Today we get to remember that Martin Luther King became “Dr.” at Boston University. He met his wife Coretta Scott who was a voice *and* violin major at NEC. There’s always a Boston connection.
From WGBH:
But I recommend reading the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and mentally substituting “Boston” for “Birmingham”. There will be places where the comparison thankfully doesn’t fit, and some where it is shockingly apt. Boston’s continuing pervasive racism and segregation — measurable, palpable, and infamous — are this city’s and region’s immense shame.
- It should be unacceptable to every person in this region that African Americans have $8 in median family wealth. What is this, if not “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society”, as King put it?
- It is unacceptable, in this world-renowned citadel of health care, that black people receive worse health care.
- Our searingly hostile reputation among African-Americans from other places is a national embarrassment. It diminishes us — in an absolute moral sense, but doubtless in an economic and societal sense as well. We drive people out, and we keep them away.
There is still something deeply, stubbornly, and pervasively wrong with us. And it is a white-people problem: On sports radio and newspaper comment sections you can read all manner of rationalization and victim-blaming. To dismiss the experiences of oppressed people; to look them in the eye and say, no, it didn’t happen that way; you didn’t hear what you heard; to deny the obvious injustice when it’s there in front of you; or to walk past the whole business like the priests and Levites … this is racism. And it is not a burden our neighbors should have to bear.
But we must move on from guilt. Engage in thought exercises: Imagine a city and region more welcoming, more open, more fair, more geographically and economically integrated. Imagine human potential that was nurtured, not neglected. Imagine new relationships, friendships, partnerships, business deals, political coalitions – free of this cloud. Imagine … what should be normal.
People do change. Places change, attitudes change; they change when people decide it is necessary; and when there is strong and intent leadership. Let us not prefer “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” After all, the tension is never really absent.
So while our leaders today excoriate a raw-racist President — and today of all days they should not pass up the opportunity — let’s not be satisfied with pointing the finger elsewhere. We can change.
jconway says
This was a great post. I would also recommend reading the letter in conjunction with the recent Globe report on Race in Boston.
Everyone should read or reread Dr. King’s ‘Letter from A Birmingham Jail’ today if they get an opportunity. I consider these words a challenge to all of us who want to fight for racial equality and social justice:
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
I will keep them in mind as I fully take over my classroom of black and brown Civics students this week. To remember my privilege, check it, and do the hard work of being a white ally by building authentic relationships with my non-white students.
Christopher says
Is there any way you can see your students as just students rather than black or brown? We created racism and racial animus. It is on us to quit the notion of race entirely if we are too ever judge not by color of skin, but content of character. Just be yourself, whatever that is. You have experiences too. Listen to your students, but also share with them.
jconway says
Of course I see my students as unique individuals, but part of recognizing who they are is recognizing where they come from and the experiences they have that I do not have. To deny that their racial identity has shaped who they are is to deny who they are and what their experiences are. To be color blind is to be blind to the realities of racism that they encounter everyday and I do not. I refuse to do that.
I also refuse to treat them as helpless victims to pity. White savior complex is just as dangerous as pretending race doesn’t matter from the other end of the spectrum. I refuse to believe that white supremacy is an insurmountable obstacle to student success. Systematic racism is real and a barrier to educational access, but it will not be for the students in my classroom who will be empowered to overcome it and trust that I treat them fairly.
As one civil rights leader put it, “You have to be racially conscious in your thoughts so that you can be racially neutral in your actions. You have to understand the ways in which people are different in order to craft policies that treat everyone the same.” That is the way I run my classroom. It’s the way we all should work together to solve this problem.
Christopher says
I think I very much disagree with that quote in your last paragraph. To me being truly neutral means ignoring race, otherwise you risk even if only subconsciously not being quite so neutral. I still want skin color to be as inconsequential as eye or hair color.
jconway says
I wonder how you would react to a student who felt their entire life destiny had been predetermined the moment they were born black. Saying “well I don’t see race” seems like cold comfort to a kid our society has already written off as a lost cause simply for being black.
I think we can’t be race neutral so long as racism exists. To do so is to deny the stories of real people and pretend their trauma didn’t happen. I don’t see how you can do that. I don’t see how we’ve had this argument for ten years now and you still can’t see why black people feel different than whites about how they are treated by this country. Or how race neutral policies and attitudes end up hurting blacks. We’ve gone over a ton of evidence and you’re still blind to reality.
Christopher says
I’d be happy to help that kid find opportunities to the extent it is in my power to do so. I can only control my own words and actions, but do no see it as my responsibility to make up for others (though I do see it as my responsibility to speak up when I see others acting not so enlightened).. Again, I’m not saying these things haven’t happened, but I’m offering a different, and I believe quicker, way of fixing it.
seascraper says
How can you say Boston is racist, referring to its history, without noting that the entire class of Townies, who took the blame during busing, have basically been eliminated from the city?
Charley on the MTA says
I am referring to (Greater) Boston’s present. 2018, in words and numbers. The “Townies” didn’t leave the whole region.
jconway says
They weren’t eliminated, they fled to whiter towns to avoid integrated schools and neighborhoods. That said, by no means are the affluent white professional class immune either. They may not be the townies hurling epithets or American flags at African Americans, but they also choose to live in largely white towns and oppose things like increasing affordable housing, zoning reform, and more equitable school funding that would fill in these persistent gaps. They believe in the fiction of a meritocracy where anyone can get a good education, go to a good college, and get a great job and anyone who couldn’t do those things didn’t deserve to. They fail to recognize their own privilege as whites and as upper class whites time and time again.
Let’s also be honest. How many of us on this blog are familiar with black Bostonians, their neighborhoods, or their needs? Before working in Roxbury, I can count on one hand the number of times I had been there before. Exactly once, and it was for a mixed friend’s bah mitzvah party at the RCC community center in middle school. Had I not gone to a camp that mixed Boston and Cambridge kids, it’s unlikely we would’ve met. I remember being shocked that another friend in that camp had never been to Harvard Square, since he lived off the Red Line. Yet he poignantly pointed out I hadn’t been to his neighborhood, which was also off the Red Line. These divisions are real. We won’t overcome them by pretending they are not.
Fortunately my perspective has changed. Moving to and living in a majority black neighborhood in Chicago for six years and seeing that city’s stark segregation made me reevaluate my own. Seeing race through the prism of my non-white wife and her initial reactions when she visited Boston changed things. So did hearing a couple we met for drinks at the Seaport one New Years when we were both in town describe their shock at hearing a white person call them the N Word for the first time in their lives. One was from Michigan, the other was from Alabama, they met at a MN college. Yet Boston was the place that introduced them to the N word. Not Tuscaloosa or Oakland or St Paul. Boston. We have to admit we have a problem to beat it. And it starts with all of us admitting our own blindspots and working to address them. I know I am a work in progress.
Christopher says
You’re hardly a work in progress. As long as you treat everyone as you would want to be treated regardless of skin color, as I’m sure you do, you’re fine.
jconway says
I think we misquote King and take his remarks out of context. As a Guardian piece put it:
“the world Martin Luther King Jr was talking about, is a world where we judge people by the content of their character through understanding how their character was shaped by the reality of the color of their skin.”
To pretend race doesn’t matter is to deny that race still matters. That racism still exists and racist systems still exist and hurt people we care about. We can recognize the reality of racism without treating it as a predestination either. Blacks are not predestined to do worse than whites, they will continue to do worse if we continue to keep these systems in place that perpetuate that reality, yet we can work together to dismantle these systems.
Where I disagree most strongly with Ta Nehisi Coates is the idea that white supremacy is an inevitable and insurmountable byproduct of our country, I don’t think it is. I think it’s a choice our society continues to make. It will continue to choose to fight it. That means acknowledging the enemy by name and working with it’s foes to defeat it. We don’t do that by being color blind. We also don’t do that by giving up hope or denying the hard fought progress we have already made.
Christopher says
It’s always been hard to hear or understand that the capital of such a reputedly liberal state has had such a race problem. Maybe I’m not Bostonian enough to see it, or listen to enough sports radio. What I need to know is if there is active discrimination against the black population. Otherwise, I’m not sure making Boston out to be like the Jim Crow South is helpful.
Charley on the MTA says
Christopher, this is terribly simple: *Listen to black people and believe what they tell you.*
Or if you don’t believe that, look a the piles and piles and piles of social science evidence, from health care disparities to sentencing disparities to wealth to de facto segregation to … everything.
My friend, it simply will not do to sit around and pretend you don’t have enough evidence. It’s literally everywhere. And your purported “color blindness” — which I don’t believe about anyone, btw — leaves you blind to the real experiences of human beings.
It’s denial. You should drop that like a bad habit.
Christopher says
First, I didn’t say it doesn’t exist; I said that it was hard to hear that it does. I want to know where it comes from, which I believe is the first step toward solving it. I’m sorry you don’t believe color-blindness exists. Some of us were never given any reason to see or judge people that way. If we can be blind to the color of one’s hair or eyes why can’t the same be said about skin? I’ve always suspected this was part of the disconnect, but I wonder how much is projection.
jconway says
I ask this with love, but have to discussed this with people of color you know? I think you’d be pleasantly surprised they think really differently about this than you do.
Christopher says
A little bit, and for the most part they are just asking for the same opportunities and treatment as everyone else, which is precisely what I advocate and offer.
jconway says
Sure, and were they convinced they were denied those opportunities because of their race, would you speak out, or would you argue it couldn’t have been race that was the factor? I feel like it is hard to be color blind when close friends of yours are called the N word when they step off the train from New York at South Station, as happened to a couple we met for New Years two years ago. I feel like it’s hard to be color blind when a former co worker got slammed against a wall outside his apartment by an out of uniform Chicago Police Officer who assumed he didn’t belong in that neighborhood, despite the fact that this friend likely out earned that cop and had a BA and MBA from U Chicago. When a student of mine saw two of her relatives get shot in front of her this year and that has never happened to me or any of my white friends or co workers.
So if by color blind you mean, don’t treat black people differently, I am with you. I think that requires being conscious of how race still plays a role in peoples lives today and is a major factor in inequity between Americans.
Christopher says
But aren’t those experiences the whole point, and I think make my argument? If someone is being called a racial epithet or roughed up by a cop because he “doesn’t belong” it is precisely because some jerk is very definitely NOT being color blind! If they were we would not be having this discussion. My solution is to personally commit to lead by example and through persuasion and calling out get everyone else to go along.
jconway says
I guess that’s my entire point. I don’t think we can be color blind so long as society and many powerful individuals in it cannot be. We have to be aware of color and be on guard to help people of color when they confront racist actors and racist structures. Does this make sense?
I think you are conflating the idea of not being personally racist with the idea of being color blind. Color blind is a particular viewpoint that we are ‘past race’ and ‘race does not matter’ which is objectively untrue. It’s what I hear when John Roberts says “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race”. A color blind person would say anytime race is invoked it is problematic since we are post-racial and race shouldn’t or does not matter. This is objectively true, as the data Charley has pointed to and just about any headline regarding race in 2016 and 2017 can point to. There’s a reason white President’s don’t get asked to show their birth certificates and it’s not because the country is color blind.
Color consciousness is being aware that race matters a great deal and is something we can all grapple with. It means recognizing, as I did when I heard Julian Bond say it at Rockefeller Chapel, that every day a black person wakes up they look in the mirror and remember they are black and remember that means a great deal to them positive and negative. When we wake up our we don’t even think about our race because it doesn’t matter, which is precisely what white privilege is. It doesn’t mean having privileges over anyone else, it means enjoying a basic norm black and other non-white Americans never can.