If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.
- Maya Angelou
When I was seven or eight years old, I watched a documentary on television about the civil rights movement. Until that time, I had never seen skin as having a color. My father was a jazz musician, his buddies, black and white, were often at the house. Louis Armstrong records provided our evening music. My very first “boyfriend,” in first grade, was named Oscar. We held hands, and he kissed me on the cheek. It didn’t occur to me until years later that his skin was a different color than mine. That night when I saw the marchers in Alabama being beaten by the police on our little black and white television, I woke up to what race meant in my country. I buried myself in my mother’s arms and wept, “I don’t want to be white.”
We have each of us experienced race in our own, personal way. From the moment I awoke to the reality of the racially divided world that we live in, I have carried the sadness that I felt that night, watching those brave men and women defy oppression, and walk toward the violence, anger and hatred that stood between them and freedom; sadness, mainly, for the heinous wrongs that were committed against the Africans brought to this country as slaves and all of their descendants treated as much less than equal, but also sadness for all of us, that our entire country had to bear this burden, and deal with the ugly prejudices that separate us, holding all of us back from being truly free.
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou wrote: “In Stamps (Arkansas) the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than that they were different, to be dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the worked for and the ragged against the well dressed. I remember never believing that whites were really real.”
Segregation in public institutions has been illegal in this country for half a century, but segregation of racial and ethnic communities continues to exist. Perhaps it is a basic human instinct, to gather with one’s own ethnic group, for safety and comfort; however it fosters ignorance, on both sides of the racial divide. What we do not know, we fear. It can also have a powerful impact on our psychology as a society, promoting negative stereotypes, both of the racial other, as well as within each racial community. Psychological examinations of young black children were used as evidence of the negative effects of segregation in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education that ended segregation in the public schools in 1954. Sadly, resegregation of our nations schools has been on the rise since the early 1990s, most notably in the Northeast and West, and it’s not simply a black and white issue anymore. “For Latinos, California and New York have the dubious distinction of ranking first and second respectively as the most segregated states for Latino students. Forty-seven percent of Latinos in California, and 58% in New York, attend schools that have… ‘intense segregation’ — schools with 90%-100% non-white students.” (USAToday)
Living in segregated communities may give us the illusion of safety and security in our neighborhoods, but it is not good for us as a society, and it shouldn’t be passed on to the next generation. How can we break down the barriers of ignorance and distrust if we do not live together? Today we are one huge step closer to proving to ourselves, and to the world, that we are ready to be free at last of the racial inequalities that have tethered our society’s progress. But that dream of a perfect union will forever elude us as long as we remain so separated from one another.
When Maya Angelou’s little brother asked their Uncle Willie why the whites hated the blacks so much, he responded, “They don’t really hate us. They don’t know us. How can they hate us? They mostly scared.”
I have often wondered what would happen if our collective memory was expunged, if we, as a nation, or world, suddenly developed amnesia, and all of the old prejudicial grips on our minds, hearts and consciences, passed down through the generations, just disappeared. Would we return to that innocence of childhood where we truly judged one another not on the color of our skin, but on the content of our character? It is impossible, of course, to erase the centuries of history, bias and fear that each generation passes down to the next. But today I do believe it is possible to move beyond them; we have proven that as a society we can recognize the errors of our fathers and mothers, try to repair what we can in our present, and teach our children to be at once wiser and more innocent and trusting than we have been. By electing a man with black skin to be the leader of our country, and in many ways, the world, we haven’t forgotten, but perhaps we have forgiven, each other, and ourselves.
Such an interesting post. I’m a latino woman and I grew up in Miami… when I moved to NY I missed the culture of Miami sooo much. My friends in NY could not understand, they would say — but NY is the most diverse city in the country. My response is that although it’s diverse by the number of minority groups, it is segregated by neighborhood. In Miami I lived next to a Brazilian couple, across the street from a black family, and shared a backyard with a white family. While far from perfect, neighborhoods in Miami are very mixed. Everytime I mentioned my ethinicity to someone in NY they asked if I lived in a certain neighborhood in Jersey… because that’s where we all lived. I didn’t live there, and everytime I was asked the question I longed for a city where that physical boundry didn’t exist… even if it was less diverse.
Ms.Camilleri,
I wish my parents were alive today, so they could see the America they missed. Intelligent and defiant people, they never believed they were unequal despite their circumstance in “Jim Crow” America. They taught me from our ghetto one-room Harlem apartment that I could grow up to be somebody, even President. They believed that active insistence would ultimately change their condition and America’s most base instinct. We haven’t gotten there yet but Senator Barack Obama’s ascension to President- elect Barack Obama has fulfilled my parents’ belief that there would be a better day in America. In one giant leap, America has done something that propels it ahead of the rest of the world. Even though my parents weren’t able to get here with me to see this day that they helped make happen, they always believed it would. I and all of us cannot forget the sacrifices of so many others to make this a more perfect nation with the election of a Black and White man as President of the United States. I wish the children of our future America, color blind at birth, can live that way as adults in future America.
I’m old enough to have lived in Jim Crow America, in the South in fact, and felt the shame. I remember the hope and despair of the 1960′s. For me and others like me, this is a great moment in our lives, as it is in history. Obama’s got a tough row to hoe for the next four years, or two years at least, but we can rejoice that if a world wide bank failure is what it took to get a majority of Americans to see past their prejudices and choose the best man for the job, God knows it was worth it.
There is an interesting article in the NY Times today which underscores the point of my entry: we must live together to truly break down the barriers of racial prejudice. The study found that by fostering friendships between members of different ethnic groups, racial biases decreased considerably. The more contact we have with each other, the more we feel connected and empathetic, the less we fear and distrust. Makes total sense, of course. Some key points:
“In some new studies, psychologists have been able to establish a close relationship between diverse pairs — black and white, Latino and Asian, black and Latino — in a matter of hours. That relationship immediately reduces conscious and unconscious bias in both people, and also significantly reduces prejudice toward the other group in each individual’s close friends.
This extended-contact effect, as it is called, travels like a benign virus through an entire peer group, counteracting subtle or not so subtle mistrust.”
“In a series of studies, Art Aron and others have found that, by generating a single cross-group friendship, they can quickly improve relations between cliques that have been pitted against one another in hostile competitions. In a continuing study of some 1,000 new students at Stony Brook, Dr. Aron has found that merely being in the same class where other interracial pairs were interacting can reduce levels of prejudice.”
The entire article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/us/07race.html?th&emc=th
So how do we integrate our communities more? Obviously socio-economic factors play a large part in our segregated lives. I wonder what can be done to truly mix up this melting pot of ours.
Do we assist the segregation by making this country bilingual? By allowing schools to teach in Spanish? Seems that our kindness to the minorities is (as it often does) harming its beneficiaries. By helping them cope in the foreign language country, we encourage them not to jump in the melting pot and stay isolated within their ghettos. I’m beginning to wonder if this is intentional… Nah, that would be paranoid! More likely it is shortsightedness in action again.
Naomi
I like your blogs, your sharp thinking, your style and wisdom in everything you’re saying. You are a great writer, great journalist, great analyst. Please continue doing this great job.
I agree that the best, perhaps the only, way to kill prejudice is through individual relationships. Though this may be difficult for some of us, we should recognize that, as a nation, we’ve made a lot of progress already. That we’ve made as much as we have is due to several factors.
1) Most important: The integration of schools: children are born free of prejudice. That so many young white people turned to Obama recently is, I believe, due to the fact that, having known smart, honest, good-hearted black kids in school, they weren’t blinded to the good in him by inherited prejudice.
2) Also important: Advertising and film: since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Hollywood and Madison Avenue have more than made up for their decades of racial stereotyping and compartmentalization. It may be unrealistic to see a middle class suburban barbeque with all ethnic groups presented as close personal friends, but advertising is always looking to present some kind of ideal. Okay, so they make these commercials, not to help race relations, but to appeal to as many pocket books as they can at one go. Still, as they well know, images sink in and have an effect. The buddy movies have done the same thing. People who are in no position to have a close friend of another color can see such relationships portrayed in movies like the Lethal Weapon and Rush Hour series. (Does anyone remember Silver Streak with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, back in the 70s?). How about that fabulous spoof, not only of racial prejudice, but just about everything else in our society, Changing Places, with Dan Ackroyd and Eddie Murphy? Here’s another area where Capitalism has been one of the good guys. Hollywood has also contributed with serious movies like The Color Purple (when I saw it the entire theater audience, mostly white, including teenage boys, was in tears); Spike Lee’s biopic of Malcolm X; Glory, or the best of all in my book, Remember the Titans. Beginning in the 60s, Hollywood has made up for StepinFetchit by consistently portraying African-Americans in roles of leadership, as judges, bosses, heroes, even the President of the US. These images sink in. Television has followed suit. The per capita percentage of racial diversity in the US may not have been totally reflected in the pundits discussing the politics of the recent election, but it had to be pretty close.
3) The Bush Administration. Much as I hate to admit it, George Bush did African Americans a great service by ignoring the color line to appoint two of his most important cabinet positions to highly qualified persons of color.
We know where we’ve come from and how far we have to go, but we also need to acknowledge how very far we’ve come and feel some gratitude for those who helped by reaching out.