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.
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
