Confronting the 'R' Word

Affluent white women pay $2500 for an experience that'll be (almost) free for those participating in our next Member Monday session: the opportunity to be challenged on racism. The referenced experience is one in a series of private dinner parties hosted around the country (fifteen so far, including Denver) consisting of eight women "of privilege" as guests and two interrogators "of color" calling them out on their underlying racial biases (click: Race to Dinner ).

Men need not apply to these Race to Dinner events as they are deemed beyond hope; women, with their access to power and wealth and inherent good manners to not leave the table, are fair game. Confessions are revealed and underlying assumptions are surfaced (" . . . I have explored my need for validation . . . . I'm working through that . . ") between servings of Pasta Carbonara.

Member Monday, with its tradition of open examination of hard subjects, is an ideal forum in which to discuss a topic otherwise approached only tentatively elsewhere. Joining us in the conversation with his unique insight will be Simon, a recent club member (and a first-time MM participant). Though white and raised on the east coast, Simon earned his stripes in the deep South through his stint there with Teach For America. He was "up close and personal" with the black culture which gave him a solid look at the racial dynamics that played out in that world.

Let us now take as a challenge the sentiment implicit in the title of our main discussion piece: White Fragility: Why It's So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism (click: White Fragility). At its core the hurdle rests in the article's premise i.e. that our (white) socialization renders us racially illiterate. Eight patterns are cited in support of the proposition that white privilege prevents us from comprehending the perspectives of people of color and, as such, we are blocked from bridging the cross-racial divide. The words concluding the article, "let go of your racial certitude and reach for humility," will set the tone as we remain open to the underlying premise. Our goal here is self-awareness.

A sister club discussion group did, indeed, address America's "original sin" taking note of the so-called 1619 Project -- last year's exhaustive New York Times Magazine initiative, which began on the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery (click: NYT: 1619 Project). Its aim was to frame the country's history by placing the consequences of America's lurid immorality at the center of the national narrative. 

However, let's add some additional historical context to the findings of the 1619 project. Our very first Member Monday topic centered around Howard Zinn's book People's History of The United States  (click: MM 7/5/16 Howard Zinn, People's History of the United States), which included an account of the almost-contemporaneous massacre of the Indians by the Whites in 1610 Jamestown (see paragraph two of the referenced intro for the fuller account). The point here is not to engage in comparative atrocities but, rather, to suggest there is no monopoly on the parade-of-horribles that define much of our history. The question instead becomes how and why some harden into a kind of residual permanence. 

One hint might be gleaned from the quote of sociologist Glenn Bracey appearing near the end of the NYT piece, "Out of the ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves" to which the article's author added, "In the void, we forged a new culture all our own." A central question then is whether the long-standing issue of race and the impediments to assimilation might come down to a failure of imagination -- on the part of whites and blacks alike -- which locks us into an historical straitjacket.

Let us be transparent as we discuss our own "Fragility" on the subject of race. I'll share two personal accounts and suggest context makes all the difference. The first was my decade-ago experience living in a "village" for seven weeks with sixty other students at a summer language immersion course at Middlebury College. Of my two closest friends there, one was a remarkable young black student whose color -- and I say this without equivocation -- served as no barrier to our bonding. None. The second account, however, had me standing alone (I thought) at a ticket kiosk at the Emeryville (Oakland) BART station. While standing there, my walking sticks in the left hand, my open wallet in the right, facing the machine, I was startled by a black youth suddenly appearing to my left with a question that sounded more like a command, "Where ya goin'" and, just as I was re-pocketing my wallet, his friend approached from my right, and then . . . . and then, nothing -- the two swaggered off together. The point of all this is to say, upon later reflection, I felt like a thompson gazelle standing in the Serengeti. 

So judge me. The question is whether I am, you know, the R-Word.