Red's Wrap
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Black History Month is for White People, Too
Black History Month is a time to release some of our ignorance.
That is not easy. Very few of us walk around knowing what we don’t know. That’s what ignorance is all about. Not even knowing how ill-informed and poorly educated we’ve been.
Take me, for instance. I lived on righteous island for a long time. A lot of my career was spent working with Black people in Black communities. And for a good share of that time, I beat back my own racism with a stick. Racism – it isn’t a thought structure, it’s a reflex.
So, I had this reflex, growing up in the fifties and sixties in a white world but, I’m kind of proud to say, I pushed back on it and put myself in places where the power and the culture was defined by Black leadership. I tripped and fell and made a fool of myself so many times I became the butt of jokes. Kind jokes, they were. But still jokes. It was the seventies – a time when, if you were in the thick of things, you were going to get exposed.
Asked in a diversity training session in the late 70’s at the Black organization where I worked to describe what was happening in a picture where three white kids were jumping rope and a fourth kid was watching, looking as if she wanted to join in but clearly feeling excluded, I said there were three girls jumping rope and one who wanted to join in. To which everyone in the room exclaimed,
“She can’t even say the fourth kid is Black!”
But, to me, to say the fourth kid was Black was to say that her being Black mattered and I so wanted to pretend that I hadn’t noticed her Blackness, that her being Black was irrelevant. Color wasn’t important, don’t you know. A minor detail. I thought it was best to claim to be color-blind.
I got corrected. On the spot. Not shamed, exactly, but corrected.
“The girl is Black, Jan. That’s why she can’t jump rope with the other girls. Call it what it is.”
That’s what Black History Month is about for us white people. Reckoning. Not getting away with celebrating Booker T. Washington and Sojourner Truth as historical figures, but having to face our own, reflexively racist, selves.
As Maya Angelou said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”
That’s been my aim for a pretty long time.
__________
PhPhoto by Annie Spratt on Unsplashsh
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
you are so right, a lot of time and learning to make up for. when I talk about black history and issues with my 3 and 4 year olds in my class, all throughout the year, at a level they can connect to, they have a lot to say, and one thing that I find so interesting is that they are shocked that people have ever been treated as not being equal. and that it is still happening.