International Blog Against Racism Week thingie

[rushthatspeaks]

So all throughout the interwebs there have been many fine and intelligent and good people blogging against racism and making interesting and important points, all this week, and I have read these posts and found much food for thought, and then I have sat staring at my computer screen and very much not blogging, on the grounds that I find the whole subject confusing and difficult to articulate and other people tend to say the things I would like to say anyway, only they do it much more clearly and with footnotes and links.

But! I think I did think of something that is interesting, and possibly noteworthy, and that I'd like to compare notes on with other people:

I am white and was raised middle/upper/academic-class in the Midwest by liberal-moderate parents; I attended a diverse-but-tending-toward-Catholic Montessori elementary school and a very diverse Baha'i Youth Workshop during high school; and during my childhood, my teachers, mentors, parents (to some extent) and friendly authority figures all spoke of racism as over. As a thing that happened in the past, which was then progressed beyond, or if not beyond at least progressed so far into that the battle might as well be won. I was raised on heroic stories of the glory days of the Civil Rights movement, and Dr. Martin Luthor King Jr. was an American saint in my elementary school, along with George Washington Thomas Jefferson Ben Franklin Abe Lincoln and the rest of them. I was born in 1981. I know that I knew who Dr. King was by 1987, with the relevant dates.

No one ever sat me down and explained to me that this had all taken place only twenty to twenty-five years ago. That the sit-ins, protests, marches, that segregation and the restrictions I knew to be so backward and horrible were within the living memory of adults who were not all that old; that generations before mine had not necessarily had it taught them since birth that all of humanity are human. The 1960s, as a time period, went into my mental file with Prince Henry the Navigator and Catherine the Great and all the other dates one learns in school that are old beyond immediate relevance and whose influence cannot be traced directly but must be viewed as a trail through water.

Now that I am twenty-four, I am starting-- only starting-- to have some idea of how short twenty years could be for a society, let alone an adult human being. It is extremely conjectural. When I am eighty I expect it will be even shorter.

When I was born, the Civil Rights Movement was recent history: even now it is not too distant. And recent history is *relevant* history, because recent history will trip you up if you don't actually know it was recent. Or even if you do.

I know that I'm not the only one to have been raised this way, to think of racism as over and dead and gone and that battle fought, because the other kids of my socio-economic background in my workshop tended to feel the same way, whatever their races. (There were several kids of a distinctly working-class background involved in the workshop, too, and they tended to think the rest of us were being idiots when we talked this way.) We did a lot of anti-racism activism in that group, mostly through dance, and a lot of us didn't understand why it was necessary: we'd heard it so many times, surely it was beating a dead horse? We got lackluster about it. I was very focused on sexism those years, and on trying to get people to do something about that, and was rather single-minded politically; others had their pet theories; we were bored.

We went to a fair in a small town somewhere in the middle of nowhere to do a dance performance, and our dancers had tomatoes thrown at them from the crowd, and our resident interracial couple had stones thrown at them. (I wasn't present at either incident, but I helped clean up the tomatoes.) And when everyone went to the adult who was driving, terribly upset and confused and hurt, he sighed and shook his head and asked what we expected-- didn't we know that when he was our ages, we'd have been run out of town by a mob? He told us about being twenty in the Freedom Summer, and I said, but you're only fifty! And that's when it hit me: it's not over, and it wasn't that long ago, and the way things are now was not laid down by fiat by a whole lot of people suddenly coming to their senses. It was worked for and it is still being worked for.

And I think that something was wrong with the way I was taught about racism and about the history of this country, that I could have access to so many facts and yet not know that one. I don't know exactly what it was, or how to go about fixing it, and for all I know it could just be me and this one group of people I went around with in high school. But there it is.

How does this jibe with everybody else's experiences? If you were born after the 1960s, were you raised to think of racism as over? If you were born beforehand, do you see the younger generations being raised that way? Is it a white liberal thing? A middle-class thing? A Midwestern thing?

Where did this come from, that I could believe it until I was sixteen years old?

Comments

[gryfeathr.livejournal.com]

I've been lurking about for a while, and seen the posts come up about Blog Against Racism Week, and your post here rings bells for me in how I've been thiking about it. While not raised in midwestern America, and instead on the East Coast, the same glossy overtone was presented to me since the age of five; that strange distant feeling of history long gone and impossibly relevant. Only in highschool did I really begin thinking about it--about the assumptions I made, and the assumptions I didn't make, and how very close to my family this entire issue was. It was learning about that, a very real and close to my home incident of racism in action, that really made me begin to realize the kind of mental conditioning I had.

I think it's a middle-class thing, a white-liberal thing--but mostly, a thing born of a lot of people who want to seem intelligent and PC believing that this is the way to irradicate it. I'm not sure how I feel about it, whether it's the right way or the wrong way. But I can definitely say that I've had quite the same experience, and thinking about it--I can't put it into the right sort of words.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

YES. Absolutely. B. 1973. And frankly I am seeing this same attitude a lot in the current discussions, from people older than both of us and from people younger.

[quietspaces.livejournal.com]

I was in high school and college during the 60s. I took part in the anti-war marches and the Civil Rights protests. The college I attended did not allow inter-racial dating, and there was a "Minorities Club" where "those people could mix with their own kind." Drove me up a wall! You see, my parents were, when it came to race, colorblind, and I ran into racial prejudice for the first time when I started college.

Before that *I* was a minority in the town in which I grew up. Groups create their own minorities if there aren't any ready made. In a very small, pretty much homogenous population, any sort of difference can make one a target. My "minority" characteristics? My father's father's people were Saami, and my mother was from Iowa. (Yes, really!) My best (only?) friend during grade school was Sioux Indian. I felt stranded when their house burnt down and he was sent away to a foster home.

Racial/ethnic prejudice and discrimination definitely are not dead issues.

[sovay]

How does this jibe with everybody else's experiences? If you were born after the 1960s, were you raised to think of racism as over?

I couldn't miss that the civil rights movement was within living memory, because my grandparents had stories about living for a year in Mississippi when the faculty had to meet to determine whether black students were allowed to cut across the campus on their way to classes (and students would regularly peek into my grandfather's office to see if he really did, as Jews were supposed to, have horns) and my grandmother marched for desegregation, and my mother remembers differently labeled drinking fountains and how she learned to stop saying hello to the black kids, her own age, because they would always say hello back with an honorific. And my elementary school did lots of black history and we talked about racism (and other forms of bigotry) in the modern day, so it was not presented as a bygone issue. But I'm not sure that we were taught how to do anything useful about it, if that makes any sense. Racism was there. It was bad. We were not supposed to think that way. And the world would be a better place. End of subject. That . . . was not so helpful.

[shati.livejournal.com]

Oh hell yes. (Boston suburb, and 1986, here.) And when my high school had a big race kerfuffle (for lack of a better term), it was a small group of black girls who were part of the METCO program trying to convince the, man, probably 90% white majority that yes, racism does still exist, in response to several incidents thereof. In response, they got *so much* resistance and hostility and confusion.

A lot of the recent LJ discussions right now (or, more accurately, the more flamewary parts of them) remind me intensely of that, and what a revelation it was, and how frustrated I was.

In fact, reading this post -- I knew racism isn't a thing of the past, but I *hadn't* considered how recent the Civil Right Movement was. So, uh. I just had an "oh my god!" moment.

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

I'm the other side of the divide: born 1951. Something you said rang a big Tibetan bowl for me though, and this is what came up in response (http://slashfairy.livejournal.com/162190.html).
Thanks for this post. You're a thoughtful person, and it means a lot to me to be on your friendslist. Blessings on your head.

[oyceter]

Yes! Me too! I'm the same age as you, and I lived in America till I was 8. I remember reading those kiddie biographies on Martin Luther King Jr. in America, but thinking that it was cool, but didn't affect me.

But yes, and I see the attitude of "Racism is over! We fixed it!" a lot in RL and on LJ.

[khava.livejournal.com]

My experience of this was almost exactly the same. It didn't really "click" for me that the civil rights movement was only very recent past and that it was still relevant to the world today until I saw Forrest Gump, which came out during my freshman or sophomore year of high school. Watching Forrest live through all of that and emerge in today's world still a middle-aged man with a young son suddenly put everything into time perspective for me.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

I'm English living in Scotland, so the entire American history of racism happened on another continent. I went to a secondary school where around a third of us were Jewish (including myself) and a third Asian, so I couldn't exactly grow up thinking everyone was a WASP. I knew that I was growing up in a fairly middle-class, liberal, ethnically mixed area, but I also knew that racism was alive and well. As far as I expected it to brush against my own life, I was thinking more in terms of family friction (e.g. at interracial dating), unpleasant comments, discrimination in the workplace (friend of mine said Try getting a job as a surgeon if you're female and Asian), rather than physical violence. I knew that existed, but that it was rarer and largely confined to certain parts of the country, certain parts of cities and so on. I think I was mostly correctly informed, though I know that as someone white I'm not going to be able to notice all the little things my Asian friends put up with regularly and not going to get the most accurate picture.

Incidentally, are you with us for co-moderating lesliaisons1782 or not? It starts in about a week.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed! I've friended all the relevant things and so on. Do you still have my email address? Which bits need done of what? I'm sorry I've been so absent; it's been kind of a rough past while for various reasons I haven't gone into much on this journal.

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

First of all, proofreading! I've got about a third of the entries up, including the whole of the first quarter, which should keep us busy for a while. Judging by what's happening with dracula1897, I would strongly advise proofreading in advance, especially since I won't be able to proofread in French if it comes to the day of posting and the entries haven't been done. With any luck, we may find that the e-text was entirely accurate and nothing needs to be changed. Anyway, that's the first job. You're doing the male narrators (angevin2 is doing the female ones, it's pretty much a 50/50 split that way and easy to remember), which basically means a stint on Valmont and Danceny to begin with.

I set up epistolary_mods a while ago as a forum for the three of us to discuss this, but I can't add you until you request to join as it's not open-access membership, so please could you do so? The proofreading is the part I'm most concerned about, but we also need to start advertising this community and doing things like sorting out icons for the character journals (the ones there at the moment are just placeholders, I don't actually want to use them).

Sorry to hear about everything being rough, hope it's improving. If you reckon you won't be able to handle this at any point, please give us as much advance warning as you can so that we won't be stranded.

[em-h.livejournal.com]

Me, I'm old. I was born in 1961, which was an interesting time to be born -- into a society that had recently entered into a period of tremendous social upheaval on many levels. So yeah, I was too young to participate in most of it, but I lived through it. The anti-Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights Movement, these were things I had a vivid awareness of, even though the impact was refracted in Canada (we never had the exact equivalent of the Civil Rights Movement; racial issues are different here and the way we handle things is different, it all played out differently, but I was *very* aware of what was happening in the States -- with Vietnam, of course, we got so many people coming here, it had a very direct impact in an odd way). Second-wave feminism was changing my life the whole time I was growing up. I remember the FLQ crisis, and how we got superstitious about mailboxes even though there were never any bombs in Ontario. All of this, and all the other cultural changes of the 60s, they were just part of my environment. So it's all very much living history for me.

But also, I think the "racism is over!" thing may be more American than general. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm not trying to claim greater virtue for Canada, but perhaps the fact that we never had a dramatic moment like the Civil Rights Movement makes it harder to feel like, hey, we dealt with that! It's okay now! (On the other hand there may be a certain amount of, hey, we're Canadian! We're not racist up here! We totally never had slavery! [which we did, btw]).

[q10.livejournal.com]

thank you.

i've been bitching for a while about how i think a lot of the problems with understanding these issues - in my generation, at least - came from the fact that this stuff was taught as history, and not as current events, but you've said it all much more coherently than i would have.

[ephiphonora.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1982 and grew up in South Eastern New Hampshire. Once when I was visiting my grandparents in Salem, NH, we went to the Rockingham mall to walk around. I was holding my grandfather's hand and we were speaking of nothing when an inter-racial couple passed us. My grandfather said, "See that? Don't ever do that. Blacks with blacks and whites with whites." I was eight, adored my grandfather who had fought for us in the Second World War, and knew in my bones that he was wrong, but that I couldn't change his opinion.

In school, racism was treated as a beast slain, speckled with the attitude that we were lucky to be Northeners--we championed the cause of the slaves in the Civil war, so we couldn't be racist, right?

I woke up when my next-door neighbors moved in, when I was about 14 or 15. They had come from the next town over, where they had been driven out. He was black, she was white, and two girls rounded out the family. Mom and I went over with a welcome basket, to greet them, offer our assistance if they needed anything, leave our phone number if they needed help or just to chat, etc. Stuff you do for a neighbor, because they're your neighbor. The woman answered the door and cried when she figured out why we were there. No one, she said, had ever done that for them before. She had been expecting condemnation.

It was inconceivable to me then and still is now, that people would do what was done to my neighbors. I was furious that in this supposed enlightened age of acceptance, old hatreds were being bred in my small town. And I felt deceived. I had considered the hurtful comment of my grandfather to be due to his age, but that it was still in action baffled me. And then I looked around, and there were almost no minorities in my area at all, and there aren't many now either. It's easy to spread the semblance of acceptance and enjoining when there's barely anyone around to contradict or correct the propaganda.

[larryhammer]

Born in 1967 and raised in Washington, DC. I got it both ways, actually. On the one hand, many of my teachers had been on the front lines of the civil rights movement. There were parts of the city that were still burned out from the riots after King was assassinated. I knew the words to "We Shall Overcome" as well as "The Star-Spangled Banner." On the other hand, until seventh grade, I was relatively sheltered in a neighborhood elementary school. I had trouble connecting just about anything outside of my immediate experience to me personally, including the civil rights movement -- The Vietnam War was also just as distant, even though it was still happening in my early childhood, and one of my friends from third grade on was a Cambodian refugee adopted by Americans.

I grew up with the knowledge that equal rights was just as much an ongoing struggle for blacks as for women. But it wasn't my struggle, quite. Not until later.

---L.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

That sums up exactly how my high school was. And mine was a *very* diverse school on the East Coast. There was probably racism present; I was oblivious because I lived in my own little world, but it was never discussed in class.

[navrins]

Response in navrins. Short form - I learned *about* racism as a strange custom still prevalent in some places, but not the place I was. I started learning to *be* racist from the people fighting against racism.

[ckd]

Thanks for posting this; it's very thought-provoking. I haven't posted this week for much the same set of reasons: I don't feel like I can put the words together to say anything helpful beyond "racism bad, mmmkay?", and as Whitey Gringo-McGaijin I'm in a bit of a spot vis-a-vis personal experiences. I have been reading a lot of good stuff on my flist, and I've been trying to listen to each perspective.

That said, I did have one experience which your small town experience reminds me of.

First, some background. I went to a fairly small high school, the only one in a small town; my graduating class was about 120 students or so. (And 20 years ago, speaking of how short 20 years can be. Me? Just turned 36, speaking of being 16.)

However, the town was within the general Puget Sound urban area and right near both Fort Lewis and McChord AFB; this meant that we had a whole bunch of kids who were black, or half-Korean, or Filipino, or whatever. Very mixed. I don't claim that it was the Color-Blind Shangri-La of schools, but it seemed to me that things were pretty much okay. (Not that I necessarily would have noticed if they weren't; see above.) Certainly my (immediate; not discussing the grandparents, not not not) family's culture was very much a meritocratic "judge the person" sort of thing. (I do, now, recognize the cultural bias WRT "what is merit" that is part of that attitude and try to keep myself aware of my assumptions.) This was almost certainly influenced by the military environment, which for all its failings had been working on integration since the Truman days. (My dad didn't care what color you were if you could fly or fix helicopters well.)

Now, as a small school, we were paired with other schools of similar size for athletics. Very few schools in the urban area were that small (I think one, a private school); most of the other schools our size were in small towns. Our athletic league had other schools that were, literally, 100 miles away on the other side of Puget Sound. Most of these schools were in small towns that tended to be, shall we say, more homogeneous. (In one incident I did not witness, apparently another school took offense at the color of our quarterback and decided to give him a few kicks after tackling him.)

So, one year we headed to the state track championships, which were over on the other side of the Cascades, several hours away. I was the manager, and wound up riding along with one of the parents who came along as chaperones/cheering section. As we reached a town along the way, the van signaled and we all pulled into a restaurant parking lot so we could get some food, use the restrooms, and so on.

Well, except that their kitchen was "having problems" and the restrooms were "out of order". (Funny, there seemed to be plenty of people eating just fine when we arrived.) I have no doubts that if Mr. C and I had walked in by ourselves that everything would have been working just fine, because, y'know, Whitey Gringo-McGaijin x2.

It's not rocks or even tomatoes, but it sure pissed me the hell off, and as with your experience, slapped me with the Clue Stick that this was not over and that my friends experienced this sort of thing all the time.

And this was in the mid-1980s, 20 years after the Voting Rights Act.

I don't remember being specifically taught that "racism is over" but I think my environment predisposed me to think of it that way. After all, I wasn't getting hit with it; I had the privilege to ignore it, and I was in an place where it was not particularly visible or prominent.

[This became longer than I'd expected. Sorry about that.]

[homasse.livejournal.com]

Well, for me, it was never something that was seen as "history." Maybe it's because I grew up in the South, and in a time where the Klan was still somewhat active--as a seven-year-old, I once actually thought about what reaction I would have if the Klan ever burned a cross in my yard (my call was have a weenie roast, since obviously what they wanted was to scare me, and that was dumb. So, weenie roast)--and went to school in a school system that was *still* under a desegregation court case being investigated, and was bused to a majority white school under the M to M (Minority to Majority) program until I was accepted into my magnet school--and that school was specifically created to try and prove that the schools well and truly were desegregated, and so there were racial quotas (easily filled, though, because the top two students from each school were chosen, and there were majority Black schools and majority White schools). Likewise, my parents went to segregated schools. So...it was never "history," it was something I was one generation away from, and not that far removed.

It seems to me, though, that the groupd of teenagers now is being rased to be "colorblind," but that the problem with that is that they think racism is over, when, in fact, it's not.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Very different for me (born 1968 and raised in the South). My parents sent my older siblings to school after integration and got a lot of shit about it from their neighbors. Also, when they were very young and already had three kids, my parents had a part-time maid. My mom went to buy a doll for the maid's daughter at Christmas, and was asked at the store, "Do you know that's a BLACK doll? Are you sure you want to buy that?"

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this is one of those things that everyone has to find out for themselves, that recent history is real, and alive (and not so recent history too, for that matter). I can picture you and your classmates saying "But why did no-one tell us?", and your teachers saying "But we did; weren't you listening?"

I was born in London in 1951, and for me the equivalent would be the war - or rather, The War, this historical event that had affected my parents generation so profoundly, and yet that we felt we'd never really been told about. I was in my teens before I saw a ration book and realised that rationing had carried on into my lifetime; older, before I put together what I knew about the blitz, and understood that the piece of waste land on the corner of our street where we used to play (until they tarmac-ed it over and made it part of the school playground), and which we referred to as "the bomb-site" - hang on, that was a bombed site, somewhere where the houses had been demolished by a bomb...

Maybe it's a thing about recent history, that it's so big to the adults around us that we can't really learn it from them, we have to work it out for ourselves. So (evading the central theme of this post altogether) I'll ask you, since the battle for your generation was feminism, how you react now to young women who say that that's over, we are post-feminist now?

[shahnasa.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking of that...good question!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Pretty icon!

[shahnasa.livejournal.com]

Too quickly sum up my experience: b. 1982, taught that racism was history, definitely grew up believing that anyone with racist ideals was so backwards that they would be ridiculed.

Also frustrated that while I'm beginning to recognize that we still need to DO SOMETHING about racism, I have no idea what.