May '70: 5. The Gathering Storm

May the Third, 1970 was a Sunday.

The main thing about it was that we still really didn't quite have a handle on what was happening. Not did we know what was about to happen. Those who had spent years fighting campus battles--or who felt ourselves part of the broader multifaceted forces of social justice generally known as The Movement--were pretty much as full of excitement and uncertainty as the high school sophomore who had suddenly decided that she would cut school on Monday and head on over to see what was happening at the local college.

With the benefit of hindsight, of course, we now know that forces were gathering which would only one day in the future recast everything that had happened so far and intensify it by an order of magnitude.

What were we doing on May 3?

Though Students for a Democratic Society was gone, and with it any chance of real national leadership and coordination, it would be wrong to overestimate our isolation. Local successor groups and semi-formal regional networks were solidly in place in many parts of the country.

The first thing we did was share information. That was harder in the pre-Internet days, but every nugget plucked from a high school classmate or sib who had gone to a different school halfwayacross the country, every report from the radio, the teevee or the newspaper, circulated immediately.

And we networked. 20 campuses in the mid-Atlantic area had representatives at an emergency meeting at the University of Pennsylvania to coordinate strike activity.

And we organized. In the Boston area alone, organizers at M. I. T., Harvard. Tufts and Boston University were building for mass meetings on Monday to vote on strike proposals, while students at Brandeis met in their dormitories on the 3rd to decide what action to take. More than a dozen campus newspapers around the country endorsed the demands coming out from New Haven rally two days before.

[Interestingly the article from the Harvard Crimson issue of May 4th where I found some of this info reported 1. that a "National Strike Committee" had come out of the May Day rally in New Haven and 2. that there was a fourth demand, Impeach Nixon. A good call, history would prove, but I don't remember it myself, and for sure it was not on the semi-canonical 11x17 black on yellow strike poster.]

What were they doing on May 3?

Around the country, school administrators, government officials and cops were also feverishly sharing information and trying to plan their response to something they had never expected--a deeply militant and locally-centered national student strike.

Newspaper editorials ran the whole gamut, from full throated denunciations to timid declarations that we were right to be concerned and it was too bad that we were going about things in the wrong way.

On May 3, Governor Rhodes of Ohio, raging after the National Guard contingent he deployed to Kent State failed to stop the burning of the campus ROTC building the night before, said of student protesters in a table-pounding radio broadcast:

They're worse than the brownshirts and the communist element and also the night riders and vigilantes. They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. And I want to say this: They're not going to take over a campus.

Now we today we are used to hearing rhetoric on this order from yahoos like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh directed at protesters, movie stars, Democratic elected officials and miscellaneous other targets whose sin is having a political outlook to the left of, say, Vlad the Impaler.

The difference is that these clowns are media figures, entertainers. Governor Rhodes held political power in the state of Ohio. He had a state police force and tens of thousands of National Guard troops to back up his big talk. So did California governor Ronald Reagan, who had had threatened campus demonstrators only a month earlier, on April 7, saying "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with." So did President Nixon, whose Cambodia speech (which I quoted in the second of these May '70 posts) conjured up the threat of anarchy and warned that "Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed."

Let me repeat, these people exercised state power, to use a fine old Marxist term. They ran the government. And while we knew that they were potentially capable of using the force at their disposal, we were also wrapped in a cocoon of privilege, white privilege for most of us and the class privilege that comes from being college students, being in a transitional class location en route, many of us, to professional and managerial careers.

Yes, white folks had been killed in protests--James Rector was gunned off a roof by Berkeley cops during the People's Park riot the year before. Yes, students at traditionally Black college campuses had been shot in cold blood by police--three had been killed just two years before at South Carolina State in Orangeburg.

So we knew they could kill us, but we didn't quite believe they would.


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White Noise: White Adults Raising White Children To Resist White Supremacy

[FotM is pleased to be able to repost this incisive and insightful article from the Anti-Racist Parent website.]

by Susan Raffo of White Noise

It hit me while I was still pregnant. Standing there at the Mall of America, looking up at the huge rotunda of bright lights and countless stores, I realized something. This baby I carried inside of me, at this point no bigger than a knucklebone, was going to be privileged with a capital “P.” And with that awareness, I entered a place of contradiction. You see, I could already feel the mama-self growing in me; that place where my bear claws would live, where the desire to do anything to make this child safe, make this child whole, would growl as it grew stronger. That mama-self doesn’t feel like a choice. It’s in there, hooked around my mitochondria and woven into the DNA.

But there’s this other self; sometimes called the political self or the activist self or the stand back and pay attention self. It knows that my child — white and raised by white parents in a family where the adults have the gift of education, have choice about their work, and own their own home — is a privileged child. Every gain my mama-self wants to support my child in making will be on the backs of other children, children with mother’s whose mama-selves are just as fierce as mine but who have to fight against real monsters like hunger or violence.

And this is the contradiction that crept into my belly standing there, at the Mall of America. I felt sad, and a different flavor of fierce. Luca’s creativity, her curiosity and her passion have the time and space to be priorities when we think about raising her. We don’t have to protect her daily from violence or spend most of our time finding food. All children should have the same kind of space. Standing there in the Mall of America, my fierceness shifted and grew larger. It became less about my child and more about the community of children. In other words, my question was not “what is the best for my daughter” and more, “what is the best for all children?” How does this question affect how I parent? How do my partner and I – and all of our friends and families – raise our children in a way that honors the lives and struggles of all children?

Whiteness

Here is what we noticed right away: both the race of our daughter and the economic privilege of our family. We have enough – not a lot, but enough. And we are white women raising a white daughter. Here is the question that followed that: how do we, from the very beginning, start raising Luca to be a different kind of white? What does it MEAN to be a different kind of white? This feels about way more than having a commitment to anti-racism. It feels like being a different kind of person entirely.As a quick aside, my partner and I have a belief system about race, racism and white privilege that assumes that the legacies of slavery, the attempted genocide of Native Americans, European colonialism and its affect here in the Americas and elsewhere in the world has created a present day moment of inequity based on skin color, language, culture of origin and so on. Within that belief system, the fact that my partner and I have light skin and ethnicities with the majority of ancestors being European gives us a kind of privilege. There isn’t the space in this article to explain what we mean by white privilege and white supremacy and racism. At the end, there are resources listed for further exploration.

So, white parents raising white children. We looked at books and blogs. We googled for magazine articles and newspaper features. We talked with our friends – white and of color – and kept coming against the same thing: there is hardly anything out there that directly talks about raising white kids to be anti-racist, to work against white privilege, to be a different flavor, an accountable and creative flavor, of white. There are resources about raising children to live in a multicultural world. There are resources about raising your children to respect difference. There are books about nonviolent child-rearing. But really thinking about what kind of white your kid might be? It’s not out there. And here’s why: most of us white adults don’t really understand what it is to be white ourselves. We sometimes have language about being Irish- or Italian-American, or about growing up on a farm, being Midwestern or from the mountains, but this whiteness thing? The ways in which being white affects our sense of who we are and the communities around us? We usually have no words.

My partner and I decided that if we’re going to raise a white child we want to pay attention to how she becomes white and how she is white. It’s the same thing as paying attention to the fact that she is a girl, that she likes to dance but isn’t so into playing soccer, that she gets shy in front of lots of people she doesn’t know. Each of these things is about her, and each is about the world around her.

Paying attention to how our child becomes white is about a lot of things: and we already know that we don’t know half of them. Sometimes it means paying attention to all of the ways in which being white gives her a kind of “get out of jail free” card, a kind of free pass into better jobs, more income, and less stress and struggle. It means watching and learning from what happens when she pops out of me, all instinct for survival and connection to mama, and starts to grow a personality and set of understandings about herself and the world. It means learning what there is to be proud of, to celebrate, about who she is in the world as a white person.

So, since this is true, we decided to get help. And while folks of color probably are smartest about what being white means, after all, they have to deal with us all of the time, they aren’t the ones who have to fix this part of the crazy mess. It’s up to us to figure this one out. I mean, if as white parents, we can’t figure out how to help our white kids become compassionately or powerfully or collectively white, well, then who can? It’s pretty much our responsibility.

Laying the groundwork

We gathered together a group of white friends, parents every one of them, and decided to form a group. We call it White Noise as a way of describing the everyday annoying distraction from thinking and paying attention that’s akin to living with white privilege. Our kids are all young – the oldest is Luca and she’s only seven. And we sure haven’t figured everything out. But we figure it’s time to bring the light in. The more we share what we’ve learned, the faster it’s going to grow. And growing our understanding of how to raise a white child to make being white an entirely different thing, that’s what we want to grow.

Right now, we call what we do “laying the groundwork.” Meaning, since we have young children whose needs and questions are still more simple than complex, we figure we’re just trying to help their bodies get clear about whiteness. At the end of the day, there is no single recipe for how to do this. Raising white children is really about just plain raising our children to pay attention to all of who they are. We can’t protect them from anything. The best we can do is prepare them to carry the tools they need to weather the multiple storms their lives will bring them. That’s why we call the work we are doing with our young children, “laying the groundwork.” Our intent is to support them to experiences themselves and the world around them in a way that will feed their ability to not only do anti-racist work but also be anti-racist “from the ground up.”

Making whiteness visible

Somewhere around four years old, we started to notice Luca, when describing her friends, only “raced” her friends of color. Meaning, when she was describing people to us who she knew, she described her friends of color as “Black” or “Native” but her white friends as “with red hair” or “tall.” Already, at four years old, and living in a multiracial community, white had become normal for Luca. Normal in a way that means invisible. So, one of the first steps is to just plain make whiteness visible. This means making sure that all of us, when we are describing people, talk as much about white friends as we do our Black or Asian friends. But making whiteness visible is more than that.

The minute we are born, we are surrounded by information. Some of it is directly pointed out for us by the adults in our lives. Most of it goes completely unnoticed by all of us, children and adults alike. Making whiteness visible means seeking to notice the presence of whiteness in every aspect of our lives. How do we do this? We practice everyday. What does that mean? Well, one example is when we walk into a store or into a restaurant or down a neighborhood street, we ask: “Who is here?” and then we notice. Once we notice who is here, we began to intentionally wonder about why they are here. And then to notice who isn’t here. And to wonder the same thing.

A story for explanation: we are out running errands and we all get hungry. We stop by a coffee shop. Right away, Luca notices, “There are only white people in here.” Raquel and I both look around and see that she is right. So then we ask, “Why might there be only white people in here?” We notice that the coffee shop is in a predominantly white upper-middle-class neighborhood. So we assume that drop-in traffic is going to be mostly local. We wonder if people of color might not come by this coffee shop or this neighborhood because it might not be comfortable or because they wouldn’t feel welcome or reflected back by the staff or other customers. We next wonder if there are people of color who would even be interested in this coffee shop – maybe the culture of this coffee shop is one that mostly white people are attracted to and so some folks of color are choosing to not come here, or to instead go somewhere that will better reflect their experiences. Then we talk about what it is like for us to be in this coffee shop – noticing that when we are white and we fit in with the other white people, we barely even notice that we are white. We talk about how there are different kinds of white people, but even though there are different kinds, we don’t really need to think about race when we are among all white people. This is important. We notice that we don’t need to think about or even notice race when we are around other white people.

Making whiteness visible means noticing the books we read, the movies or television shows we watch, the people in our families and neighborhoods, and the rhythm of everyday life. It’s a practice for white people, just like meditation or parenting is a practice. If we don’t do it constantly, we don’t notice.

Learn together

Don’t assume you have to already know everything before you start trying to teach your children. You know the syndrome: the perfect parent syndrome. Our kids look up to us. They ask us questions about the world around them and wait for us to share what we know. When they’re young, we are all-knowing in their eyes. It can be scary to have to admit to your child that you are clueless about some aspect of the world around you.

Figuring out how to be white is something we do together with our children. We can tell them what we have experienced, our ideas and struggles and understandings, but living in the world with consciousness as a white person is not about getting it right once and then being done forever. It’s about making mistakes and learning and then making more mistakes and then learning more and inch by precious inch, feeling the world open up around us.

Learning with our children is about being in process, in struggle, in family with the most important people in our lives. It is about sharing the fact that this is life-long work, that we are all learning together, and that your child has some valuable things to teach you even as you have things to share with them. That last piece is really important. The minute our kids are born, they are learning –both directly and indirectly – how to be white, which includes how to be a racist. Thandeka in her book, “Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America,” states that the first act of child abuse directed towards all white children is that the minute they come out of the womb, they are being taught to be racist. So the game has already started, whether or not we ever directly address race and whiteness in our family. But kids have something we don’t have. Even though they have already started learning their whiteness, it hasn’t embedded itself over decades of experience. Their brains and nervous systems are still literally creating their bodies, their identities, their sense of self in the world. Much has already been established no matter when we start, but much is also open for shifting and changing.

Some of what is confusing to adults is likely to make gentle sense to children. Some of the places where we adults make this thick and complex is likely to be simple and poetic to our children. In listening to the questions they ask, the reflections they make, we can learn a whole bunch about how whiteness grows.

Know your own shit

Know your own shit. Oh lovely shit, oh layered deep old stuff which gets triggered by the innocent voices of our children. The shame of it. The guilt. The embarrassment. What do I do if my child says something racist? What will others think of me? Will they look over at me, knowing what a horrible mother I am, because my son just came out with something funky about that woman’s hair, her skin, the way she talks? What will people say?

This is a big one. A really big one. As soon as we encourage our children to reflect on the world around them, to say what they are thinking and feeling and to invite conversation, well, they start to talk. And they will say things just about everywhere. And in front of just about everyone. And they will ask questions. Why is your hair like that? Did you notice that your skin is really dark? Wow, look, my mom’s arm is really white next to your arm! How come all the Black kids play basketball? Did you know that your grandfather was probably a slave? Your kids will say things that are beyond what you could possibly imagine. And they should say those things. Because this is how they learn. But they are only going to learn if you are open to hearing them. Which means knowing your own shit. Here is what we mean by that: What is going on for you when you hear your kids say something that triggers your “that’s racist” button? What emotions come up? What are you concerned about? What do you do when those emotions come up? We have all seen parents, when reacting to something their child has said, looking quickly around and saying, “Shhhh, that’s not a nice thing to say,” or “Stop that! Don’t be rude!!” or any number of other things. We know the feeling in our bellies when we are walking through the world, thinking about our grocery list or the drive back home, when junior says something that immediately makes us feel exposed and visible. As white people. As potentially bad parents. Raising our children to be white is about knowing our reactions and finding ways to NOT shut our children down when they ask those kinds of questions.

Of course, this is also complicated. It’s a different thing to have a three-year-old making a comment about a stranger in a store, it’s another thing for a 13-year-old to say it. Embedded in supporting our children to ask questions and be open to learning about the world around them, is also teaching them about respect. Teaching them that people are not objects but individuals with feelings and complex lives. Because the reality is that while our children are reflecting on the world around them, the people of color they are reflecting about are real people who just might not be in the mood to hear yet another person talk about their hair – even if it is a gap-toothed five year old. Everything about this work includes supporting our children to act as respectful members of communities, every single day and in every single context.

Another part of knowing your own shit is knowing your own story, all of it. What is your culture? Did you grow up in a city, a suburb, the countryside? What celebrations and rituals did you grow up with? What kind of food? Do you have a word for it? What did you learn about work? About taking care of your own family or other people? Who felt “like you” and who felt different? What is your culture?

The other piece of knowing our own shit is knowing our own understandings of race and whiteness. What did you learn about race and whiteness when you were a child? Really, spend time here. Think about the kinds of things you were directly taught and the things you witnessed. Notice what your life looks like, who the people are who surround you, your sense of why different people are different form you. Think about what it means for you to be white, to be an anti-racist. Find people you trust to talk to about these things. There is a whole bunch you can talk to your children about, and there’s a whole bunch you need to learn with other adults. Don’t stop thinking about yourself, noticing your beliefs, your reactions, your concerns. Stay with your own work.

Don’t immediately go big, stay specific. Remember those reflections our children make in public places – or sometimes private? The ones that make our insides flare up as we struggle to make sure our own shit doesn’t get in the way of our children learning? This is about those times. Example, when Luca was walking by the basketball court in our neighborhood park, she suddenly asked why only Black people play basketball. In my belly flared up things like: oh shit, that’s so racist. It isn’t only Black people that play basketball, and oh god, I have to help her understand the complexity, and on and on. But here’s the funky thing about young children: she was only describing what she saw and asking about it. It is true that when Luca walks by this playground, most of the time the people she sees are Black men. And so she wants to know why. And while the answer is complex and many-layered, there is an answer. Or there are answers that will unravel over the time of her growing up. It’s a legitimate question based on an observation. Stay specific, listen to what your child is saying or watch what they are doing. Are they in distress? Are they worried or having any kind of emotion? Is it just a question? Before making any assumptions about what your child’s question might mean, ask them about it. Refer to knowing your own shit and learning together. Keep the channels of conversation and learning open.

Making Mistakes

Here’s another example from a white friend of mine: she picked up her white grandson from his preschool. His first comment to her was: “I don’t like Black people. I don’t think I want them to be my friends”. My friend freaked out, her emotions rose up to the sky, and she jumped in immediately, asking with an anxious voice what he meant but also saying that of course he doesn’t know all Black people, and a whole bunch of other things that she doesn’t remember because her emotions were so high. And as she was talking, she saw him retreat into himself, getting quiet and logging away the information that this wasn’t something he should talk about.

And my friend kicked herself from here to the preschool and back, knowing that she had goofed but feeling overwhelmed. As she later asked more questions, she learned that her grandson’s school had just done a chapter on the civil rights. During this chapter, there was a lot of conversation about Black folks as a people or as a community. Her grandson knew Black folks but he knew them as individuals. He had never thought of anyone as a “people.” While he knew Black folks out in the world, there was only one Black child in his preschool class: a boy who, for whatever reason, teased him a lot. So my friend’s grandson put things together in a pattern in his head: “this kid is a Black kid and he is mean to me. Black kids are part of a Black people. I don’t like playing with this Black kid and I don’t want to be his friend. Therefore, I don’t want to be friends with Black people.” If you take away the sting and the legacy of racism, you’ve got to admit there’s a logic to this.

As we talked about it, my friend wished that she had just hit the pause button after her grandson spoke. She wished she had started right away with asking questions, not putting any kind of value on his words until she understood what he was actually talking about. Because now she has to undo something, one of the somethings that white supremacy depends on. She has to undo this idea that some things are not “polite” to talk about, that there is something uncomfortably emotional about talking about Black people, that grandma freaks out when you bring it up so don’t bring this kind of stuff up.

And every single one of us is going to have to undo moments like this. Because we will all make mistakes. Because we are learning as we go. We make mistakes and we will continue to make them. The important thing is to keep coming back, being honest with our kids about our own struggle, and asking for their help in figuring this out.

And maybe that’s how this article will end. As we enter our third year of White Noise, the group focus is shifting. There are some new people joining in the Fall, some people who are stepping out. We now share a groundwork among ourselves as adults, and we share some thoughts about how to start laying the groundwork with our children. In our meetings, we laugh a lot, we freak out, we forget to bring up important things, we spend too much time talking about the easy stuff and sometimes we dip into the hard and scary things that move us all forward.

Recently, we’ve been talking about the aspects of our cultures that really prop up white supremacy. We’ve been talking about how the protestant work ethic is one aspect of white supremacy, the particular values about how we approach work and “responsibility”, what gets called laziness or self-indulgent, how we think about the relationship between work, family and community. We have talked about the difference in valuing relationships and community versus valuing “getting things done.” We have talked about how raising our children to code-shift is an important part of resisting white supremacy. This means being able to move across cultures and communities without losing a sense of themselves and without assuming that everyone else has to be just like them. And we are talking about moving outside of our own comfort zones in figuring these out. Meaning, not just reading books and getting together to discuss, but maybe, actually, playing; with our kids and not just alone as a bunch of serious adults.

We will continue to learn together. As our children get older and enter different developmental stages with different relationships with friends, community and self, we will need to figure out new things. And at the end of the day, we know this group is far more for us adults than for our kids. Because they will be living their lives separate from us. Their choices will be their own and their mistakes their own as well. By laying the groundwork, our hope is that we support our children to feel empowered and creative as white people to live in the whole world, with wide open eyes and a sense of accountability and celebration. And that in living in the whole world, they might be part of shifting the pattern so that there are more children with each successive generation who also truly have access to the whole world. What we have realized is that we can’t take our children’s privilege away but we can work to shift our collective understanding of what that privilege means.



A good basic article on White Privilege is by Peggy McIntosh: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

White Privilege: Essential Readings on the other side of Racism (an anthology) by Paula S. Rotherberg, Worth Publishers

White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun http://www.prisonactivist.org/archive/cws/dr-culture.html

Acknowledgements: Susan, Raquel, Susan, Nicola, Amy, Lisa and all past members of White Noise, Vikki, Kris, Kristen, Kristin, Jen, Laura, and Karn.

White Noise is a group of white parents with white children who have been meeting for two years to learn together and support each other in ending white supremacy.

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A Wake-Up Call on White Privilege

Walking back a recent comment here at FotM by a guy named Jack Stephens (of whom more in a later post), I found some nifty material on the subject of white privilege. It struck me that it's been a long time since I gave the topic the attention it deserves--or plugged Chip Smith's superb book, The Cost of Privilege. So that's the plug.

What I want to do now is praise JJ Kissinger and Susie Becker, a young couple who were based, at least through this spring, at Seattle Pacific University. (SPU is a liberal arts school, although one which takes pains to let visitors to its website know that it "provides more than 3,800 students with a high-quality, comprehensive education grounded on the gospel of Jesus Christ." What does this mean? I don't exactly know, although Comrade Google informs me that the Discovery Institute has held an "intelligent design" conference there. Hmmm.)

JJ, by his account (which I recommend everybody read) pretty much climbed out of bed one day and decided

to create an exhibit that would visually and interactively educate people at SPU about the idea of White Privilege.

So he and Susie drafted friends, brainstormed, polled, built and assembled what looks to have been a challenging visualization and expansion of Peggy McIntosh's work on the "Invisible Knapsack" of white privilege. Throughout, they were driven by a simple conviction:

In order for true racial reconciliation to take place on this campus, our majority-white population MUST consider the implications of our whiteness.

The duo and a conscript work crew spent the better part of a Sunday night putting the whole thing up for a one day show which rang the changes on the theme of "Liberty & Justice for All." (It had such an impact on those who saw it that they held it over for Tuesday.) I highly recommend going to the well-captioned slide show JJ has posted at Flickr to document their exhibit, and giving it a look-see.

Note that JJ and Susie incorporated responses and reactions from non-white friends and acquaintances at SPU to drive the point home.

Thanks and respect to the both of them.

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The Most Popular Video on the Internet--What's It Mean?

This is kind of an action survey, for those who are likely to show up at this blog, generally folks with a pretty sharp critique of late capitalism, neo-liberal globalization and US culture. Or to put it another way: lefties, hard lefties and the handful who think the hard lefties are soft as baby poop.

This video has been up online for about five days now and quickly became the most watched video of the week in the US and probably globally. If you are young and spend much time on teh Intertubes, you may well be sick of it already. If you're over forty, you probably haven't seen it or even its predecessor videos, hits in their own time.

So do me a favor. For real. Watch this little video. Now. It's four and a half minutes long and, while I can't promise, I suspect you'll find it pretty likable. Then go "below the fold" (i.e. click where it says "Read more!" right below the video) where I pose a couple of thoughts/questions I've been chewing on. I hope you'll feel like weighing in--just click at the end of the post, where it says "comments" in blue and enter same. Even a couple of lines will be much appreciated.



Okay--thumbnail background: slacker Matt Harding (who evidently went to the same CT high school I did) is videoed by a friend doing an extremely dorky dance in Hanoi. A couple years later the snip becomes a spontaneous YouTube smash and some gum company bankrolls him to travel around the globe getting videoed, doing the dorky dance in diverse, colorful and remote locales. One is made (remade, actually) in 2005, one in 2006, and now this. His girlfriend, Melissa Nixon, is a partner in the project.

I found myself tripped up and unexpectedly moved when, after Iceland, it suddenly moves away from the relative solipsism of the earlier videos and of the first minute of this one, with Matt dancing by himself. As others participants rush to join him from all sides, it suddenly becomes an intercontinental celebration of dorky dancing. Did you find it had that effect on you? (I'd also be interested if it really startled other folks who had seen the earlier videos.)

It doesn't bother me that he got to do this because he got backed by some gum company, especially since their presence is not heavy-handed. You?

The message is heartwarming--the global commonality and interconnectedness of humanity--and it is rather obviously meant to be. Need we steel ourselves against this message as mush-minded liberalism? And if we don't, how can we integrate that sentiment into an internationalism that is deeper and more about solidarity than vibes?

More problematic for me is the question of advanced-country privilege, what my fellow FotM blogger Napolitana-Piemontese calls the "narcissism of empire." It is a bit creepy that Matt, good-hearted doofus though he seems, feels entitled to ramble around the world without having to make a living, doing his li'l shuffle wherever he feels like. On the other hand, he was evidently invited to most of these places by locals who know him through the Internet and he seems pretty welcome by almost everyone everywhere, well, except for the Korean border guard and that one wave. How does this strike you?

(If you go to his website, you'll find a video entitled "Where the Hell is Afunakwa?" that shows Matt's clear understanding that he does have dues to pay, and suggests some of the limits of that understanding, at least so far.)

You can throw male privilege in there, too. I can look at this, imagine myself in Matt's shoes and think, "Boy, that looks like fun. If I weren't so much worse a dancer than he is, I could do that!" I'm not so sure how easy that is for women to imagine. Anyone?

Finally, there's a lot here to think about in terms of the global reach and impact of the Internet. His video has had 2 and a half million hits in the last five days and that's only on YouTube! His early ones have inspired scores of others to do it themselves, some in pale imitation, but many more as witty or imaginative variations, including earlier explorations of collectivity than Matt's own. The blog at his site is full of comments; except for a couple irate Zionist cranks going on about "What West Bank? What East Jerusalem?" nearly all are enthusiastic.

I don't know where to start to think about what all of that means, and in many ways, it is really the important question, moreso than just trying to appreciate and understand and critique a single engaging cultural artifact.

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Unlearning Racism in Newark in the '60s

[This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the Newark Rebellion, one of the most powerful of the so-called "riots" that shook cities across the US that summer. My friend Joy has written up this recollection of being a white girl in the Newark public schools during the Sixties.

Set four years before the actual rebellion, this story highlights some of the conditions that led up to it: white flight and the conscious abandonment of the school system in Newark by the local and state power structure as the student body became Black. It also reminds us that decades of students since then have suffered from this same educational abandonment and been made to feel unworthy in the same ways Joy's memoir details.

It is also the moving story of one thirteen-year-old white girl suddenly becoming aware of how white people make Black people invisible. I gladly take this opportunity to plug Chip Smith's splendid new book, The Cost of Privilege, which sets this phenomenon in a social and historical context--it's a must-read for anyone seeking to break down the system of white supremacy in this country. --Napolitana Piemontese]



Newark, New Jersey, 1963

It’s the first day of 8th grade for me and there’s complete chaos in the halls of the Hawthorne Avenue School. Hawthorne is the school I have gone to since I was in kindergarten, but everyone seems so unfamiliar.

It’s Newark, New Jersey, 1963 and white flight is in full throttle. And the hallway looks like a place that people are fleeing from. Classes and teachers have not been assigned. No directions for where to report have come in the mail over the summer. So hundreds of Black students and dozens of white teachers occupy the hall. Many students are new to the school and look nervous. No teacher or administrator is rushing over to welcome us back to school. We are just waiting, waiting for our class assignments, getting tired in our new shoes.

Last year the school only went up through 7th grade. This is the first year it is going through 8th grade. This change is instituted so we can avoid the infamous Clinton Place Junior High which draws students from even rougher neighborhoods. Clinton Place is a 7th through 9th grade school, so we would not get to enter Weeequahic High School until 10th grade. None of the parents want that year’s delay. Weequahic has a good reputation. It’s where the whiter, more affluent population of Newark goes. So this is the first year of 8th grade for Hawthorne, and no one seems to know what to do with us.

I am a good student. I have always gotten straight A’s in school. In 7th grade I was in a special class that covered a year and a half of instruction in just a year. The year started with the second half of 6th grade and when it was over you were ready for 8th grade. This was needed to get everyone on a September start schedule. When I and others had started kindergarten, eight years earlier, if you turned five after November you started in February. A placement test was given and either you got to skip a half -year, or you were forced to stay back a half-year. The special class was for those of us who were skipping. The students in the class were two-thirds white, which I am, and one-third Black. But now in the hall, I do not see any of the kids who were in the special class with me. They have all moved over the summer. I start to cry.

I am almost thirteen, and crying like a kindergartner just starting school. But no one even notices me. Finally we are lined up to get class assignments. I notice one girl who lives down the block from me. Dori is her name. She is chubby, white and loud—not school-smart like me but kinda fun. Now they are assigning classes---very clearly tracked. 8-1 is the top, smartest class and 8-4 is the bottom. The principal comes up to me and greets me somberly. “What are you doing here? How come you didn’t move over the summer?” I do not know what to say. I feel humiliated, and poor. Then he tells me that there is a policy that if you were allowed to skip the year before, you cannot be in the top class, because you might still be a little behind. He tells me he knows that is not true of me and shakes his head in pity for me.

The class assignments begin. Almost all the white kids are being assigned to 8-1. I realize the significance of what the principal told me five minutes earlier. I am being made a token white kid in 8-2. That is not totally accurate---there are other white kids, but they are notoriously bad students. I am really crying now. Dori, who was a September starter and so did not need to skip, is of course assigned to 8-1. My one hope of a friend is gone. I continue to cry.

Darlene, a very quiet Black girl, comes over to me. I remember when she was the only Black girl in first grade. I remember that her mom died when we were in 6th grade, and I went over to her house to tell her I was sorry. She was so happy to see me, and her father seemed amazed that I had come. Darlene asks me why I’m crying. I reply, “Because I don’t have any friends in my class.” She asks me what class I was assigned to. I tell her 8-2. She gets really excited and tells me she’s in 8-2 too, and we’re friends!

It suddenly hits that I’m crying because I don’t know any white kids in my class. I do know many of the Black kids, including the few like Darlene who had scored high enough on the test that they, like me, had been allowed to skip half a year. I am totally ashamed of myself.

I hadn’t even noticed Darlene’s class assignment, but now her welcome lifts me and makes me resolve to see her as my friend. Then all the other Black kids, who I have known for years but only in school, not outside, start crowding around me, happy to be with me again. And I’m reciprocating, even as I conceal my shame that they have been invisible to me the whole morning.


The Year That Changed My Life

As the 1963-64 school year unfolded, all the views that I had unconsciously internalized from the culture, about Black kids (then Negroes) misbehaving in schools, dissolved. I experienced firsthand, with my classmates, the fact that no one cared about our education. There were days when we had no paper and not enough workbooks. The classroom contained 35 seats nailed into the floor, but there were 40 students. Instead of bringing five additional desks into the room, it was just assumed that five kids would be absent every day.

The generosity of my Black classmates continued to educate me.
I was never excluded from the teams or from socializing. If anyone put me down, or threatened me on the way home, a classmate always magically rose to my defense. Some of my fellow students looked to me for help with homework; and my classmates ultimately elected me class president.

For the first time in my life, I had Black friends over to my house after school; and my out –of-school reading became fiction and non-fiction about heroic fights against discrimination. A book called The Barred Road, about a girl excluded from nursing because she is Black, is still vivid in my memory.

At first, the principal’s remarks had made me feel that my parents did not care about me enough to move, or finagle me into a better school district, and I was angry at them. What really happened that year, though not by design, was that I was educated to the reality of racism, and my own internalization of that bias. That 8th grade year has changed the rest of my life.

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Check Out The Erase Racism Blog Carnival!

Last week I blogged here about the Erase Racism Blog Carnival. Blog Carnivals are an impressive development in blogospheric self-organization, wherein once a month a host blog (generally a role rotated among a number of blogs) collects submissions from other blogs of recent diaries on a given topic and curates and posts a whole set, which can be categorized, excerpted, commented on and, of course, linked.

The one I got turned on to was the Erase Racism Carnival which examines white supremacy and white privilege in our society. A couple of days ago the April edition came out, hosted by the two bloggers who run the aptly named Double Consciousness blog.

I want to recommend that anybody interested in issues of white supremacy and white privilege give this month's Carnival a run-by. (Full disclosure: they were kind enough to link to a post on "sundown towns" I had at FotM and DailyKos.) The categories Jack and Carlo used will give you the flava: Fighting Oppression Within the Movement; Racism, The Subtle Everyday Occurrence; and Whiteness and Other Issues.

One of the most fascinating things for me, as one who has been dealing with these issues since the days of the Civil Right Movement, is how many young folks, people of color and the melanin-deficient alike, are thinking and writing about this stuff, some on blogs dedicated entirely to the issue. What's more, some are activists and some don't seem to be deeply involved in social movements at all. I'm not going to single any out, but encourage folks reading this to really give the whole thing a once-over.

Among the intellectual stimulation and first hand accounts there was some trenchant social criticism, too, and some first rate snark. Without the Erase Racism Carnival, I doubt I ever would have found MADtv's take on the recent boom in feel-good movies starring the likes of Hilary Swank and Michelle Pfeiffer, which propound the thesis that the cure to the problems of kids in inner-city schools is to be found in the form of a Nice White Lady.



And before signing off, the obligatory plug for the great new book, The Cost of Privilege: Taking On the System of White Supremacy and Racism. Get it and read it!

[crossposted at DailyKos.]

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White Privilege Through Lenses Red & Black

This blog entry is my response to Nelson Hawkins' General Call, issued last week over at Pottawatomie Creek, for bloggers to take the occasion of the Martin Luther King holiday to "Blog Against White Supremacy." I was thrilled.

For one thing, I've been doing some of that myself, in part to promote a splendid new book: The Cost of Privilege: Taking on the System of White Supremacy and Racism is due out by the end of this month. There's a rudimentary website here which will, I understand, be bulking up with an order form and much cool content in days to come. I'd advise bookmarking it.

For another, some of those who've pledged to blog are new to me, tweaking my curiosity, and some, like the one-woman wrecking squad of white supremacy, Yolanda Carrington over at The Primary Contradiction, are guaranteed to have some intriguing insights to offer. Collect 'em all! (Centrally linked at Nelson's site, I assume).

Now to cases. This is going to be an explicitly Red entry. I am going to excerpt, with only minor commentary, what I consider the most important section of veteran US communist Nelson Peery's autobiographical Black Fire. It's short but very rich.

Let me set the stage. Peery is a GI in a segregated unit, occupying the Philippines after the defeat of Japan in 1945. He is contacted by a couple of white CP members who urge him to help get the Black troops into building the "Home by Christmas" movement, a campaign which will thwart the drive by US capital to start a war with the socialist USSR.

I could feel the surge of adrenaline and the hackles began to rise. White folk look out of their blue eyes at the world and they see only a reflection of themselves. They don't see that there is a white army and there is a black army and they are equal only on payday.

The whites, in the military as in civilian life, would ask us to unite with them on issues that concerned them a lot and us a little. They would never unite on issues that concerned us a lot and them a little.

Peery has just spent chapters detailing racist violence and other outrages perpetrated against the Black troops by both the white brass and Klan types in the ranks, as well as the omnipresence of G-2 Army intelligence snooping around for unrest in Black units.

Yes, we wanted desperately to go home. But the men could not be convinced that the way home lay through mutiny.

And here the importance of the long memory of the African American community, that most valuable of survival mechanisms, is subtly shown. Peery refers to lessons learned from a mutiny thirty years before as the US finished a decade and a half of combat to consolidate its occupation of the Philippines.

The last Black regiment to try that in the Philippines spent the next twenty years cleaning white soldiers' toilets at Fort Benning. The white soldiers were glad they didn't have to work the "sugar run" and most of them figured it proper that blacks clean their toilets anyway.

Now, having laid out the contradiction in the starkest terms, Peery brings it back to the human level.

The white communists I had known were dedicated to the struggle against discrimination. The problem was, they seemed to think we would become equal if they individually treated us as equals. They had to get the sheriffs and the generals to do that too. Instead, they constantly preached to the believers. We were too sophisticated to go for that.

Now it was my turn to size up my comrades and get my thoughts together. How can you tell a person he is being strangled by an evil he is too decent to see? It was sad and frustrating and insurmountable.

And here, to thump the editorial lectern briefly, is the enormous value of the development of white privilege theory. It gives the "decent" white folks a set of lenses ("They Live"!) with which they can see--and try to figure out how to deal with--the contents of Peggy McKintosh's "invisible knapsack."

But the true kicker in this short section of Black Fire (pages 296-298) is yet to come. Peery (who has hooked up with the red-led guerillas of the Hukbalahap and is giving them aid) finishes his risky meeting with the two.

Watching them walk back through the company area, I felt more than understood something new. For the first time I got a muddled and disturbing sense that the merger of antifascism with communism had produced two kinds of Communists. Communists had led the fight against fascism in Europe. The anti-Fascist war was the practical side of the European and American Communist movement. In the euphoria of victory they were emerging as the social vanguard of their nations.

In Mindanao, in Alabama, in Rhodesia and Brazil and Shanghai and Calcutta, the war had just begun. Freedom, national freedom, the self-determination of nations, the unity of the colored colonial peoples--this was the new war. The tactic of one brand of communism was the struggle for peace. for the other, the task was preparing for war.

Too schematic? 20/20 hindsight? A big leap from white privilege in an Army camp to a global perspective? No doubt, no doubt. But these insights have flavored my thinking since I first read them when comrade Nelson Peery's book came out over a decade ago. I hope you find them as intriguing as I do.

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La Raza, White Privilege and the "Hippie Question"

On New Year's Day, I hailed the forthcoming book The Cost of Privilege: Taking on the System of White Supremacy and Racism. Until they get a website up to promote the book, I hereby declare Fire on the Mountain the official unofficial publicist for this most important work.

One thing I want to do is to draw attention to the ways, overt and insidious, that white privilege has affected people's resistance to the capitalist system and the ruling class in this country.

This post reprints a 1969 document from New Mexico. From today's Santa Fe, no doubt it will look as quaint as a chamber pot. It was written at a time when Chicana/o activists had initiated an armed struggle to defend and reclaim land that was theirs under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a formative battle in the rising movement of La Raza.

It was also a time when young white people started surging out of the suburbs and cities to places like Vermont and New Mexico, to chill and pursue a lifestyle closer to the earth. These two social movements collided, and here's what it looked like from the point of view of El Grito del Norte, one of the most important publications of the rising Chicana/o movement. For all the years intervening and the changes since, there are notes in here that ring as true as they did, that will spark anger and shame as surely as they did on the day they were written.

The words "white privilege" are never mentioned here, but the article displays a deep and rich critique of the actual mechanisms of privilege and of the invisibility of those mechanisms to those who are given the privileges.

Newcomers and Old Struggles

...After talking with many people, EL GRITO has come to some conclusions about the Hippie Question.


The first one is this: Any violation of anybody's civil rights is a threat to everybody. If the police are today arresting Hippies when they have committed no crime, they can arrest you tomorrow--in the same way.


The second one is that teaching hatred of human beings must be fought against. We can hate injustice or oppression or lies, and we must fight--maybe even kill--people guilty of these crimes against humanity. But to teach hatred of people based on the way they dress or their religion or whatever it is--this is dehumanizing and dangerous. La Raza has had enough experience of this, not to become guilty of it to others.


The third one is a message to the Hippies, or Longhairs, especially those who are thinking of coming to New Mexico. It is a message offered in a spirit of humanity and truth-telling.

*

The basic message is: PLEASE DON'T COME! At least not now. Stop and THINK about a few things you may not have heard about or thought about.


Think about the fact that, as much as you reject your middle-class Anglo society and its values, you are still seen here as gringos, Anglos. Think about the 120-year old struggle by chicanos and the even older struggle by by Indians to get back land stolen from them by Anglo ranchers and their Anglo lawyer buddies. Think about what it means for a new influx of Anglos--no matter how different their purpose from those others--to come in and buy up land that the local people feel to be theirs and cannot afford to buy themselves. Think about the fact that a real estate agent in Taos reports having sold almost $500,000 worth of land to longhairs.


Think, on the other hand, about how people have sometimes reacted to Hippies who get welfare payments and food stamps. Even though this takes nothing away from poor Raza people, they have felt resentment. It seems like a false representation, when the Hippie involved can get money from home or a decent job if necessary.


Think about the water problem. Longhairs usually come from the big city, not knowing that water here is precious and often hard to get. They see a stream and wash their feet or dishes in in. Hey! That's our drinking water. We are used to being abused, ignored, scorned--but that's too much.


Think about not only the land and the water, but the culture. Longhairs come, often deliberately unwashed and ungroomed in their rebellion against a sterile, hypocritical middle-class society. They don't see that, for the Spanish-speaking people, cleanliness is a weapon of cultural self-defense against the oppressor. It is not a symbol of hypocrisy, but of the little pride and self-respect left to them, preciously guarded. So is conventional sexual morality: the tight-knit family is everywhere a source of strength and unity against a hostile environment. Longhair values might sometimes be better--but they cannot be imposed. Especially when you are not joining the struggle of the people against the oppression which is the source of many Raza values.


Think about the educational advantages that you often have--whether you wanted to have them or not. You can come here and start a little business, and you will often succeed where Raza people fail (or would not even try). "Son muy vivo," Raza people say--the hippies are very bright. It is often true, it is not your "fault" but it is important to remember how many times the Anglo's education and technology helped to make him a successful oppressor. If you say "I've come to learn from the People," excuse us if we sometimes remember: that's what the Anglos said when they came to the Sierra Nevada, learned from us how to mine, and then drove us out, even murdered us.


Think about yourself, and just how clear you are about rejecting your own society's values. Recent events here have shown that, when things get heavy, the longhairs sometimes act very much like the society they have fled. When a hippie woman in Taos was raped by a chicano youth (because the chicanos don't understand free women and because they have been taught not to see hippies as human beings), the longhair men called the cops--THE COPS. In another case the longhair went out and shot the chicano for supposedly raping "his" woman. And he got off, with a hung jury.


Think about this: the longhair has opted out. Most of the chicanos and Indians have no option--except revolution. People here cannot flee to islands of peace in a nation of horrors, this is their nation. It cannot be said too often: there is a long, hard political and economic struggle in these beautiful mountains, a struggle for land and justice. That struggle calls for fighters and supporters, not refugees with their own set of problems. You may see the scenery and relief from an oppressive America. We see a battleground against oppression.


Think about this: if you (rightly) condemn your own society, your own culture, so strongly--why not go where it is, and change it? And if your answer is "I can't" or "I won't," then think about what this answer implies--and whether you are then a person needed by the people here, who can be useful here.


Now, finally, please think about this: if you must come, wait a while. Wait until things cool off for longhairs, wait until the speed freaks have (hopefully) left, wait until the longhairs who are already here can develop a better climate--if they can. While you wait, READ and LEARN about this part of the country. Read what has been done to the people here by the white man; find out why they see Kit Carson and all those other frontier types as murderers--not heroes; find out what the U.S. Forest Service and Smokey the Bear represent here. Don't just put on a long skirt and think that you understand "the Indians"; too many rich tourist ladies do that too. Learn Spanish, learn about the everyday culture, hang around some poor Spanish-speaking families. Learn about the tradition of courtesy, and why you must not presume on it. Learn some humility; look in yourself for unconscious arrogance and selfishness.


Ask yourself, what do I know? Do you know how many Mexican-Americans there are in this country? Do you know that in terms of education and jobs, they are worse off even than the Blacks? Can you imagine what it is to speak one language as a child and then suddenly be dumped into a classroom where another is enforced on you--and fall behind in class, and then be told you are stupid?


Can you see the difference between being poor and being without money? Can you go to a demonstration by poor people and let them run it in their way, and not impose your style as did some longhairs in Santa Fe recently? Can you show respect for another people's culture and not be disrespectful simply because that's the way you feel toward your own culture? Can you in other words, do some hard thinking?


If you think, you won't come. Not now. And when you do come, come as a revolutionary.



El Grito del Norte, July 6. 1969
reprinted in "Tierra O Muerte: The Land Belongs to the People"
(A Radical Eduction Project pamphlet, 1970)

If there is sufficient interest, I will post the follow-up article from El Grito del Norte, "No Parking on people's Earth" (March 28, 1970)

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Something To Look Forward To In 2007

In my twenties, I was prone to say dumb stuff around this time of year, stuff like "Boy, 1976 really and truly bit the big one. No way could 1977 possibly be worse." Suffice it say, such thoughts never form in my brain these days, much less cross my lips.

But from where I stand, already there is one bright spot glowing on the generally bleak horizon of this new year. Some time within the next four to six weeks, an exceptional new book will be rolling off the presses, and I suspect it's gonna become a feature of the political landscape of the Left and the people's movements over the next couple of years.

The title: The Cost of Privilege: Taking on the System of White Supremacy and Racism

The author: Chip Smith (a 'rade of mine for many years), working with a crack research and writing team.

The thesis: That the system of national oppression reinforced by white privileges has been interwoven into the very fabric of capitalist rule in the US from its earliest days, and that only by tackling that system can a foundation be laid for deep unity across "racial" and other lines both within the working class and between working people and other oppressed strata and groups in this society.

The mission: To get activists reflecting on, talking about, planning approaches to and basing strategy on the need to deal with white (and other forms of) privilege as a pervasive social reality.

You"ll be hearing more about The Cost of Privilege at this blog in the weeks to come, but since you can't get your own and dig in just yet, I have a small treat to whet your appetite. As 2006 drew to a close, I got a happy bit of news from Jeff Perry. He told me that an invaluable 1975 pamphlet by the late Ted Allen, "Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: " has been posted on the web. It is the seed from which sprang Allen's magisterial two volume study, The Invention of the White Race, published by Verso, and a fine introduction to the contributions this too-little-recognized thinker made to the cause of revolution in the US.

So read the "The Invention of the White Race" pamphlet, and keep checking this site for breaking news about the forthcoming book.

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Sean Bell & Peyton Strickland—Compare and Contrast!

For the third but undoubtedly not the final time, Fire on the Mountain turns to the simmering rage in NYC’s Black community about the 50-shot police murder of the unarmed Sean Bell in the early hours of his wedding day, November 25.

Ajamu Dillahunt on his North Carolina-based blog Sankofa Meets the Future has drawn an instructive comparison between the Sean Bell case and another recent police shooting. A young man in Wilmington, NC named Peyton Strickland was killed on December 1 as a heavily-armed police task force followed up a complaint that he had stolen two new Play Stations. Peyton Strickland was killed when Deputy Christopher Long of the New Hanover County Sheriff's Office Emergency Response Team fired his pistol through the front door, even as it was being knocked down by a police battering ram. The unarmed Strickland was hit in the head and shoulder, fatally.

By December 8, just a week after the shooting, Deputy Long was fired from the Sheriff's Office. On December 11, he was indicted on charges of second-degree murder brought before a New Hanover County grand jury by District Attorney Ben David:

After interviews with other law enforcement personnel at the scene, it became clear that Long's perception "was not the belief of others," David said. Long's actions were not "objectively reasonable," David said, even though the ERT had information that the occupants of the house might be armed and dangerous. To obtain a second-degree murder conviction, prosecutors must prove that Long committed an unlawful killing with malice, but not premeditation and deliberation.

Is anyone reading this surprised to learn that Peyton Strickland was white and that his father is a prominent attorney in the Durham area?

I didn’t think so.

In NYC, we have a crime just as egregious being played out as a shell game, with politicians like Bloomberg, police spokespersons and the media shuffling statements of concern, declarations of fealty to the legal process and broad hints about fleeing, gun-toting friends of Sean Bell. Only calculated leaks from within the NYPD have provided any information. One nugget that has come out is that a couple of the killer cops reported that they didn’t know whether they had fired their guns or not! These people are still on the payroll. Feel safer, New Yorkers? The Queens District Attorney can’t tell us when, if ever, a grand jury might be convened or what charges it might consider.

As Ajamu Dillahunt points out:

So what we have in Wilmington is a swift action against a law enforcement officer... in a case that is no more compelling then the deaths of Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo and countless hundreds of other People of Color who are victims of "armies of occupation" in our communities. Clearly Strickland's racial, ethnic and class background have compelled the Sheriff and the District Attorney to move quickly and seriously.

In closing I want to call attention to another important point the first Sankofa Meets the Future piece makes. It cites a local news story on the family’s response:

His father, Durham-area lawyer Don Strickland, said Saturday that he would address Long's firing "at the appropriate time."

"Right now, I'm just going to let the judicial process do its work," Strickland said.

Can anyone reading this imagine the parents of an African American victim of police murder in New York City proclaiming that they’re going to be quiet and let the system work?

I didn’t think so.

As Ajamu Dillahunt sums up:

While he may not be conscious of it, only a sense of White Privilege positions a person to take this approach to such a serious blow to their family. His legal background and experience with the criminal justice system may be responsible for him refraining. In contrast, Black and Latino families, based on a long history of injustice in these kinds of investigations have usually joined communities in speaking out against the atrocity and have often joined the outraged masses in the streets.

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