On a beautiful day in Washington DC, I met up with two friends to visit the African American Museum of History. This would be the capstone to my civil rights tour, and I was hoping for a synthesis of all the history I had been studying, all the authors I had read the past winter and spring.
It was overwhelming in so many ways that a blog post is never going to be able to explain how I felt. It was all there laid out in a timeline of exhibits: the sad and sordid history of slavery, the promise of Reconstruction and the discrimination of Jim Crow, the struggle of the Tuskegee Airmen, the fight for civil rights in the 1960s, all the way through to the inauguration of our first African-American president.
This quotation by James Baldwin, displayed on a wall over the civil rights section of the Musuem, starts to cover what I’ve learned this past year.
I cannot see this drawing without feeling the horror and the complete insanity of enslaving people. Look closely: it is instructions on how to pack the maximum amount of live people below decks on a slave ship from Africa to America. Each of those little markers was a person. A person. I can’t find the words to go on.
Every part of the country took part in it. The North was far from blameless, as you can see by the numbers below. The economy of our nation depended on cotton, which depended on slave labor. America grew, and grew wealthy at the expense of people’s lives.
Our country still suffers from what we started with the taking of free people into slavery in the 1700s. Racism, discrimination, mass incarceration, it’s all related and it’s all relative fo what happened in our collective past. We need to change it. WE need to change it.
White people, it is beyond time for us to step up and recognize our privilege comes at the expense of “others” who are not white, who did not and do not get the exceptional advantages we have been handed simply because we were born white and not black or brown, Muslim or Asian.
Here’s the link to some good books my Racism and Civil Rights reading list. Learning and listening are good first steps for white people like me. It’s a long road and I feel like I’ve just stepped onto it, but I am willing to do the work: listen, learn and change myself and the world around me.
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or… some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
Barack Obama
Shirley, I appreciate your reading my post, but I am a bit taken aback by your assumption that I simply take things at face value. I have learned to read critically and question, searching for the truth. To that end, I have never read that Martin Luther King Jr incited (not “insighted”) violence. Can you please provide at least three links to articles or news reports of this?
A lot of white privilege is structural in nature. Here’s one example of how I am privileged in ways I never knew till recently: my dad served in WWII and when he got out, he was able to use the GI Bill to become one of the first in his family to graduate from college, and then you used the VA to buy a house and was a homeowner the rest of his life. A black GI, a veteran of the same age and service, was often unable to find a college that would accept him and the GI bill benefits he wanted to use, and he was redlined out of many neighborhoods, often unable to buy a house. Thirty years later, compare the net worth of the college-educated, home-owning ex-GI with the one who did not get the college or home-owning opportunities. That is structural racism and that’s what we have to work on acknowledging and changing.
One book I highly recommend for its nuanced approach to white people and racism is White Fragility. I have thought much about the topics in this book and have read it twice already.
Annie, I am totally blown away by this post. I studied history in college so my education was very much on the surface. We are only taught what “they” want us to learn, the rest is learned by living and continuing to remain vigilant by further educating ourselves, and others.
I am excited for you about this life altering experience you are living; education is the key to a healthy understanding of ourselves and others. However, I implore you to look deeper into this experience and keep your eyes open for the truth and not just accept what you read in a book or from a wall. In other words, ask yourself “what can I do to help?”
Yes, Martin Luther King was a hero in the eyes of many races, but did you know he was also accused of being a terrorist and not just by whites? He would insight enough anger that riots were started, the police would get involved and people were killed as a result. Was that the best he could do?
After the riots and killings MLK’s words of change sent the blacks and whites away from the demonstration with their heads in their hands, blood on their bodies and not to mention, so many dead.
Is this how we should continue to act today, with violence? How can we change the fact that we are white? Should we be martyrs for people who continue to kill each other? What needs to be done?
Well, can we be part of the solution by continuing to kill our own people? Maybe we should have more riots that leaves us feeling defeated.
Your words below concerned me when I read them. Shall I apologize to the world that I’m white? Should I maybe carry the shame of my ancestors?
Shall I forget the importance of the Holocaust? What? And no, I was not advantaged or privileged because I’m white. I was sitting next to a black woman at my college graduation. I paid for my degree, she however, had her graduation paid for at someone else’s expense. She didn’t thank me for working to help pay for her education; she owed me nothing nor I her.
As you have written, “White people, it is beyond time for us to step up and recognize our privilege comes at the expense of “others” who are not white, who did not and do not get the exceptional advantages we have been handed simply because we were born white and not black or brown, Muslim or Asian.” Annie, I am sure I am NOT the only reader of your blog that felt compelled to offer my opinion.
Amazing… heart-breaking really, especially the ship image. Man’s inhumanity to man exemplified.
I hope they are, but since so many textbooks are content-controlled by Texas board of education, it’s probably not a reasonable hope. The history is there if we look, so let’s try to bring facts to the surface as much as we can so that all of us can learn (or unlearn what we were taught in school!).
Oh, I’ll have to check Barkow out. The documentary 13th had some mind-boggling statistics and really showed how the “war on drugs” was really a war on blacks/minorities. The complicity of large corporations and government law-making is something I’m still wrapping my head around.
Hi, Toni, just click on the phrase – the link is underlined but it is hard to see with the color scheme 🙁
Thanks, Annie. We should have started learning this history and lessons many years ago. It was just scratching the surface. Wonder if students now are learning at a level of truth and understanding.
I can’t see the link to your booklist
Great blog. I have read a few of the books on your reading list. I will be sure to read some of the others. I just finished Prisoners of Politics. Barkow it was another good one on mass incarceration.