Another Brick in the Wall

We don't need no education


We don’t need no thought control


No dark sarcasm in the classroom


Teachers, leave them kids alone


Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

~ Pink Floyd, Another Brick in the Wall Part 2

I’ve been en route and then busy with visiting family for the last couple of weeks, but I am home again, in my quiet house where I can cogitate without interruption, and I am ready to write.  Lots of words and ideas, jotted down so I wouldn’t forget, are pushing to break free, and I warn you, this post is lengthy and random, but it’s all connected in my mind.

Though most people don’t want to recognize racism or consider themselves a part of a racist society, it is integral in our societal structure, one brick laid on another and another, made strong with individual prejudice and what I’ve come to call willful or knowledgeable ignorance – the refusal to acknowledge what is right before one’s eyes, a denial of the truth.

There was a front-page story in the Winston-Salem Journal two Sundays ago: Separate worlds. The article begins with the following:

Many of Forsyth County’s public schools have resegregated over the last 40 years as national court decisions, and local political ones, favored neighborhood schools over racially and economically balanced ones.

It goes on to say:

Past Winston-Salem Journal and Associated Press reviews of the U.S. census data from 1980, 1990, and 2000 have shown Winston-Salem and Forsyth County to be the state’s most segregated major population center. In focusing just on Hispanic population data from the 2000 census, the Associated Press determined that Hispanics here are more segregated from whites than in any other city except Oakland, CA.

Can anyone deny the racism that exists in the town I live in? I’ve already warned Ronald that he will be responsible for selecting the next city we move to. Some people say everything happens for a reason; some think God has a plan and puts you just where you need to be to fulfill a purpose. I think I just made a poor choice, and yet, this may be the last place I call home. I think every place is similar, anyway.  Racism exists everywhere in this country.

I didn’t see the wrinkles and imperfections of this city when we used to drive down to the dance conservatory to see Cara and Mackenzie perform, or to spend time watching their classes, or to pick them up to take them home for the summer. The Carolina blue sky must have blinded me. Every day we live here teaches me that this town has plantation mentality. Every day I see that although we experienced racism in the North, here racism runs deep and true. It’s a part of the lingo and the philosophy that gets passed down through the generations. There is no denying it. And I’m not even out there talking to the citizens as Ronald is.

One white guy told Ronald that his great-grandfather owned slaves, and they were treated right. They even had doctors look after them when needed. He averred that they had a good life, better than what they might have faced in Africa.

“Do you know how much my great granddaddy paid for just one slave girl?” he asked Ronald. He had found his grandfather’s bookkeeping logs.

“Don’t know,” Ronald said.

“Eight hundred dollars. That was a lot of money back then. You wouldn’t abuse your slave when you paid that much for her,” he said, proud of how he had proven the humanity behind slavery.

“Oh, just like you wouldn’t mistreat the oxen or the other farm animals,” I said as Ronald finished up the story.

“Just like that,” he agreed.

“Never mind that you consider them animals and property, not people.”

“And they still want to believe it.”

“Take back America,” I said. “That’s where they want to take it back to.”

Ronald had been called a Yankee again and told that Yankees came down here for the weather but hated the people. Ronald told the white man that while he didn’t like the opinions of a lot of people he had met, he had never been rude or called them names as he had been since moving here.

“Did you remind him that the Civil War is over and that they lost?”

“Sometimes I want to,” he said.

I’m not perfect. My emotions are strong and deep and not always appropriate. There they are like banners, displayed for all who care to look, snapping in the wind on a bright day, hanging wet and limp in the rain, or rendered stiff and immobile in sub-zero temperatures. I don’t and won’t apologize for having them.

When we moved to the South, it was a big adjustment. Ronald lived his entire life in one city, and that was the same city in which I spent most of my adult life. We had always struggled to find a few close friends, mostly, I think, due to our being interracial. People, even when we could tell they really liked us, just couldn’t compute how to fit us into their social network. I had lost my aunt, with whom I had a close relationship, a couple years before.  (Ronald and our daughters had changed her mind about black people and interracial relationships.) Then I had gone through a rough patch with my siblings as I settled my aunt’s estate. The unresolved issues dampened my skin like fine, misty rain, and I wanted a big change. Moving was the big change we chose. I hoped we could run away and lose the past.

In the South we knew no one but our daughter, and we weren’t ones to think our children were obligated to entertain us. So I imagined we’d make new friends, and I would entertain a girlfriend or two on long Saturday afternoons spent drinking hot tea and eating scones, settled around a Scrabble board. We didn’t make any new friends. And most of the old ones never visited as they had promised.

I always thought I was strong and resilient, but the move knocked me down for the count. That surprised me. I didn’t realize how attached I was to our old home, the one we raised our daughters in, and to the city that I always thought looked dirty, worn, and gray. The doctor said my serotonin was low. She prescribed something to increase it.

It worked, kind of. I stopped having panic attacks, the kind that caused me to pass out in the shopping mall and crack my head open one humid August evening just months before we made the move.

Then I noticed something after taking the medication for a couple of months. My emotions were neutral. I didn’t cry at movies. I didn’t feel pleasure, displeasure, angry, happy, joy, or despair. I was completely and utterly devoid, empty. I imagined my soul had oozed out of my body and left behind an empty vessel. I thought, “The world could crumble around my feet, drop away, leave a void as big as infinity, and I would feel nothing.” I stopped taking it.

Within a few weeks, I was sniffling at movies again, loudly enough to disturb other moviegoers. Laughing out loud at commercials. Wearing my love like a hot pink blouse and my anger and sadness like itchy woolen leggings. I truly missed feeling, and I embraced all of it: the good, the bad, the best, and the worst. You can’t know one emotion without experiencing its opposing emotion.

I’ll never cede my emotions again.

So my last post, Checking the Other Box http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/06/checking-other-box.html

was an emotional rant, most likely addressed to the wrong person, but warranted, valid, and real. It was as honest and authentic as can be.  I’m not afraid to show my humanity with all its imperfection.

“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be wearing dresses that show my knees,” I said to Ronald this past week as I stared at my reflection in the hotel room full-length mirror. I was traveling for work, and he came along because we were bringing his parents back with us for a visit.

“Why?” he asked. I know he appreciated how well the dress fit over my curves and the way my heels elongated my legs. Later that evening when we returned to the hotel, I watched a man back up so he could watch me walk down the hallway, my walk slower, more languid, than it was thirty years ago, but my hips still rolling in that sensual, feminine way. I like that kind of attention, distant and non-threatening.

‘My knees show what age I am,” I said. I think fifty-five must be the magic number. Rest my elbow in the car window and turn to see the skin above it fold and crinkle. Straighten my arms and look at my elbows, and the flesh covering them looks like tiny elephant knees. Glance at my hands, and notice how the skin is thinner and losing its elasticity. Stick my hands under the dryer in the restroom and watch the force of air swirl the skin in skittering patterns. I keep applying lotion, believing I can hydrate myself to twenty-something. Staring in the mirror, I noticed the skin above my knees looked crepe-like, spidery fine webbing etching my flesh. My once smooth and flawless skin has texture.

“Some women’s knees are like that their whole lives,” Ronald said. He’s always trying so hard to make me feel better, and I laugh at his attempts, not meanly, but sweetly and thankfully. I know, though, that his artist’s eye has wandered and explored every new crevice and crinkle. I think it must be painful to see the woman he pursued, photographed, plastered, and painted enthusiastically fade before his eyes like an old Polaroid snapshot. Even I, devoid of the sharp vision he has, noted how his eyes sit deeper in his face, the skin on his forearms, backs of his hands, and ankles is textured, and the bald spot on the crown of his head is growing. Disbelief rises. I think I don’t want to know, but why deny the truth? I refuse to practice willful ignorance.

I have to embrace aging the same way I’ve come to embrace my emotions. The alternative doesn’t appeal.

Neither does the alternative to speaking out about racism. My voice in the matter will be heard. I don’t want to shut others down, but sometimes their willful ignorance rattles my sensibilities.

A couple weeks ago the guys at the golf range told Ronald that President Obama stole his identity by assuming a dead man’s social security number. His grandmother aided and abetted Obama when he was fourteen and perhaps wishing for his first summer job. I got my social security number at fourteen for the same reason – to obtain my ready to work papers.

Apparently the conspiracy to turn us into a socialist country was born years ago by a conniving mixed-race child and his power-hungry white grandmother. The agencies of government that vet candidates for office were too dumb to discover the complex scheme, or perhaps they were in on it. But not the Tea Party and “Take Back America” conservatives – they were on to his masterful and evil plot to displace and disempower D. Whiteman.

“Snopes debunked that myth back in 2010,” I said to Ronald as he told the story, and I typed in a quick search. “Don’t they have the internet?”

‘They don’t want to know,” he said. “If not that, then something else. They just can’t say the truth. They don’t want a black man in office.”

Then my disappointment in humanity was further fueled by an experience we had this past weekend. We drove my parents-in-law back to NC to visit with us for a few days. Every place we stopped along the way garnered stares.

“Dianne, they’re just looking at you. They can’t figure out why you are with us,” my father-in-law said several times during our travels.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m used to it.”

“They think you’re our social worker or something,” my mother-in-law said at dinner in a Ruby Tuesday’s in Maryland. I had ordered my father-in-law’s dinner for him and then asked the waitress to bring him another soda as the first one had too much ice and was shades paler than the usual Coke products.

We had to turn in early. The drive is arduous for two octogenarians, so we pulled over at a Holiday Inn Express in West Virginia at around 7:00 p.m. I went in to book the rooms. That’s something Ronald and I figured out a long time ago. It’s using that white privilege I’ve spoken about in past posts. I’ll get the lowest rate. Why shouldn’t we get the white people rate? There should only be one rate.

We know this because one time when we went down to visit Cara and Mackenzie while they were at the dance conservatory, we stopped into a nearby Comfort Inn. I booked the room and got a really nice rate. Ronald was back a couple of weeks later by himself, I can’t remember why, but when he returned to the hotel, they quoted him $30 higher.

“I stayed here a couple weeks ago with my wife, and that’s not what we paid,” he told the clerk behind the desk.

“Impossible,” the clerk responded.

“Look it up,” Ronald said.

He did.  “They made a mistake,” he told Ronald, but he gave him the rate I paid. How could he not?

We chose the Holiday Inn Express because my parents-in-law have used them in their travels for the last fifty years and feel comfortable there. The reason my parents-in-law like the Holiday Inn is because back in the mid-twentieth century that was one of the few hotels that would let blacks book rooms. I guess there’s no way to know if they gave them the same rate as white people.

That kind of memory stays with a person. It’s like Dillard’s. A long time ago, they did not welcome black shoppers. My in-laws have never forgotten, and they refuse to shop there when they visit the South. Though I love the store, I understand why they don’t, even if it happened fifty years ago.

I booked two non-smoking king rooms, asked for the AARP rate (he never even asked me for my membership card), and told the clerk, an Asian Indian man who spoke broken English, that my parents were elderly and needed to be close to us because they had health issues. He gave us rooms across the hall from one another.

I returned to the car, we parked, got our luggage, and piled into the hotel. The clerk stared as we passed the desk. I had a bad feeling from the start. I’m not psychic, but I use my intuition, and nothing felt right. I chalked it up to a long day on the road and the worry that clutched at me because I knew this trip was going to be awfully difficult for my parents-in-law to make. As soon as we got up to the rooms, the evening slid into chaos.

The clerk did not give us two rooms with king beds as I requested. One room had a king and the other had two doubles. No problem, Ronald and I took the one with the doubles (we slept in a single dorm bed together for three of the four years of college), but the one with the king bed had a broken A/C unit. Ronald and I trudged back down stairs to tell the clerk. His uncle, a small man the same size as my father-in-law, stood behind him with a toddler in his arms. Ronald explained the situation. Then I added that if the A/C could not be repaired, we would have to move on to another hotel.  “You understand that my in-laws are elderly and have health issues. They cannot stay in a room without air.”

The desk clerk said he’d be up in twenty minutes. A half hour later, he still hadn’t come.

Ronald went back down while my in-laws propped open their door with a chair. I was trying to get them into our room to wait, but they didn’t want to miss the clerk. There were white people filing past us down the hall with dogs, lots of dogs. There must have been a dog show in town. They all stared as I stood with my in-laws, my father-in-law growing more upset as the minutes ticked by.

Downstairs the clerk told Ronald he was rushing him. Ronald explained, again, that his parents are elderly with health issues and the temperature in the room was well over 100 degrees. Finally the clerk agreed to come upstairs with him. The clerk’s uncle tagged along.

As soon as my father-in-law saw them, he wanted to explain the situation, but already tired and not feeling well, he was agitated and emotional. My mother-in-law made him sit down as the two men stooped around the PTAC (that stands for “packaged terminal air conditioner”) and examined it. Ronald stood nearby them. I waited in the hall.

After several minutes, the clerk announced the PTAC needed a new circuit board and maintenance would be there in the morning.

“Unacceptable,” Ronald said.

“Open the window,” the clerk answered. Even though it was evening, the temperature was still in the low 100s.

Ronald went into fire lieutenant mode. When you’ve managed fire scenes, you learn to communicate clearly, succinctly, loud enough to be heard, and with no room for interpretation. He did not curse. He did not lose control of his voice. He stood inches from the man’s face, his finger in his chest.

“You’re done. I gave you a chance to make it right,” Ronald said as the clerk backed out of the room, Ronald in close pursuit.

The clerk said, “Let them sleep in your room with you or take them to a different hotel and you stay here. You have another room.”

“Why don’t I call the police and they can help us sort this out?” Ronald said.

“Okay, okay, I have another room.”

“Too late.”

I jumped in. “I’ll see you at the front desk to check out. I already told you we’d be leaving if you couldn’t fix the air.”

Downstairs, my voice shaking, I said, “I explained to you that they have health issues. You see they are elderly. I better not see one cent charged on my credit card.”

Then he argued with me about the room numbers. He said we were in 320 and 322. We were not side by side but across the hall from one another in 320 and 321. I didn’t want 322 charged to my card.

“Really?” I asked. “Weren’t you just up there?”

“The computer doesn’t lie.”

“I don’t either. We are in 320 and 321. I want documentation that you cancelled the rooms.”

He said he had none and I took a business card from the desk and told him I would be checking to make sure he didn’t charge me. There was a white woman standing at the counter during our exchange. She stood with her mouth open and her wallet in her hand. As I stood waiting at the elevator to go back upstairs, I mouthed to her, “Don’t stay here.”

She excused herself from the desk and came over and whispered, “What happened? He was so rude to you.”

I explained. She said, “Oh, God, we prepaid.”

“Good luck,” I said.

I took my in-laws to the car while Ronald gathered the overnight bags, and the white woman and her family were parked next to us. It was the first she knew of our interracial status. She and I spoke again.  She offered the understanding that I wish for lots of times and don’t get as I navigate this interracial world.

I don’t think every white person hates black people. It’s the way our culture operates silently behind the scenes. Racism is institutionalized and systemic in how we live, work, and socialize. It’s about power and privilege and the oppression of others. Most people don’t realize it. They think racism is an individual thing, but it isn’t. That’s just plain bias or hatred. That white woman was kind and understanding, but in our society, she is still part of the majority race and benefits from that membership, just as I do. Until we eliminate the unwritten racism hidden in our social structure, it will remain, and the majority will continue to enjoy power and privilege while minority groups continue to suffer their status of “less than.”

Later, lying in bed with the lights turned off in our king room at the next hotel we found along the route, Ronald and I chuckled as we recapped our day before dropping off to sleep. We talked about all the people who stared and wondered what our story was. Then I mentioned the look on the hotel clerk’s face, how it went from arrogant to fearful, when Ronald went into lieutenant mode and told him we were leaving. We didn’t know if the man was stupid, rude, prejudiced, acting superior, or all of the above, but it had made for a very bad evening, one that we’ll talk about for years to come, no doubt.

“I guess all the white folks with their dogs were worried that the niggers were going to turn out the place,” Ronald concluded. He keeps a sense of humor about these situations.

“Yup, it’s always an adventure,” I said, laughing.

I told Ronald the story of the white woman who nodded to me one last time after I had pulled our car up to the front door to wait for him while he imparted a last warning not to charge our credit card to the clerk and his uncle. The woman tilted her head and smiled, and I smiled back at her and shrugged my shoulders.

We are all just another brick in the societal wall, but I hope that together we can modify the structure so there will be true equality. I’m talking about the kind of equality where everyone pays a better rate at the hotel and the clerk aims to please all of the hotel guests. We can’t run away and lose the past. Instead we have to shake up our willful ignorance and face the undeniable truth.

Checking the Other Box

Dear Mrs. (or Mr.) Ladderprice,

Let me introduce myself, although I do not know who you are as you have hidden your identity.

My name is Dianne. I am a white woman. I am interracially married with interracial twin daughters. I write about race in the hope that it will somehow contribute in a small way to changing our racist culture. I am a racist because I am part of the majority race that holds the political, social and economic power in our country, and I am a beneficiary of that privilege.

You commented on my post titled Can’t We All Get Along? And I responded, but only briefly.  For other blog readers, here is the URL, and don’t miss the heartfelt comment from my daughter Cara about her experiences as a mixed-race person in America.

http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/06/cant-we-all-get-along.html

First of all, I am not certain how you feel about what I wrote. Are you angry and offended by my statement that if you are white in America, you are a racist? I can’t tell, and this is how miscommunications occur. I am going to respond as if you were angered about what I wrote.

Your comment appears to question my credibility and the truth of my experiences. If I am wrong, I apologize; however, I am sensitive to the power of words and the meaning they convey. Time and experience have honed my skills in recognizing racism. I have discovered that some white people question the authenticity of the racist experiences reported by people of color. They might think the person telling the story is exaggerating, reading into the situation, is overly sensitive, or just needs to get over it because we are all tired of talking about race. This kind of thinking blames the victim and allows racism to thrive in our society. Then there are the people that believe those occurrences happen in other places, never in their locale (or pocket, as you called it) because people there don’t act like that. I’m here to tell you they do, but most white people won’t be attuned to racist behavior or even recognize it if they witnessed it unless it is blatant and undeniable, like the KKK burning a cross on someone’s front yard.

You told me that your son didn’t even realize his neighbor was different until he saw him check the “other” box on a school form.

Let me ask you, how would you feel if your son was the one who had to check the “other” box? Checking that box identifies you as different than your peers, not part of the majority, and subject to possible bias, isolation, and sometimes abuse or violence from majority members.

My daughters were those kids back when they started Kindergarten in 1989. We refused to check the “other” box. 

We raised our daughters to embrace their mixed race and multi-ethnic heritage. We taught them about race because they had to know as a matter of safety. They needed to understand that other people would identify them as black in spite of their mixed race heritage and that would define how others treated them. Think about Tiger Woods who calls himself Cablasian, to honor his mixed race heritage, but the media identifies him as black. Think about President Obama, who, even though raised by his white mother and white grandparents and who in some ways identifies with his white heritage more strongly than his black heritage because he had very little contact with his Kenyan father, is identified in the media as the black president.

White children aren’t often taught about race, except in vague ways. For example, maybe they are taught, “everyone is the same.” They are not told the following: we are white, and in this society we are able to negotiate our way with invisible privilege that allows us to go where we want to go, live where we choose to live, work in the profession we have an interest in, and feel free to explore our individuality. The world is our oyster. See that child over there. She is black. She will have to be twice as good as you are to get the same job, and she will probably be paid less than you. She will have to face prejudice and bias as she negotiates her way in society.  She may be denied housing, jobs, adequate health care, and even access to public venues such as bars, stores or restaurants because of the color of her skin. If she is Hispanic or Asian, she may have to carry papers proving she is here in this country legally even if she is a citizen and her family has been here for generations. Her life will be difficult in many, many ways, because she does not have the invisible privilege we whites carry with us.

White children are not often taught the concept of privilege and entitlement, but they learn it through experience.

Even when the white child learns that “everyone is the same,” the child will see that there are differences between him and the children of color, unspoken, but there nonetheless, like when your son saw the boy check “other” when he identified his race. He will see that sometimes assumptions are made about children of color, about their intelligence, for example, or about their behavior, while the white child is given the chance to prove his intelligence and misbehave on occasion because that is what children (white children) do. He will see that white people are smart, strong, and brave when he plays video games or watches his favorite cartoons or movies.  He will learn that blacks are gangsters, criminals, athletes, or abjectly poor, while watching TV. He will see his parents or other white people get nervous or scared if someone of color is walking through the neighborhood or approaching them on the sidewalk.  He will learn that although everyone is the same, some are better.

You talk about progress. You are right. We’ve made progress.

Ronald did not get lynched the first time he looked at me and told me my eyes made his heart skip beats. We did not get arrested or denied a marriage license when we got married.

But we face racism every day. Isn’t it terrible and unacceptable when it happens even once to a single person? It’s an outrage when it happens repeatedly over a lifetime.

Do you think we should forget about or pretend the following events were not racist? You can read about each of these, and many others, in past posts in my blog.

1.     The car that tried to run us down in the movie theater parking lot.

2.     The prejudice and bad treatment my husband received on the job as one of the first black firefighters and the third black officer in the history of the fire department.

3.     The forty white men who swarmed Ronald because they didn’t think he should be dating me, a white woman.

4.      The man who attacked Ronald because he thought he was an Arab.

5.      The time the police arrested Ronald because they told him that no blacks lived in the neighborhood he had lived in since he was twelve.

6.     The seller who decided she didn’t want to sell her house to us because we would ruin the neighborhood.

7.     The photographer at my daughter’s wedding who didn’t know I was the mother of the bride because my skin was too white or that Ronald was the father of the bride because his skin was too black. No matter that familial resemblance is obvious.

Some of those things occurred in the beginning of our relationship, some over the thirty-six years we have been together, and others very recently. They are just a few of the incidents we have experienced. I could describe many, many more that range from stupid to dangerous.

Just last night at the pizza shop, the young white woman behind the counter did what she does every time she waits on us. She took Ronald’s debit card from him. Then she handed it back to me after she swiped it. She only handed Ronald the slip to sign because I walked away, and she had no choice. Why did she hand a debit card back to someone who doesn’t own it? Not just once – every time she has waited on us.

Mrs. Ladderprice, when you believe your country is too great to engage in racism (or any act that limits or oppresses the freedoms of different groups) or that most people are blind to race and skin color, you are fooling yourself and creating an environment where racism can thrive, both quietly and loudly. You are accepting the systemic and institutional racism that our society was built on and that still exists, and you are assisting, through your inaction, to keep it in place. You are a racist because you directly benefit from a system that perpetuates racial division and inequality.  No other action or belief on your part is necessary to identify you as such.

I don’t know you, Mrs. Ladderprice, but can I assume you are white? How many people of color have sat at your dinner table or stayed as guests in your house? How many people of color do you consider close friends, and do they feel comfortable telling you about their race-related experiences? Would you be upset if your son, coming home for Christmas break from college in the coming years, brought home a black girl and told you he was in love with her?

Colorblindness only works when people are truly equal and every person can live and work in a fair and equitable society. It will only work when we have openly, and perhaps painfully, explored our history and the systemic and institutional racism interwoven into our societal norms. But when colorblindness is practiced in a racist society, it allows racism to thrive unchecked by our ideals and better selves.

You sounded angry (and I apologize if I misread your comment) that I had introduced the idea that we live in a country that absolutely divides by race and class. A post-racial society might be a collective ideal – that which our best selves envision as fair and equitable treatment to all citizens of the USA.

Reality is far different. Your experience of being an American is markedly different than the experience of minority Americans or my experience as a white woman married to a black man with twin interracial daughters. The difference is the insidious way racism is institutionalized and systemic in our laws and societal norms and how it negatively impacts people of color every single day and in every endeavor. You live a “raceless” life, one that affords you privileges and freedoms that are not shared by people of color.

If it were simply about people displaying prejudice against others, a different response, one that is just as important because bias is damaging, too, would be warranted. But racism is about power and privilege. It is about passing a constitutional amendment that defines marriage between a man and a woman with hints from certain supporters that it is also about preserving the white race. It is about passing laws that the Supreme Court ruled as constitutional, that require people of certain ethnic heritage to produce their papers to prove they belong here if deemed suspicious by law enforcement, something that is easily abused and misused, just as free blacks had to produce their papers before the Civil War, so they would not be captured and sold into slavery.

Here’s an explanation of how freedom papers were used back then from the historical documents collection titled Slavery in Pittsburgh housed at the University of Pittsburgh. I see clear parallels between our history and the way Hispanics are treated in America today:

Freedom papers and certificates of freedom were documents declaring the free status of Blacks. These papers were important because “free people of color” lived with the constant fear of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Freedom Papers proved the free status of a person and served as a legal affidavit. Manumissions and emancipations were legal documents that made official the act of setting a Black person free from slavery by a living or deceased slaveholder.

It was prudent for Blacks to file papers attesting to their free status with the county deeds office in order 
to protect them from slave catchers and kidnappers. Antebellum America, including Western Pennsylvania, was hostile territory for a person of African descent. There are records of Blacks being held in local jails because they were suspected of being fugitive slaves. As was stated earlier, Black slaves were perceived as property that, just like other goods, could be bought and sold, stolen or lost.

Filing with the deeds office protected African Americans from the loss, theft, or destruction of original documents, as in all-too-frequent situations where slave catchers confiscated or destroyed freedom papers to force free men and women into lives of bondage. Some free men had to have an affidavit that testified to their free status.

That’s what our country’s history is, and some of that thinking still remains. Just like the lynchings that were popular in the early twentieth century.  Black men were hung simply for looking at a white woman. Lynching is not acceptable today in our country as it was under Jim Crow laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ensured that, but James Byrd, a black man, was dragged behind a truck until he was unrecognizable and his body parts were spread out for miles along the roadway; James Craig Anderson, a black man, was beaten and run over by a group of teens on a mission to “fuck with some niggers;” and Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, was trailed and then shot and killed by the neighborhood watch president for looking suspicious in the gated community where his father lived. These are current examples of black males being subjected to and murdered by vigilante justice. Black men are still considered sexually dangerous and violent, a myth created by white slave owners so they could perpetrate inhuman treatment against their slaves. That thinking still sits like an undercurrent in the ocean of our humanity.

Here is a short description of lynchings from Wikipedia:

Lynching, the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action, occurred in the United States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took place most frequently in the Southern United States from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in the annual toll in 1892. However, lynchings were also very common in the Old West.

It is associated with re-imposition of White supremacy in the South after the Civil War. The granting of civil rights to freedmen in the Reconstruction era (1865–77) aroused anxieties among white citizens, who came to blame African Americans for their own wartime hardship, economic loss, and forfeiture of social privilege. Black Americans, and Whites active in the pursuit of equal rights, were frequently lynched in the South during Reconstruction. Lynchings reached a peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Southern states changed their constitutions and electoral rules to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites, and, having regained political power, enacted a series of segregation and Jim Crow laws to reestablish White supremacy. Notable lynchings of civil rights workers during the 1960s in Mississippi contributed to galvanizing public support for the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights legislation.

Lynchings also occurred in the North where Irish workers feared their jobs would be taken away by blacks, many of whom had immigrated from the South to seek a better life and work.

It is difficult to imagine that the thinking that led to thousands of lynchings could still exist today, but it does.

I write about my experiences to enlighten people much like you, who, I imagine, are kind people who want to believe racism died with the Civil Rights Act and that we have arrived in a post-racial era ushered in with the election of a mixed race president.  You have the best intentions, but your wish to ignore race has made you fall into a kind of apathy and blindness to the racism that is still so prevalent today. Mostly it is because you are not affected by race and may not have personally witnessed any racist acts. I was a lot like you except that four things happened in my life to open my eyes. The first was that my father’s best friend was a black man. The second was an incident I witnessed as a child – our neighbors signing a petition to prevent a black family from buying a house on our street. My parents refused to sign it. The third was meeting my husband thirty-six years ago when I was eighteen years old. The fourth was the way my parents, liberal in every sense when it came to equal rights, condemned my interracial relationship. My mother accused me of causing my father to have a heart attack, and we did not speak or see each other for almost three years, a sad fact, because I would lose both my parents soon after. I saw clearly how different life was for blacks and other minorities in America and how good people who have good intentions can be exposed for harboring racist notions.

I am not trying to spurn or offend you by responding to you in this letter. Rather, I am hoping to open your mind to the possibility that we still have a race problem in America, because I see that you want to do the right thing.

The first step is to acknowledge that being white in America comes with certain privileges that other races do not have access to, thus perpetuating the racism that is prevalent in America. Together, we can begin the hard work of removing systemic and institutional racism from our laws, norms and mores and healing the painful, heartbreaking legacy that racism left behind. Then we can each check the other box, the box that says we won’t stand for anyone being treated as less than because everybody is the same.

Sincerely,

Dianne