Race

           Race is, has been, and most likely always will be a hot topic in society.  What I find to be the problem with most “hot topics” is that people spend way too much time talking about them and less time listening to others who are more knowledgeable and educating themselves about the subject.  Worse than that, the spend even less time actually doing something about the problems at hand.  What this leads to is rampant naivety mixed with arrogance, a crippling lack of helpful dialogue, and a scarcity of positive action.  Now, race is an incredibly complex concept that covers a wide range of people groups.  That being said, this particular blog is focused expressly on hearing voices from the black community and is aimed at the white community.  I do not claim to be an expert on race in any way and am, in fact, less informed than any person of a minority people group our there for the simple fact that they live this problem every day and I do not, which is the definition of white privilege and informs why I am writing this blog in the first place.  Allow me to elaborate…

So many people (specifically those perceived as white) in this day and age are obsessed with clearing their name of racism that they turn a blind eye to the unbelievable systemic issues that are still undeniably prevalent in our society.  People everywhere are so quick to say, “I’m not racist!,” that they shift the focus to themselves rather than fixing the problems at hand.  Racism is alive and well, and the cultural trends in most educational, economic, and political spheres demonstrate that every day.  There are definitely bigots who are still explicitly racist and that is a huge, obvious problem, but a more extensive and subversive problem are the people like me who grew up with white privilege without ever knowing it.  Once again, ignorance and closed-mindedness cause all the problems.

            Race is a funny thing.  What it comes down to are social constructions more than anything.  For example, I’m not even predominantly white.  I’m Spanish and Mexican, but I look white and am therefore perceived as white; and that’s all that matters at the end of the day.  Growing up, I didn’t understand how or why people could be racist.  I mean, people are people, regardless of how they look, right?  So when people generalized about the white community being racist, I would get immediately defensive.  “Me?  No way!  I mean, I have a black friend!”  Oh young Luke, you stupid ignorant fool.  The problem at hand is that through my immediate defensiveness, I neglected to recognize the problem.  And as any twelve-step program will tell you, the first step is recognizing that you have a problem.  The problem to me became fear; fear of being labeled as racist and bigoted.  God forbid some one judge me because I seem white!  Come on!  Just because of the way I look you are going to label me as racist when you don’t even know me??  Oh, wait… I see now.

            This small, tiny, insignificant affront against my race calling us out for being what we actually are, which is racist (or simply uninformed) is the most minuscule example of prejudice possible.  It’s not even prejudice, it’s just truth.  The truth that we become so self-justifying that we are blind to the real problem which is that society, in and of itself, is imbued with undeniable biases and prejudices.  Therefore, if you are a member of society, you should be constantly checking these biases, which are sometimes painfully obvious, yet overlooked.

            One tangible example is something called the achievement gap.  This gap is an educational concept that people of racial minorities are less likely to succeed in school and it is mathematically and empirically proven every single year in the form of graduation and dropout rates across the country.  The amount of factors that contribute to the gap are staggering, but for the sake of brevity I’m going to mention the one that pisses me off the most.  The majority of government funding allotted to any given school is determined by the property taxes of houses in the district.  What this means is, schools that are in areas with higher property values will receive that much more money just because of the affluent nature of the area.  Therefore, schools in poorer areas receive less money, and schools in nicer areas receive more.  This creates a defined economic gap that only gets worse and worse, and we have yet to change the laws of funding for schools.

            I went to a nice school in a nice area.  I was completely unaware of the achievement gap until I went to graduate school.  Through my perspective, everything was hunky-dory and some people were just unlucky.  Luck has nothing to do with it.  Race, as much as you may want to fight against it, plays a major role in society and the blind cry of “But I’m not racist” is not helping anyone.  If you are a person who is perceived as white like me, there is nothing that we can do on our own to “fix” racism.  We are the oppressors and we have been for centuries.  The first step is recognizing that, accepting it, and then going to people from racial minorities with contrite hearts, willing spirits, and open minds ready to shut up for a moment and listen to someone else’s experience.  We will never fully understand persecution of this nature.  We will never truly experience what it is like to, day in and day out, be a member of a racial minority with all of the prejudices and persecutions that go with that.  We simply won’t be able to solve this problem alone because we caused it.  All we do is perpetuate it with our apologetics and impotent attempts at being the savior.  We need to stop talking and start listening.  Here are some of the amazing voices that have taught me how blind I was and still am in certain ways.  Stop being defensive and open your eyes to this issue, which is the root of so much violence and hate.  Then, maybe we can become a part of the solution instead of just worrying about ourselves and how people see us.

1. Race Matters, by Cornell West

It is important to note that the title of this book is double entendre.  West means that race really does matter as much as this work is about racial matters.  This book was written right after the Rodney King riots of the early nineties, but it is just as insightful and transcendent now as it was back then.  Cornell West is one of the most amazing thinkers of our time and more people need to hear his voice.  Race Matters elaborates on the racial issues in society, how they are perceived by different sides of the political spectrum, and how we as a whole need to recognize how our own skewed perceptions get in the way of us constructing a beneficial solution.  West tears apart these problems and offers remedies that are founded in love and respect, which he argues are the main ways that any person can commit to racial reconciliation.  He also brings up the vacuum that has resulted with a lack of leaders such as Malcom X or Martin Luther King Jr. and the need for a central rallying cry in this post-modern civil rights movement.  Lastly, he highlights the need for simple education.  An academic himself, West acknowledges the fact that misinformation and obliviousness are driving catalysts behind the racial dilemma.  With incredible compassion and unabashed truth, West created one of the most important works on race from the turn of the century. 

 

2. The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

            Ta-Nehisi Coates is an amazing contemporary voice in not only racial issues, but also literature in general.  I featured his other book, Between the World and Me, in my blog about diversifying my reading list and you should read that one too because it is incredible and also about these racial issues in our culture.  The Beautiful Struggle, however, is different in the fact that it is a memoir about his life growing up in the crack-age of inner city Baltimore.  With beautiful poetry and lyricism, we as readers see the world through young Ta-Nehisi’s eyes complete with his complex relationship with his parents, his brothers and sisters, and the world at large.  Tracing his life from childhood to college, we see what it was like for him growing up young and black during a pivotal time for his city.  Steeped in musicality, this book is so much more than just informative: it is inspired, visionary, and eye-opening.  This book helped me to realize that I know nothing.  I am simply an uneducated part of the problem and I need to change my tune and listen.

 

3. Native Son, by Richard Wright

            There are certain books that are so visceral, so powerful, and so vivid that you will never forget them.  This is one of them.  When I read Native Son, it easily jumped to the top of the list of my favorite books of all time.  Bigger Thomas is a young, twenty-year-old black man living with his family in a dilapidated, one-bedroom apartment on the South-Side of 1940s Chicago.  The lines between the white world and the black world are painfully obvious to Bigger and the anger and fear that this causes in his consciousness are palpable.  When he commits a vicious crime, we as readers are thrown into a tumultuous and unforgettable storm filled with racism, panic, and violence.  Wright wrote a masterpiece when he wrote Native Son.  Word of caution, this book is disturbing and haunting in a way that is hard to describe, but it is ineradicably important.  This is a must read.

 

4. Beloved, by Toni Morrison

            In this fearless novel, Morrison plunges courageously into the depths of slavery, shedding a lyrical light on an excruciatingly violent time in our nation’s past.  Sethe is a recently escaped slave living with her daughter whom she gave birth to while on the run.  Her sons have left because the house that they now occupy, which is simply called by it’s address, 124, is haunted by the memory and ghost of the daughter that didn’t survive named Beloved.  The address itself echoes the fact that her third child is missing and memories that are too disturbing bubble beneath the surface as Sethe tries to adjust to a life of freedom.  Identity, remembrance, and the supernatural play an authoritative role in this outstanding novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and contributed to Morrison winning the Nobel Prize in literature.  Widely heralded as the greatest American novel of the late 1900s, this book exudes evocative poetry and engulfs its readers in a haunting, ominous, yet hopeful look at one of the bleakest times in American history.  Few people command the English language with as much mastery as Morrison.  She is one of the true artists.

 

5. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

            Wilkerson is an award winning journalist who has dazzling powers with the non-fiction genre.  In this, her masterwork, she weaves the true story of America’s Great Migration.  In the century between emancipation and the civil rights movement of the sixties and seventies, black people left the South in droves and headed North and West to escape Jim Crow, segregation, oppression, and violence.  Since then, it became one of the most overlooked and misrepresented movements in American history.  Through painstaking research and endless interviews, Wilkerson gives us the first comprehensive look at this Migration that affected and continues to alter so much of our country.  What is most amazing is how she utilizes people’s stories as a lens to analyze this seminal time in our country.  Driven by compassionate narrative, this book shows the reader how non-fiction is anything but dry and mundane, but instead is filled with heart, soul, and necessity.  This book taught me so much that it would be impossible to put it into words.  Just read it, and listen to the true stories of these millions of lives.

 

As usual, happy reading everyone!  See you next month.