I Used to Argue With My Mom About Racism
I used to argue with my mom about racism. Having grown up with fair skin and privilege, it didn’t really seem like a thing to me. I went to the best private schools, had access to plenty of resources, and received an excellent education. If the kids didn’t like me (and they didn’t), I blamed it on other things. I was too weird, too nerdy, too over the top. I never really crossed paths with Those Kind of White People, the type who had nicknames for things using the n-word and who blamed Black people when they were murdered by the police. My mother, a Gen-X slam poet (she’s technically a boomer, but only by one year) wrote constantly about race, politics, and the type of overt racism I had only seen in movies.
As a teenager, I genuinely believed that we were living in a post-racial society. Sure, there were incidents, like the time when I gave my cigarette to another teenager to kill and they said, “Ewww, you n — — — lipped it.” It’s not that I was totally naive to racism. I understood systematic racism and generational oppression. When I transferred from my cushy college prep school to a city school, my junior year, it was very clear that public schools were not designed to elevate Black youth. We had metal detectors in the hallway and armed security guards.
The school was host to three programs: there was the Spartan classic which was the regular program for children from the neighborhood, the International Studies magnet program, and the International Baccalaureate magnet program. These magnet programs increased in rigor, and when you got to the top level magnet, the International Baccalaureate program, the faces were paler. I would say that the Spartan Classics program was a majority of Black students, and the International Studies program was reasonably diverse. I started out in Spartan Classics, and ultimately ended up moving into the International Studies magnet program and noticed some very significant differences. My math class had a substitute teacher for the two months that I was in the program, and we never received any lecturing at all. The English class did not allow us to take our textbooks home. I threw a fit with my guidance counselor and was transferred into the International Studies magnet. I ended up doing my graduation project on racial disparities in the public school system.
When I listened to the new podcast from the team at Serial Productions, Nice White Parents, I noticed some interesting parallels to my own, unscientific observations. Chana Joffe-Watte talks about a situation in 1987 when District 15 in New York City was noticing a decline in white enrollment, and their solution to this decline was to open up a gifted program. They started diverting the highest performing students from one school (I.S. 293) to another school (M.S. 51). And in this gifted program, students of color were represented disproportionately. White parents started paying for their own psychologists for tests, and also hiring people for test prep.
A 2013 study by the Council of the Great City Schools pulled up similar observations in the Pittsburgh district revealed similar observations. Black students made up 53.7% of enrollment in the school district, but only 26% of the gifted and talented program. The gifted and talented program was largely based on IQ tests for entrance. They were also more likely to attend a school where a gifted and talented program was not offered, making up 70% of enrollment in these schools. They were also not represented in schools that offered calculus, and only made up 20.5% enrollment in calculus classes. However, they were represented in AP/IB classes, as well as physics, making up about 47.5% of enrollment.
Although I was able to accept institutionalized racism as a fact, however, overt racism was harder for me to accept. To be fair, I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by progressive individuals who, in spite of their potentially internalized biases, are vocally anti-racist. I understood that there were racists in this country, but I assumed that most of them were in rural areas and sported southern accents. Perhaps racism was only a product of the south. Even after I moved to the south, I heard few racist sentiments, aside from a couple of snide comments about diversity. In retrospect, perhaps this isn’t because I didn’t talk often about racism.
What happened is that police killings of Black men became more newsworthy. What happened is that suddenly these killings were getting media coverage and protests. I came to realize that police have always killed Black men, but now it was getting coverage. After Eric Garner and Michael Brown were killed in 2014, there just seemed to be an onslaught of more and more Black men lost to police. In spite of these killings, I still didn’t encounter many white people who seemed to think that they were justified. So the cops were racist. So the justice system was racist. Where were the people who condone racism? I still had not really crossed paths with these people.
Then I moved to the midwest. I settled in, and I had children. I connected with people, and I broadened my network. I was living in a suburb of Chicago, and most of the people with whom I interacted were white, suburban people. I joined the neighborhood Facebook group, and here all of these people were. It started with a debate about adding public housing to an ugly historic building in the neighborhood . Residents were outraged. They did not want people moving into the neighborhood from other, less affluent parts of the county. “Those people” moving in would attract more crime, they argued, never mind that the majority of the low income housing was to be reserved for the elderly and the disabled. Go to the What’s Happening in Batavia Illinois Facebook page, and search for “Campana.” One resident made this comment on one of the posts: “I’ve worked in and on Section 8 properties for many years doing Heat and Air repairs and I will only say that I carry a S&W .357 as part of my tool kit. Make of that what you will.” Another woman on a local mom group made a frantic post about an encounter with some “thugs” on the street who made her nervous because they had a rowdy dog.
As time progressed, I friended more individuals with whom I’d crossed paths on Facebook. There is nothing like adding someone who you thought was otherwise reasonable on social media. My newsfeed was suddenly filled with memes about how you shouldn’t run from the cops if you haven’t done anything wrong and detailing the criminal records of Black people killed by police.
So what happened? I don’t believe that racism is exclusive to the place that I live — although I will argue that suburbia is by nature a more racist place. How come I was suddenly encountering all of these racists when I had never crossed paths with someone who I believed to be truly racist? For one, I was making friends outside of my comfort zone. When you’ve only hung out with progressive people in urban areas, you are less likely to hear the narratives of individuals who are downright racist. You simply do not cross paths with these people. I was in a new state, with very few friends and I was developing my social network that consisted solely of other moms and people recovery support groups that I frequented. By default, I was interacting with a more diverse group of people who are probably more representative of White America than the other people who I’ve known.
Two days ago, Jacob Blake was shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He was shot seven times in the back while trying to get into his car that had his three children inside. Reports say that he had been trying to break up a fight between two women, he was not even a suspect in this incident. Already, acquaintances on social media are once again arguing that you shouldn’t run from police. Digging up his criminal record. It’s the same story all over again, and the police who shot Blake have not yet been arrested. Because Blake is still alive, Kenosha will not even open an independent investigation ⁴.
I used to argue with my mom about racism, but now I’ve lived experiences that show me that racism is alive and well in America, even to this day. Beyond the institutionalized racism and inequities perpetuated throughout 244 years of American history, there are individuals who have overt, problematic biases. You cannot argue with these individuals or educate them, because they are not teachable. Their beliefs are deep to their cores and we have a long way to go before we will truly be able to boast a post-racial society.
Footnotes:
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/podcasts/episode-three-this-is-our-school-how-dare-you.html?action=click&module=audio-series-bar&pgtype=Article®ion=header&showTranscript=1
- https://www.cgcs.org/cms/lib/DC00001581/Centricity/Domain/4/Pittsburgh%20Report.pdf
- https://www.kcchronicle.com/2018/02/02/campana-apartment-project-in-batavia-is-dead/aarrmly/
- https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/08/24/jacob-blakes-shooting-will-get-an-independent-inquiry-advocates-say-wisconsins-law-doesnt-far-enough/%3foutputType=amp
