug
My hypothesis is that racism is in the same big bag of shit with patriarchy and authoritarianism. The sadness and rage I feel witnessing the inhumane treatment of George Floyd is visceral, it takes me back to childhood experiences seeing my father beat my mother. Because it evokes this earlier pain I recognize it as a similar wound or injustice to humanity, in that sense from an early age I understood what it was like to be treated inhumanely and that I would stand against it. It wasn’t until later that I saw it happened to more than just my fucked up family, that it was both individual and systemic. This presupposes that I’ve managed some repair for early traumas, those that don’t manage the repair are doomed to perpetuate the trauma. My littlest brother is stuck there I’m afraid.
Narya
@Omnes Omnibus: yeah, another friend has a family farm near Sparta. I’ve been there multiple times (and eat venison & wild turkey & rabbit from there) and the summer picnic is often an exercise in tongue-biting. But I try to live the Golden Rule and they seem to respect that.
Laura Too
@bluefoot: I spent the last couple weeks listening to stories of mostly black peoples stories. It is humbling to realize how easy I have it. (I have BIPOC friends, so it isn’t completely foreign to me) I have the choice when I step in and out of the work. I want to create space so others can feel that grace. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
HumboldtBlue
Also, can the Russophiles please get on top of this Tschaikowsky-esque piece of brilliance from the Lincoln Project?
Emma
@Amir Khalid: This x1,000,000. I’ve been “woke” about racism since childhood, but I was too lazy to learn more about LGBTQIA+ issues beyond Project Rungay, for example. It took a sadly long amount of time, but I’m really now using Twitter as a jumping point to find LGBTQIA+ and/or disabled voices and am learning a lot.
On the OP’s question of when did I become aware of race and racism, I honestly don’t know, but I’m also shockingly terrible at remembering most parts of my life. Being born and raised in Singapore until I was 8, I didn’t have a concept of race in the Western sense anyway, but I do remember reading The Blue Lotus volume of Tintin as a young child and thinking “wow, Herge REALLY wants to show the weird teeth on the Japanese characters.” But because Herge was a very complicated person and depicted Chinese people in a very sympathetic light and showed white people behaving poorly toward them, I think I just thought that he drew the Japanese characters that way because they were the villains, and villains always have noticeable features.
I do know that by the time ABL was blogging here and John was yelling at everyone about how shittily she was being treated, I was already like “well, duh, what did you expect,” so I guess somewhere between early childhood and and the end of college was when I learned about racism and sexism is my unhelpful contribution to the post. My family did watch The Daily Show a lot, starting around the beginning of the end of Colbert’s correspondent days, and I’m sure it did a lot to educate us. Edit: I can’t even say it was discovering liberal blogs that opened my eyes on race, because for BJ, for example, my earliest memory of it was John ranting about the Terri Schiavo debacle, and I can’t even point to any post in particular on racism, but I’m sure blogs + TDS worked in tandem for me.
joel hanes
As a sprout, learning to swim at the YMCA, I swam and played pool with black kids.
The best librarian in our children’s library was a black woman; she’s the one that marched me up to the desk in the adult library and told that librarian “give this boy an adult library card”.
When I was maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, I found a copy of J.H. Griffin’s Black Like Me in my parents bookcase and read it.
My town had exactly one high-class supper club, owned by one of the richest men in town. Hob Mason played and sang jazz there every night. One of my father’s best friends often played bass with Hob; going there was a rare treat.
In high school, read Cleaver’s Soul On Ice. Didn’t really understand it.
Worked one summer as facilities/kitchen staff at a Girl Scout camp — integrated, of course, as the Girl Scouts have long been one of the most truly and quietly progressive organizations in America.
Got drafted, lived and worked with black men for three years. Sgt. Brooks was one of the finest men I’ve ever known. OTOH, my stupid white Southie barracks-mate showed me every day what out-and-proud bigotry looked like.
My granddaughters, now 25 and 30 years old, are mixed-race, which our society codes as black. I raised them as my own children. Most of their friends have been people of color. One of those friends was magna cum laude at UCSF, then the Berkeley law school (called “Boalt” until less than three weeks ago). She now does law for international non-profits.
Laura Too
@Miss Bianca: Yes, exactly. I wanted to grow up to be Peggy Lipton. It took me many years to realize black people were marginalized because i grew up idolizing the characters I saw on t.v. and assumed everyone else felt the same way.
Another Scott
@Omnes Omnibus: Ditto.
Some related good news. Warning Politico:
(Emphasis added.)
Until we have public financing, we have to step up and support our candidates and causes. It’s good people are doing so. We need to keep it up!
Cheers,
Scott.
bluefoot
@Narya: Being a POC you’re seen both as a threat and as not legitimate – not a legitimate person. So POC on the street or in their front yard, cops will stop for no reason. Random white people see you as a threat and/or not legitimate so will get in your face, or call the cops, or get in your way, or ignore a request for help, etc. Your job, your time, your right to be on the sidewalk or your own front yard – hell, your right to exist – not legitimate. So to them it doesn’t matter how you’re treated or how badly things escalate, because we’re not fully people.
Spanish Moss
@Miss Bianca: I thought his case for reparations was very compelling too. I liked his approach for making the case as something that has value in itself, rather than trying to spell out what reparations might look like (and then getting bogged down into details that could never make enough people happy).
His writing always makes me think. And reread sentences or paragraphs to appreciate how he expressed this thought or the other. He has always insisted he is a writer rather than a journalist, and it is so true.
joel hanes
By the way, I hope I never again see a picture of George fucking Zimmerman.
Narya
@bluefoot: my org turned over the all-staff to our black colleagues (and we serve A lot of LGBTQ folks so we heard from a lot of identities) and … damn. Knowing it as a fact and hearing/witnessing the pain and the unrelentingness are two different things.
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed.
Mike J
@BGinCHI: Yes.
Ladyraxterinok
Born in OK in 1940, moved to Tulsa (where my dad was born, in 08, and grew up). Grad HS 57, college TX, grad school (61-68) CA, IA 68-89, and now Tulsa again.
In jr high I read Native Son. Pretty powerful for a kid. Then in college I read his Black Boy, just stunned me. Bit later read Invisible Man. I was didn’t really understand 1st orcsecond–too young for the first, too naive for 2nd,. Invisible Man blew me away.
In college reagd Black Like Me, the later A Man Called White, the autobiography of a black man who could pass for white and worked as a field investigator in the South for 30 yrs in its earlier days.
But what really affected me deeply as a young girl was Huck’s growing realization of who Jim is and what their world has condemned him to. And then Tom comes blithely in, playing a game of seeing how they can help Jim can escape—when all the time he knows Jim has been freed. The inhuman, uncaring attitude of Tom’s appalled me as a teenager. I’ve never been able to see .Tom as the mischiebious, fun-loving boy many do.
In 8th grade social studies one class-period I really saw my world. Our all white class, Tulsa schools were segregated til my seniot yr, we were discussing World War II and the Nazi treatment of the Jews. It was a long discussion with great condemnation of how the Jews had been discriminated against before the war.
And then our teacher quietly asked And how do we treat the Negroes? I remember so clearly –several kids just exploded. That’s not the same at all. We don’t treat them so badly. And I partly began to glimpse the unseeing attitude blacks faced
Jay
MoCA Ace
@Omnes Omnibus:
Waves hand… deep, deep blue here!
I grew up with two biracial cousins that lived out of state and we only saw them once or twice a year. I grew up in a lily white part of Wisconsin and my familial experience, while not leading to “wokeness” made me hold my tongue through much of my younger life. When my daughter was about five or six we went to a cousins wedding in Chicago and my daughter spent the whole evening playing with my older biracial cousins daughter and friends. Fast forward about a week and my wife’s racist drunk uncle was over watching the super bowl and dropping N-bombs at the TV when my daughter turned and asked what a n***** was and before the word even left her lips I just fucking lost it. Told her uncle to stow his racist bullshit in my house or get the fuck out. He did, but never spoke to me again. That sticks with me as the start of an ever evolving and improving “wokeness”.
Jay
Jay
Ladyraxterinok
Born in OK in 1940, moved to Tulsa (where my dad was born, in 08, and grew up). Graduated HS 57, to college inTX, grad school (61-68) in CA, in IA 68-89, and now Tulsa again.
In jr high I read Native Son. Pretty powerful for a kid. Then in college I read his Black Boy, just stunned me. Bit later read Invisible Man. I didn’t really understand 1st or second–too young for the first, too naive for 2nd,. Invisible Man blew me away.
In college read Black Like Me, it reallymstunned me. Then later read A Man Called White, the autobiography of a black man who could pass for white and worked as a field investigator in the South for 30 yrs for the NAACP in its earlier days.
But what really affected me deeply as a young girl was Huck’s growing realization of who Jim is and what their world has condemned him to. And then Tom comes blithely in, playing a game of seeing how they can help Jim can escape—when all the time he knows Jim has been freed. The inhuman, uncaring attitude of Tom’s appalled me as a teenager. I’ve never been able to see .Tom as the mischievious, fun-loving boy many do.
In 8th grade social studies one class-period I really saw my world. Our all white class (Tulsa schools were segregated til my seniot yr) we were discussing World War II and the Nazi treatment of the Jews. It was a long discussion with great condemnation of how the Jews had been discriminated against before the war.
And then our teacher quietly asked And how do we treat the Negroes? I remember so clearly –several kids just exploded. That’s not the same at all. We don’t treat them so badly. And I partly began to glimpse the unseeing attitude blacks faced
hugely
@BGinCHI: Trayvon Martin. My son wears his hoodie all the time. Im Im not woke but human. To have your child’s life ended in such a pernicious way is an affront to any human. All to serve profits and power, what bullshit
noname
Couldn’t comment last night but this is one of the best threads I’ve ever read on BJ (phrasing??)
In spite of growing up in a poor neighborhood in a big city where whites were the minority, I don’t think I really understood racism until Obama was elected. The crap he and his family had to put up with (as a comment above mentions above about Michelle) and the fact that whites thought I was on board with that simply because I was white. WTAF. Lost pretty much the little respect I had for my fellow man over those 8 years.