2020 and BLM

This year has been more dynamic than any I can remember. To better understand racism in America, I have been reading and listening. I have lived in America for my whole life, and yet I still have so much to learn about America and American history.

The purpose of this post is for me to reflect a little and consider the sources that are shaping my thinking as well as the media that I am engaging with best as I reexamine my understanding of racism in our society and in my thinking. I welcome conversation about these articles, books, and biographies, and I also welcome suggestions.

Audio I prefer audio memoirs read by the author, when available. I found this especially true of Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Both books centered around the authors’ experiences and understanding of racism in their lives. Since I enjoy biographies, I chose audio books to motivate me to learn while I went for walks.

• Noah’s humor is infused in his narrative of his life before becoming famous. Hearing him joke about both terrifying and ridiculous moments helped me to process not only his narrative but also the way he shaped the narrative, structuring the narrative around the importance of his race when he was growing up in South Africa. In this interview, he reflects on the process of narrating his book versus the process of writing it. I was especially interested in his experiences using language to move between different groups in society, not only code switching but speaking multiple languages to connect with the people around him.
• I read Coates’s memoir Between the World and Me, winner of the National Book Award, and I felt I had not absorbed it as well as I wanted. So I listened to Coates read his memoir, which he wrote to his son about being a Black man in America. The anxiety he expresses about his son’s safety and well-being weigh on him in ways that I can only imagine even as I know a fraction of that anxiety for my own children as they negotiate our world. The examples and history of racism that is ingrained in our society is clear and pervasive, and the fear based on racism is even more pronounced now.

Lecture It is hard to believe that it was January of this year that I heard Stacey Abrams speak to a UNE audience about voter suppression. As I think back to her message of equity for all in elections, I am also thinking forward to this November’s election.

I engage best with lectures when I am able to take some notes to keep me focused on main points and salient examples. This was also the case when I listened to Robin DeAngelo’s presentation of some of the findings of her 2018 book White Fragility. Looking back over notes that I took, I am better able to connect concepts and ideas now then when I took those notes in June, particularly DeAngelo’s point about the lack of knowledge of Black history in America. As a child of the 1970s, I remember February as Black history month, but my recollection is that each year we heard about the same people and events: scientist George Washington Carver, civil rights activists Rosa Parks and MLK, Jr., and desegregation due to Brown v. Board of Education. In my teenage mind, racism in America was a thing of the past since popular artists, entertainers, and athletes were not of one race but many, and I assumed no one in my urban neighborhood was told to sit at the back of the bus because of their race. Growing up in an area that was known to be an “immigrant” city led me to believe that prejudice was what other people had when they looked down on us, even as racial slurs were no more unusual than misogynistic insults.

Print My lack of in-depth knowledge of American history becomes more pronounced even as I have tried to build it through years of teaching, reading, and learning. When reading Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist (2019) this summer, I was reminded again. My text is marked with sticky notes of all that I do not know. As I look back over the book chapter titles and terms, I revisit the many examples that pop up from my past; times where I did not see my reaction or thinking as racist. But I find hope in Kendi’s chapter entitles “Success.” He states, “Racist ideas fooled me nearly my whole life. I refuse to allow them to continue making a fool of me…” (227). In this chapter, I can see a path to keep learning and reflecting, to take action and to re-examine the structures of racism in my life and in our history.