Reflections - Lessons Relearned

Justice Flag

While Spence and I ate breakfast the last Friday in May, the internet blared unwelcome news. George Floyd murdered in Minneapolis. Protests against police brutality and institutional racism turn into riots. Oatmeal glued my throat shut. Not again. Not again and again. Tragic news of injustice and oppression kept recycling through my life.

Enough is enough.

I sipped rooibos tea to ease the lump. “What can I do?”

Community organizer and tenacious fighter against housing injustices, Spence answered in a soft, sad voice. “Nothing.”

“Maybe I could write something? I’ve kept controversial topics out of my blog, but—”

“You’ll come off as a white liberal.”

Duh. Of course I have a white viewpoint. I grew up in Titusville, a small town in Western Pennsylvania, then moved to Mount Lebanon, a white suburb of Pittsburgh. I rarely saw blacks.

My first encounter with racism came when Dad drove the family south for a Florida vacation. When he stopped for gas, I jumped out of our station wagon first and raced to the restrooms. My ten-year-old bladder seemed weaker than anyone else’s in our family. But the labels on three closed doors lining the outside wall of the building halted my run. 

Women          Colored          Men 

My gut pricked as if an angry porcupine rolled around in my stomach.

Aren’t all people created equal? The Presbyterian Church, the Declaration of Independence, and my parents had told me so.

Dad rounded the side of the building, and I reached for the knob on the door labeled Colored.

He placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me toward the Women door.

I glanced over my shoulder. His eyes surveyed the area around the side of the building. “But, Daddy, it isn’t fair.”

“You’re in the South now.” He gave me a push and watched until I opened the socially expected door.

Concluding racism was a Southern problem, I decided I would live in the North when I grew up.

My Skin is Not a Weapon by AlwaysBreaking, Creative Commons

Then Mom took me along to find a house for our move from Titusville to Pittsburgh.

The Realtor, wife of one of Dad’s co-workers at Cyclops Steel, waved purple fingernails past her creamy white face toward a house with a for sale sign.

Mom, who baked three pies and one cake a week in addition to sewing clothes for three children, squinted at the house then turned to the Realtor. “Why are you working, Phyllis? Chuck makes a good salary.”

The Realtor’s chest pushed against her fitted suit coat. “Any [n-word] can clean a house.”

Mom covered her mouth and tittered.

Bile rose in my throat. I turned away, watched a squirrel flick its tail, and swallowed hard.

Why did the Realtor consider herself better than Negros? Racism lived in the North too.

I kept silent like Mom expected, ignored the rest of the adult conversation, and resolved never to hire anyone to clean my house.

In our Pittsburgh house, I pushed the painful pricks and burning bile into the back corners of my mind. Nurtured in a community of white privilege, institutional racism seemed to disappear.

Following my heart, I married Spence and joined VISTA with him. Our assignment took us to Hough, an inner city neighborhood in Cleveland. Outside my safe world, racism had festered and grown. We had a front row seat for the riots in neighboring Glenville that summer. Poverty, discrimination, and the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King made people desperate. The anger and hate glaring from some of the black people’s eyes clawed at my white privilege, but the antics of the friendly black children, with so much energy and potential, captured my heart. Uneasy yet enchanted, I became a teacher who subscribed to Ebony magazine so I could make teaching materials picturing children of color for my Hough students.

The children and their parents accepted me. I relaxed and pushed ugly racism back into its habitual corner. 

On maternity leave, I took an evening seminar in child development at Cleveland State University. Soon after the small class bonded with each other, a substitute arrived at the beginning of a session and announced our professor would be delayed. The substitute passed out squares of colored paper.

With a friendly grin, she waved her arm toward the front of the room and said cheerfully, “People with blue papers, push your desks together to make a table over here.”

While our desks scraped against the linoleum, she used a stern voice to instruct the others scattered in the back of the room. “Complete this assignment without talking.”

She turned back to us, grinned again, and helped one woman move her gear. “Work together to answer these questions about communicating with students’ parents.” She handed each of us three stapled sheets of paper. “You have forty-five minutes.”

We set to work.

When someone in my group asked the substitute for clarification, she rested her hand on the back of the chair and leaned in. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll come up with some great ideas to answer all the questions.”

As my group chatted and worked to get the short answers, I peered over my shoulder at the other students. Silent. Their bodies slumped over the papers on their desks.

I glanced at the substitute.

She beamed at me.

One of the silent students raised his hand.

“What could you possibly want?” the substitute scolded. “Can’t you read? Get back to work.”

Angst curdled inside me. Why didn’t our professor show up?

After a half hour, I couldn’t take any more. I raised my hand. 

The substitute flashed her friendly grin.

“I’m not feeling well. I need to leave. I have to nurse my baby anyway.” Shaking, I gathered my gear and hustled away.

BLM by AlwaysBreaking, Creative Commons

In the hall, I met our professor.

Half of the angst drained. I chattered about a project I had in mind for the class before I admitted the truth. “I don’t like what’s going on in there. I couldn’t stay any longer.”

Later I learned that after I left, one of the silent students stood and announced that the way the substitute ran the class had upset me and things needed to stop. The seemingly insignificant color of the papers had been a clue. Blue slips and brown slips. The class had been a blue eyes and brown eyes experiment for us, all white teachers, to experience discrimination. The experiment worked on me, and I wasn’t in the discriminated group.

But that discomfort got filed away too. Spence and I moved to Cleveland Heights, an integrated neighborhood we picked after cruising around playgrounds to check the diversity of children. We raised our family in a safe, comfortable cocoon.

I’d been socialized like my dad. If someone made a racist remark, I stayed silent like my mom. If things made me uncomfortable, I moved to another place. I became adept at going along, staying silent, and running away.

Decades passed. After the alarming news broadcasts at the end of May, a disturbing email arrived from Darlene, my long time friend since our daughters became buddies in middle school and our sons became friends in high school. When our children grew and moved away, our relationship continued and strengthened. Cain Park concerts were favorite girls nights out. As a black woman with black children and black grandchildren, her email reflected the present, not our happy times. Her words pierced my heart.

I tried to write today, have the skeleton of my 100th blog done, but the words wouldn't come . . . so much sadness, anger and fear raging through my brain. Haven't slept well the last several nights worrying about the safety of my son and grandsons.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move.

Her son Curtis had come to visit on a trip home from his freshman year at Ohio State University when my son was a senior in high school. The fellas chatted with me in the living room of our Cleveland Heights house. When I asked Curtis what was new, he said, “A policeman stopped me on Public Square. He said I was jaywalking.”

“He stopped you for jaywalking?” I snorted. “You’re kidding, right?”

His face glowing with merriment, Curtis chuckled. “I thought so too. I said, ‘You’re joking.’ But he wasn’t. So, I said,” Curtis tucked his chin to his chest and lowered his voice to a deep respectful tone, “‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry, officer.’”

We laughed at the time, but after years of Black Lives Matter protests, the memory of his story terrified me. The incident could have had a tragic end.

And I’d watched Darlene’s three grandsons—Tiree, Xander, and Riley—grow from newborns to special young men.

White liberal viewpoint or not, I’m going to follow the advice  that Professor Kathryn Russel-Brown gave over On Point June 1. “White people have to talk to white people about white people.” She admitted the conversations would be uncomfortable, but we had to do it.

So, acknowledging my white privileged background and a lifetime of pushing the pain of racism into a back corner, I’m determined.

I won’t go along with immoral social norms.

I won’t stay silent when racism creeps into conversations.

I won't run away from uncomfortable situations.

Writing this blog is the first step. Now I have to work at changing seven decades of old habits and face uncomfortable truths. Inspired by Fredrick Douglass’s method’s for fighting to abolish slavery, I can “use my voice, my pen, or [and] my vote.” Remembering the faces of black children with so much potential will help.

Justice Now

White Silence = Black Death

Black Lives Matter 

Family Protest by Always Breaking, Creative Commons