Race/Racism

Moving Past the Single Story

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

cross-posted here

I have been thinking about this powerful talk for almost a week now. It has made me even more critical of how we as a society perpetuate the “single-story.” It makes me notice when a story presented doesn’t mesh with the “single-story” that has been developed and accepted as the norm in our society.

http://embed.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

This idea has me beginning to understand how important it is that we see and develop diverging stories of each other.  This video sums up the incubation of racism and long-held (mostly harmful) stereotypes.  These single-stories allow us to believe that we know someone based on the stories we have of them.  I can see the problem right there.  The assumptions that the “stories” we have of a generalized group of people, make up the parts of each individual.  That is not the case.

I began developing a simplistic view of this as we brought our Ethiopian born children home and I my black students were confused as to how my children would lean to be black.  Even my black students had begun to develop a single-story of their own about “blackness.”  This was a not a single-story they developed on their own, but one they began internalizing at an early age based not on their own experiences, but on the narrative the media and society had developed (100s of years in the making).

This video illustrates how single-stories perpetuate

As Adichie so eloquently states, we must engage with as many stories as possible, before we can begin to develop an understanding that groups/people cannot be defined by a single story.  It makes me think back to the uproar over the Cherrios commercial with the bi-racial family.  If we really dig down deep, people were upset because the narrative of the commercial doesn’t support the single-story they had developed of family, black men, white women, etc.

So many of the issues that people have with “others” are that the stories they hold of them are singular and they often lack exposure to real examples.  Look at GOP members (who had a history of opposing gay marriage or being gay in general) change their view once they were able to develop a deep story of a group of people–this often happened when someone close to them was revealed as gay.  Exposure can allow our the stories we have of others to develop and change.  This only happens when the exposure doesn’t support the single-story.

We must be willing to seek out new stories and to challenge the single-stories that often make us comfortable.  As a teacher of literature (or of any subject), I have the power to expose my students (who live relatively isolated lives) to the stories of those who are different.  To stories that engage my students in new ways and to ask new questions about our preconceived notions.

As a parent, I must do the same.  I must teach my children that there are may stories of the people in Ethiopia (their birth country) and beyond.  We have to start exposing ourselves to those who are different to ensure that we move past the “single-story” mentality.  It is so important for our future.  It is so important if we every want to begin having real conversations about racism.

My Trayvon

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 3 Comments

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I look into these dark brown eyes and wonder “when does this sweet face turn into a dangerous face?”  At what point does  my sweet baby boy turn into someone who is feared?  At what point will those who comment on his manners or his personality start to view him with suspicion?  At what point does he stop being human and start being black?

These are hard questions.  There isn’t a manual on how to raise a child, much less a black male child (if there is, please leave a link in the comments).  We knew when we adopted our children that this would be something we would have to figure out.  To learn how to raise our son (and daughter–but that’s a different post) so he values who he is, but also knows what others may think he is.  He’s only 7 now, but these are conversations we have.  He has been acutely aware since an early age that he is different.  He asked me at 3 if the other kids are the part would think he was different because his skin was brown.  This is something he strives to process and understand.

He wishes he was white.  He does that at the age he is now because he wants to be just like his dad.  We work through that by pointing out all of the similarities the two have.  It makes Noah more comfortable with the differences if he realizes the similarities.  My 7-year-old can process that.  Why can’t others?

I am tired of hearing that things are better than they use to be as far as race is concerned.  Yes they are better.  I am not discounting that progress has been made.  But I call bullshit that the progress is enough. We can’t be complacent and treat it as if it isn’t a problem.  As if it isn’t something that erodes progress.  As if race doesn’t matter.  Because race matters.

We watched 42 last night and I cried.  I cried that Jackie Robinson had to endure what he did to prove the value of a black man.  I cried that Branch Rickey learned a lesson about not standing up and tried to do right.  I cried that Jackie Robinson would have waited until his teammates were done showering, so that he wouldn’t make them feel uncomfortable.  I cried because someday Noah will make someone nervous enough in a parking lot they will grip their mace and be ready to spray him.  I cried because someday Noah will make someone nervous in an elevator that they might not get off on their floor for fear of being followed.  I cried because someday Noah will go to pick up a girl for a date and her parents won’t let her go.  I cried because when Noah experiences these things, I won’t know what to say.  I won’t be able to understand how he feels.  I will be able to love him and listen.  I will know that just because I didn’t experience these things, they do exist.  I will allow him to give voice to how he feels.  I will love him.  I will listen.

That we live in a world where black men must be taught to be submissive to others for fear of their own life, makes me profoundly angry and sad.  That my son will stop being human and start being black is unfair.

My son will one day walk home on a dark rainy night.  I pray that someone offers him a ride instead of assuming he is up to no good.

Privilege, Education, Stereotypes, and Systemic Racism

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 1 Comment

I don’t know where these people live who claim we live in a “post-racial” society.  My guess would be they live in all white, gated communities, there kids go to private, somewhat diverse schools, and  where they run into brown people at the grocery store and think “isn’t that great.”  I know they don’t live in an urban center where a deep seeded, dirty, history of segregation and bigotry that still lurk just below the surface as along as everyone stays where they belong.

Where I live (and so many other people), there is nothing that resembles anything closet to “post-racial” at a systemic level.  There are plenty of day to day examples that might lull people into thinking we have moved beyond race being a factor.  I love my city but I will admit that when it comes to issues of race–it is often lost and the racist ideals the surface still piss me off and make me fear for my two brown children.  My city isn’t alone in this.  One only has to look at the trial of Trayvon Martin and question why no one is talking about Trayvon’s right to defend himself against someone following him in the dark of night with a gun.  There has been a lot of discussion about George Zimmerman’s right to defend himself.  But as the facts have illustrated, if he had just stayed in his car and not pursued Trayvon all would have been fine.  This isn’t a post about Trayvon, but I use this lack of discussion around Trayvon’s rights as an example of the privilege and systemic racism that continues to erode our society as well as working to keep the status quo.

Currently, my city is dealing with a very public clash that clearly exposes privilege and systemic racism.  We still have a pretty segregated school system.  Our city schools (which actually aren’t the focus of this) are about 85% minority and there is a very definite line that separates north (county and city) from south (county and city).  The north/south line represents a blurry color line as there is a constant ebb and flow over the line during our daily activities.  What this line really represents is the segregation that is inherent within society and is based on both socioeconomic status and race.  This line is easy to forget as we live our lives without giving much thought to the many nuances of our city.  Then something happens and the coded racism that is so prevalent in our society becomes less coded.

Our state supreme court came to the decision that students in unaccredited school districts had the right to transfer to accredited school districts in the same county and/or adjoining county with the unaccredited school district paying the tuition bill.  The law is very ambiguous and this has been litigated for years.  The legislature failed to find a “fix” to this legislative provision (or band-aid, or passing the buck, or not really addressing the issue).  I have been avoiding comments on newspaper articles that discuss this as we all know who comes out to comment in the anonymity of cyberspace.  There have been some voices of reason, by students and sadly most of the response from adults has been appalling (like the parent who demanded metal detectors).

This is when Facebook becomes the place where one realizes someone’s true character.  One of the people with whom I am friends on Faeebook (we haven’t seen each other since high school) wrote the following post.

These crappy schools up north dumping their problems on good county schools will accomplish nothing. If you have student’s that give no effort and parent’s that do nothing, it won’t matter where they go. Its like watching the NFL draft. “And Riverview Gardens selects…..Mehlville School District” what a joke.  –facebook post

I had to respond.  I HAD TO.  I know these kids.  I have taught in their districts.  I have visited their homes.  I have been apart of their community.

_____I taught in Riverview for years–this is not about kids who don’t want an education or parents that don’t care–it’s about the systemic failure of adults to do what is right for kids. The kids in Riverview and Normandy deserve very opportunity to get a great education. I don’t think transfers is how we fix it– but these kids and parents didn’t cause this problem–that is too simple a view.

Of course more of this person’s “friends” had something to say.

Ummm….I’m going to agree with _____ on this one. I will agree about the systemic failure. No argument here. But if you have a student in a school with a problematic administration, that should not stop that child from trying to excel. Thats a proven fact. The core of the problem lies at home with the parent/parents motivating their children to do better than they did. Riverview Gardens and Normandy was mentioned. I’m going out on a limb and I’m being generous here. I bet 5% of the class of 2013 strived to be a good student, hope for scholar ships and stay away from the other BS and actually graduated meeting their own goals. My point. These children are products of their environment. But only a very small percentage has what it takes to see past that and realize what an education means to their future. The solution starts at home. My .02$

Another (stereotypical) response from my “friend”

I think it has a lot to do with the parent’s. I see it all the time. Kids running around at 10 pm on school nights, no parent’s sitting down helping their children with homework etc. That answer is typical of todays society. What or who can I blame my problems on instead of taking responsibility for your own actions and the actions of your kids. If your going spit them out then do everything possible to raise them right, educate them and teach them they are responsible for their own actions.

Then there was this response….

True _____. Shitty parents make shitty kids. Product of their environment. Strong patents that give a shit show them the right path and do whatever it takes to keep them on it……interesting debate. Could go on all night.

I had so many things I wanted to say to this person.  But I didn’t.  Because it was very clear that this person would not have heard anything I said.  Then one of the school districts that will be receiving students from one of the unaccredited districts had a town hall meeting and over 2500 people turned out.  There were some horrible things said.

 “a man at the mic rebutted that the outcry isn’t about race. But shrouded by the anonymity of the crowd, another man yelled out “No, it’s about trash.” –-St. Louis Public Radio.

Again the only voice of reason from the (nearly all white and republican) school district came from a student.  The students are the only ones who give me any hope.

“We haven’t seen a lot of students here today,” one of the seniors said. “But we would be happy to have these new students at our school. It would be a great opportunity for these kids. There have been a lot of assumptions, but I don’t think we can assume that these Normandy kids are going to cause a lot of problems.”--St. Louis Public Radio.

While I have conflicting views on this whole idea of transferring large amounts for students out of a district to the cost of the district, I do know that everyone one of those children, ALL CHILDREN, deserve a quality education.  I don’t believe that the only way for that to happen is to buss students over 20 miles away to another district that may or may not have room to effectively educate the children.  But the choice of districts that are over 20 miles away are suspect for other reasons.  The unaccredited districts claim test scores and tuition as deciding factors in their decisions.  I believe part of it is the idea that families will not want to sent their kids that far way; therefore, more students will remain in the district.

It is so easy for those of us with privilege to protest and want to “protect” what we see as ours.  It is so easy for those of us with privilege to turn a blind eye to the systemic racism and bigotry that has allowed for these districts to fail as they have.  I don’t have the answers, but I do know that until we start to have honest conversations about race, equity and money, we aren’t going to solve anything.  Until we start talking about not just what we perceive our rights to be but the rights of all humans, we will continue to jail bury black teenage boys before their time (and without a second thought) and sanction the un-education of our poor youth.

Until we admit that we still carry around prejudices that takes away the humanity of others, we can’t move forward.  We can’t begin having conversations about solutions until we confront the problems.  Until we admit that we have bought into the racial stereotypes that have been part of the rhetoric of our country for years.  While the current situation in my city is ugly–at least it exposes the ugliness so that there isn’t any ambiguity around how people view black youth and black families as a whole.  I use to believe that if we exposed the disease we could treat it.

In the early 1980’s when we had a voluntary desegregation program that bussed students in from the city to our county schools–the same ugliness was exposed.  I remember the outrage in my own district–I was in high school at the time.  It saddens me to see the same ugliness again but people of my generation.

How do we move forward?  How do we get people to realize that one’s skin color isn’t a predictor of academic success?  How do we convince others that skin color is no more of a factor that hair color?  Yet it is because we have made it so.  We have socially constructed skin color to matter (all the way back to slavery we go).  At some point we made the decision that dark/brown skin color make someone less of a person.  How do we undo that?

I don’t know and it makes me so sad and angry.

Race Still Matters

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

What if the teens had been white?

There is a pervasive and toxic stereotype in our country–Black Males are DANGEROUS.

I will admit that as young white girl raised during a difficult racial period in my own city (desegregation of schools), I was taught/socialized to be more “aware” of black males.  That is painful for me to admit.  But I have to.  We have to.  We have to understand and acknowledge that racism is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of who so many of us (white people) are that we can’t see it.  We are ashamed to admit it.  We are afraid to admit it.

Until we admit it, we will never grow or change our views. My views changed drastically when I took my first teaching job at a school that was 98% African American.  It was not until I became a teacher and interacted on a daily basis with black males, that I began to realize that they were not a group to fear.  There was nothing scary about them.  But it forced me to admit the bias I was raised with that I didn’t realize I was raised with until I did a lot of honest (and extremely difficult) examination of my own beliefs and behaviors.

Let me be honest, I said I began to realize.  Erasing a life’s worth of ingrained racism and racial stereotypes is not easy.  Not for me or for out society as a whole.  To this day if you watch my local news–99% of the people shown as criminals are black.  Those are the stories that make the news.  These all have an impact on what we think of other groups (be it ethnic or religious or life-style choice based).

Now (10-years after I first stepped into that classroom full of a group of people I was taught to fear), I am the mother of two black children.  Now, when I see a group of black boys/men walking down the street, I see my son.  My son who everyone things is cute and great, but will that be the same when he is 16 and picking up someone’s daughter?  Will it be the same when he is out being a teen with his friends and mouths off to a grown-up?

My children already know that if a policeman stops them ever “we stop and let him see our hands and DO NOT Move.”  I was never taught that lesson.  I never needed to be taught that lesson.   Now, do I need to add middle-aged random white man to that list with policemen?

At what point does the responsibility shift from my black son and onto those whose ingrained stereotypes cause often deadly reactions based in “fear.”  I can hear the voices of 3 teenaged boys talking shit to a middle-aged man who asked them to turn their music down.  I know–because I know what I would have said to my friends in the car, just loud enough that the guy could hear.  He claims he thought he saw a gun.  Would he have “seen” a gun if the three teens were white–but still talked shit?  I have a hard time believing he would have pulled out his gun and fired 8 or 9 rounds.  We have to admit that race is a factor.  What if it had been 3 girls–white or black?  Same reaction?

He fired 8-9 rounds but they claim, when he is compared to George Zimmerman and his shooting of Trayvon Martin.

“That’s ridiculous. Michael is not a vigilante,” the attorney said. “He’s a brilliant software developer. It was never his intention to kill anyone.”

How is it not someone’s intention to kill someone when they a) pull out a gun, b) fire the gun, and c) fire 8-9 shots at close range into a car?

Again, we have to admit why these things happen and have honest discussions about them.  He claimed he saw a gun.  What he saw was three black teens, talking shit and he had no idea what it meant.  I hope he does some deep soul searching (along will all of us) and considers how the scenario might be different if the teens in the car had been white.

We do not live in a post-racial society.  We live in a society that that has convinced itself that race no longer matters.

Tell that to every parent of a black son.

Tell that to Jordan Russel Davis’ parents.  They buried a son that was shot because race absolutely still matters.

Standing Out

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 2 Comments

It has been a long time since I felt like people were staring at our family.

In our city, there are lots of families that look like ours and in our daily life, our family doesn’t stand out anymore.  No one seems to pay us any attention–which is good because my children are usually making farting noises or singing completely inappropriate songs.  So–being nothing to look at is good.

This past weekend we went to Myrtle Beach for our annual family vacation.  I was excited as I had never been there and boy do they have a lot to do. It’s like Orlando, but with out the overpriced theme parks.  We could have stayed another 2-3 days and still not done everything the kids or we wanted to do.

The hotel we stayed at was huge and packed.  It was also packed with lots of white families and lots of black families and only one family like ours.  We might not have been the only family like ours (in my defense, I didn’t see another family like ours all 5 days we were there and out), but we were certainly were not a frequently viewed family makeup.

I will say that the looks we got weren’t mean or dirty, in any way.  But they were clearly curious.  I had several black kids (about 8-10-years-old) ask me “are you their mom.”

“Yes” I would respond.

The responses from them varied–“cool,”  “oh.”

I got lots of comments from other black moms on Zoë and her hair–they were all positive so that was really nice.  It amazes me how many more people of color I get to interact with because of my kids.  I love it and it makes me sad that I might not otherwise interact so easily with people who are different from me.

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Another thing that stood out (not to me) was the number of black families.  One of my brother’s commented on how great it was to see so many happy black families.  This struck me.  Why was that odd?  But it is to people who live rather sheltered lives.  Especially in our city that is very segregated.  We certainly don’t see any on TV.  I know that in my city the only time we see black families on the news usually has to do with tragedy and heartache and crime.

How sad is that?  It makes me think that I need to make sure my kids are exposed to more positive images of blackness and family.  I want to make sure that they feel good about their skin color and the perceptions people have about what that means.  It reminds me that even though our president is Black, the rhetoric and media images of minorities still perpetuate images that are mostly negative.  This isn’t right–this isn’t reality.

I don’t know how we change that.  I thought we were on to something in the 80’s with The Cosby Show and A Different World, and then Damien Wayans had a show.  But then what?  Nothing.  Really, we have one or two shows and then networks say “okay–glad that is done.”  Just like with the election of our first Black President, people were so quick to claim that “racism is over.”  Racism is so much more than one elected president and one or two positive and successful shows about black families.

Racism is how we portray and treat people every day.  Racism is giving a group their own TV channels and then keeping anything else remotely minority focused off network television.  Racism is hiring one black newscaster but running 8 lead stories that feature black or other minority criminals and two stories about some amazing thing a white person did.

We have so far to go.