Facing Race
The year Martin Luther King was murdered, I had a vague notion from an article in Life Magazine that some people thought he was a “dangerous militant influence,” but even at age 13, I also knew that my parents were skeptical of that line of thinking. While my white parents were Southerners through and through, they somehow escaped the full grip of racism perhaps because they were educated at the liberal University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It also helped that my father worked in journalism at the Durham Herald newspapers where he was the editorial cartoonist and art director. Truth and fairness mattered to my parents.
My mother volunteered in an organization called Goals for Raleigh-Wake, a desegregation effort to merge the Raleigh City Schools with Wake County school system. We escaped the desegregation backlash of other southern cities, but I was quite aware that in 1968 Black people lived in different neighborhoods from white people, were mostly poor, and nobody explained to me why that was, just that putting all the kids together was going to somehow fix everything.
My parents taught us that the color of one’s skin did not make one inferior or superior. Yet my family employed Black maids throughout my childhood. Why Daisy or Cleora and their families lived down the street in much worse houses than mine (and we were not rich) and drove beat-up cars and wore hand-me-downs, I never knew. That’s just the way it was for Black families. I remember riding with my mother in our modest Volkswagon to the only shopping center in Raleigh, and noticing the car next to me was a large Oldsmobile driven by a Black woman. I asked my mother why she was driving such a big, nice car— asking, not resentfully, just confused, as if the cows on the other side of the fence next to our old colonial home suddenly started wearing tutus. It just didn’t make sense to my young, segregated, white-cultured mind. Sigh…such is the nature of white privilege: we get to be oblivious and ignorant.
Decades later I’m embarrassed how long it took me to move beyond my shallow racial understanding of skin color to grasping the travesties of systemic oppression such as redlining in banking, unequal education, voter suppression, employment discrimination, and blatant white supremacy coursing through our political, economic and social systems like poison in the well. It’s small mercy that my parents didn’t inject that poison into me when I was younger. I have been fortunate to fall onto career paths of social justice and journalism where many, many people of color and others have patiently enlightened me to the structural and institutional aftermath of our country’s capitalism being built on the backs of enslaved people.
My journey has gone from viewing racism only from the personal perspective to seeing the systemic, perpetuated injustices that have prevented so many Black families from building generational wealth and accessing opportunities that as a white woman I take for granted. My grandfather was a South Carolina landowner who participated in sharecropping on a portion of what was mostly timberland. Our multi-thousand acres were eventually sold, and I and my children have benefited from this generational wealth, begging the question: what can and should I do to acknowledge and atone for benefiting from a system that was so patently unfair and inaccessible to Black families?
I have been aided most significantly on this journey to understanding by three different groups of Black women—two engaged in food system work, and another in race equity work in the business realm. In all groups, great care was taken to create a safe container for each of us, no matter how we identified our skin color and cultures, to say what was so about how we have been disrespected, ignored, misunderstood, talked over, and told to just get over it and get with the program. We vowed to tell the truth, and for some of us (white women) in particular, to not get our feelings hurt when criticized for our cluelessness. From them, I learned what it felt like to have the life-or-death need to teach your teenaged Black son how to respond when pulled over for “driving while Black.” Or to know that when you went to the hospital to have your baby you were three times more likely to suffer complications, even death, in childbirth because the white doctor didn’t listen to you about your pain. I heard personal, real, painful revelations of actual treatment in boardrooms, with government agencies and former bosses in the 21st century that I simply did not have to think about as a white woman. Being mansplained and underestimated as a leader by many (not all) men my whole life? Yes, certainly. But could I fight my way into the Boys Club far easier than my Black counterparts? Most certainly. At least I had an open invitation to compete, if I dared. The list of times these women were simply not seen, much less invited, was long.
I am deeply indebted to the bravery, gut honesty, and flexible strength of these women. They are like willows in a storm, bending and dancing against the winds that batter them, yielding only enough to survive, and always returning to their sturdy, standing tall, God-given beauty. In fact, the most important impact on me has been experiencing the richness of their lives: the farmer’s connection to her land, the daughter’s devotion to her family, the community organizer steeping her efforts in African wisdom, the event manager using her musical heritage to bring her community together, the entrepreneur lifting up other talented leaders of color dedicated to being role models for young girls, the Ph.d determined to gather the data that will create change. [You know who you are LaShauna Austria, Monique Bethell, Lisa Thomas, Erin Dale McClellan, Crystal Taylor].
Of course, there has been tremendous progress since MLK’s assassination. There are now many inclusive leaders and organizations. Most people I know and come in contact with in business have made a sincere effort to examine their consciences and their behaviors to do better by all people. I am now surrounded by many white men and women who courageously demonstrate their allyship and solidarity. At the same time, we are each a work-in-progress on accepting people who are not like us for a variety of reasons. But beyond the personal work, we must not turn a blind or lazy eye to systemic and structural failings that have persisted from a slave-owning past. The fact remains that a country built on slavery created some long-lasting impacts. For example, when a map of redlined census tracts of the 1960’s is overlayed with a map of food insecurity rates in 2020, they are almost identical. This disinvestment by banking in Black neighborhoods lives on today in a lack of generational wealth, lack of safe and affordable housing, and food insecurity. COVID has deepened these wounds.
This April, leaders in my city and county launched a “Blueprint for Dismantling Systemic Racism”. I was on one of the many subcommittees who contributed ideas during the long planning process the year before. My participation was through the perspective of food security, sustainable local food systems, and paying a living wage. I admit I was skeptical that any document we created would actually shift the engraved-in-stone capitalistic inertia of oppressive attitudes and practices. But remembering our Constitution started as words on a page, I persisted with my faith in the process to always remain optimistic that a small group of people can make a difference. Indeed, these are the words that kick off the report:
“The effort to reimagine a Wake County without systemic racism is significant, complicated, and requires a collection of the willing.”
Explaining further:
“The Triangle Diversity, Equity, & Inclusivity Alliance (the DEI Alliance)1 and its partners recognize that, although many in the region enjoy a high quality of life, those who have been historically underserved, underrepresented, and marginalized face a different reality that is rooted in systemic racism. It has permeated the justice system; created education, health, and wealth disparities; and resulted in discriminatory practices. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice movements recently revealed these deep inequities in our society and economy across the United States, North Carolina, and locally in Wake County. These inequities demand attention, problem solving, and action.
“Wake County consistently ranks among the most attractive economies in the country, but key outcomes differ substantially when analyzed by race and ethnicity. As the data show, Black, Hispanic and Latino, and other residents of color tend to have disproportionately high representation in the criminal justice system, lower household income, lower educational outcomes, lower life expectancy, and less access to healthcare compared with White residents.”
Hear are some of the speakers’ (more powerful Black women!) thoughtful insights:
“Prejudice is an attitude…” it can’t hurt anyone, but discrimination is a behavior and people get killed because of it everyday. Jane Elliot [diversity trainer, proponent of One Race] said that. And she also said something that my parents said to us, me, my brother and sister being brought up in rural Mississippi, every single day that we went to school and faced some kind of discrimination: they said we are one race, the human race. Don’t ever forget that. Jane Elliot* says that, too.” Demetria John, City Manager @townofapex @triangledei @WakeGOV #DEIBlueprint
“What we know is that Black and Brown folks are impacted disproportionately in just about every health outcome that we face here… higher rates of infant mortality, higher rates of diabetes, higher rates of hypertension, higher rates of cardio vascular disease. We have huge disparities that we have to address as a community!” -Lechelle Wardell, Population Health Director for Health & Human Services @WakeGOV
“Women of color are three times more likely to die in pregnancy or postpartum. We know that Black women are fives times more likely to die of cardiomyopathy and blood pressure disorders than white women.” -Nannette Bowler, Health & Human Services Director of Wake County @WakeGOV
“It’s about you when you have the power with the pen or people or policy to change this…this is about a larger system, root causes, social determinants of health that drive this issue. So it’s not about you in that way. But is IS about you when you have the power with a pen, or people, or policy to change this. We should never see another moment like Covid again.” Bahby Banks, UNC Public Health and Pillar Consulting @bahbybanks of @UNCpublichealth and @PillarPowered
The process for white people to learn the facts about racism’s structural impacts that still live today is long and deep—precisely because the layers of racism are so dense in our country’s foundation. But it doesn’t matter where you start. Just start. Here are some resources for learning more:
More about the Blueprint, how it came to be, and how you can participate https://abetterwake.com/commit/
*Jane Elliot: Her mission: One Race. Internationally known teacher, lecturer, diversity trainer, and recipient of the National Mental Health Assoc. Award for Excellence in Education, exposes prejudice and bigotry for what it is, an irrational class system based purely on arbitrary factors. In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jane Elliot devised the startling “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise”. Now famous this exercise labels participants as inferior or superior solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority.
Farming While Black, Leah Penniman. Especially, Chapter 16 “White People Uprooting Racism”
Pigford v. Glickman class action lawsuit against the USDA. The 1999 lawsuit alleged that in myriad ways the agency discriminated against Black farmers resulting in uneven distribution of farm loans and assistance. This caused many Black farmers to lose their land and farms to foreclosure. NPR:Black Farmers left behind
Search #DEIBlueprint #HealthEquity on Twitter for more partners