Race Relations

I wanted to write about race, but I'm not sure how to begin. I feel intimidated by the very topic, but it's all around us all the time. The District of Columbia, where I work, is majority black. Wheaton, MD, where I live, is very mixed and sometimes feels majority Latino. Our neighbors on both sides of us came over from El Salvador over 20 years ago. Our neighborhood school is 37% white, 30% Latino, and 33% "other". The center of Wheaton is filled with small restaurants of a multitude of nationalities, including Korean, Salvadoran, Mexican, Vietnamese, and good old American IHOP. Going to a store in the area means seeing faces of all colors and backgrounds, and you're almost as likely to hear Spanish spoken as you are to hear English.

Every day, everywhere I go, I interact with people from different races. So why do I feel so conflicted about writing about it? And I'm really thinking about black-white relations here. Part of it is the whole liberal guilt thing...the idea that I'm racist but I'm just not acknowledging it, even to myself. Maybe we're all guilty of doing racist things or thinking racist thoughts. My mother and I joke about hitting the lock button in the car when we see who we perceive to be a threatening looking person -- often black, sometimes Latino and sometimes just some white homeless guy. No matter who it is, I feel guilty. But I also don't want to feel like an idiot either if something happens, however unlikely that may be. I remember one time a guy came too close to me in London, and I jerked away instinctively, thinking he might want to mug me. I actually felt vindicated when I saw that he was white. You see, I told an imaginary panel of judges, I'm not racist. I protect myself against potential muggers in a non-discriminatory manner.

I was raised to believe that multicultural is good -- Free to Be You and Me, and all that. The characters in Sesame Street were (and still are) designed to achieve an unspoken racial balance, as were the books we read in school. I think the first time I realized there were different races was in elementary school, when I was around 6 or 7. I overheard someone saying that it was good that our school had 2 black teachers, but maybe we needed more to meet the government requirements.

When I was around 10, I saw the whole "Roots" miniseries. I remember sitting in our basement with our babysitter, watching our old black-and-white tv. I don't remember necessarily being shocked by any given scene, but somehow it all remained with me. Twenty years later, when I was working for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees' Washington office, I asked our Ethiopian assistant to take down a poster of an African refugee working in a field because it looked like she had scars on her back. And then I saw "Roots" again when I was in 8th grade, because our geography teacher required it. I remember dreading the episode when Kunte Kinte's gets his foot chopped off, and cringing in the audience when it finally happened. I also remember that in the book (which I read when I was 12), Kunte Kinte is given a choice between having his foot chopped off and being castrated, and he chooses the former because -- and I remember the exact wording -- "To be a man, you must have sons."

It's easy when you're a kid to somehow shield yourself from what you're seeing. Now, as an adult, I don't think I could watch "Roots" again, just like I don't think I could read all of those World War II Holocaust books I read as a kid. Such horrible, horrible stuff, and it's part of our country's shared history, even if all of our ancestors weren't in the U.S. then. You can talk about why -- racism, evil corporations needing cheap labor in the fields, etc. -- but the bottom line is unthinkable stuff like lynchings and selling someone's kids out from under them. What kind of a long-term impact do things like that over the course of centuries have on a country and a people? It's got to still be affecting us all today. It's odd, because I think we perceive ourselves to be the one country in the world that's free of historical mishegoss, but the legacy of slavery and harsh race relations is clearly ours.

So...I'm just amazed when I see my son and his classmates, and I realize that either they haven't absorbed this stuff yet or they're somehow in a better place with it than their parents and grandparents. My mom, for example, was raised well-off and very liberal on New York's Central Park West. She went to a costly "ethical culture" school with similarly inclined whites and a very few black kids from highly educated and well placed families. One of the white kids -- Mickey Schwerner -- ended up going to Mississippi during the Civil Rights era and was killed in an incident portrayed in "Mississippi Burning". My mother also tells how my grandmother made a complaint about a white bus driver who acted in a racist fashion towards some black customers, and she pressed her case even when it was revealed that the bus driver was Jewish like her. But despite all of this, when my mother dated a black guy in college in the late 1950s, her parents came down dead hard against it. "Think about how it would be for your children", they said to her. The relationship eventually ended, for whatever reason, but I think my grandparents' reaction was telling of their own perhaps unexamined attitudes and of the times. In the 1950s, there was probably little space in America for children of interracial marriages.

Fast forward to the 1970s and 80s, when I was in school. It was post-Civil Rights era. Most of my fellow students were white, save for a few black kids. My friends were mainly white and Asian American. I was in the comfortable position of being in the unexamined majority in my school and my community. To me, racial issues were removed from my life, and the answer to them was simple -- treat everyone equally and just get along. I wrote stories about slave times, based on what I had seen on tv. I knew about and had heard of instances of racism, but it didn't really touch upon my life, or so I believed. My view was that the North (ie, where we lived) was good, and the South (ie, the Confederacy, home to racist southern-accented sheriffs) had been bad and was probably still ignorant and racist in some places. It was pretty simple, and we could be pleased that we were on the good side.

But now that I think of it, maybe that wasn't the experience of everyone at our school. I remember when one girl in my group of high school friends, who was a talented dancer, wasn't offered any of the major parts in our school musical. She attributed it to her being black. I think the school told her that she wasn't a good fit for any of the parts. Was it really racism? Looking back, I think that racism played a part in those decisions, and that the decision to exclude her was wrong. The bottom line was that unfortunately Dawn was an outsider at our school because she was black. And I don't remember saying anything to her about it or protesting in any way. Teenagers are self-centered, but it's also possible that we just couldn't conceive of advocating for Dawn in that way. Instead, we were blissfully comfortable with our position and self-satisfied with our egalitarian values.

I also remember being a teenager and riding in a car with a group of white kids, some of whom were joking about a game called "Hit the n----r". I know I felt superior to the people who were making such awful comments, but I don't remember speaking up to protest. I also remember a close friend of mine in high school saying to me, "There are black people and there are n-----s." Once again, I didn't respond. I knew what she was saying was bad, but I didn't say or do anything. I felt good about what I believed was my lack of racism, but -- looking back -- it's clear my actions didn't match my views.

So, given that background, I've observed my son's development and interactions with interest. And it's been fascinating. First of all, he's as likely to be in the racial and ethnic minority as he is to be in the majority. Not that he notices it, but from daycare on he's been in settings where white kids were at most 50% of the group. For a long time, Philip didn't even notice it. He had friends of all colors and backgrounds, and it didn't phase him to communicate with an assistant teacher who spoke mainly Spanish.

Then last February he brought home an assignment from his pre-K on the Martin Luther King holiday. He had to cut out and color a booklet on King's life. Philip was always very concerned about using the right color in his work, so he instructed me to find a color brown that was "the color of my friend Joed's skin". Not black skin, and not African-American skin -- just skin the same color as that of his friend from Ghana. It was simply descriptive, rather than assigning any kind of meaning to the skin color.

I was happy with this, of course, and I hoped that this way of viewing the world would continue. This year Philip started kindergarten at the above-mentioned multiethnic school. Every day I ask him who he sat next to at lunch. When he deigns to answer me, he tells me names like Ali (Arab or Latino?), Luka (half-Taiwanese, half-Croatian), and Anthony (white). Of course, I'm the one who puts racial labels on these kids, not him. Another time, I asked him about an old friend he had seen at the doctor's office. He wasn't sure who she was, and he asked me, "What color is her skin?" Aha, I thought, he's seeing race at last. When I said her skin was white, he looked confused. "White?", he asked, as if I'd said something crazy. "Like your skin," I said. "What color is your skin?" "Peach", he responded, with all the assurance of a kid who has searched the Crayola box for just the right color.

We've been talking a lot about the election, and Philip is very interested in who his friends are supporting. He came home one day to tell me that his friends Chase and Navaeh liked John McCain. My reaction was -- hmm, that's strange. They're both black, so their families can't be voting for McCain. Then, the other day as we were walking by our neighbors' house, Philip asked who they were voting for. I told him I thought they were voting for Obama, because one of the neighbors had commented favorably on Philip's Obama pin the previous week. "No, mommy," he said. "I think they're voting for McCain." When I asked him why, he said it was because they had something that was the same as McCain's. At first he wouldn't tell me what it was, but when I asked directly he said it was because they had the same color skin as McCain. I asked him, well, what about Navaeh and Chase, and he said that it was okay for them to support McCain because they knew a special McCain song. I couldn't figure that one out, but it seems that he may be thinking more about skin color.

So...Given all of this, I guess I feel positive about the way we're all mixing in the U.S. right now. Not that relations among people of different races are necessarily good or problem-free, but -- to put it in the passive voice language of my government agency -- progress has definitely been made. I love to see my kids playing with a rainbow of peers without seeing race...yet. We'll see how things develop as they become tweens and then...gulp...teens. As for me, I want to say it's more about class (something I'll blog about another time) than about race, but once again I may be too self-satisfied with my views. I may get a frisson of pleasure when I'm the only white person on a bus or in a meeting (my small work team at work is all black except for me), but what does it really mean? I guess the thing is that we're not going to get rid of racial tensions, but maybe we can flood them out with familiarity. If we're repeatedly put in various situations where we're surrounded by people of other ethnicities, won't we at some point lose most of the discomfort we might have had with "the other"? And then maybe we won't exactly be in a post-racial society, but we'll be able to move forward and leave some negative things behind.

This election cycle has been all about that. As I get more and more clutched and anxious as November 4 approaches, I'm glad we can at least cling to that. Regardless of how the election goes (and believe me, I so want one particular person to win), we can already be proud of ourselves as a country that we've taken one teeny tiny step forward. Or let's be more positive -- perhaps it's a giant step. In any case, I know we'll keep on moving forward.