On my eighth birthday, my mother gave
me a butterfly party. My dress was pale pink polished cotton. The fabric was
printed with the most beautiful winged creatures across the fitted bodice and
full skirt. Mom created my cake using The Baker’s Cut-Up Cake Party Book.
Colored shredded coconut and jelly beans made it the most yummy, lovely
butterfly I’ve ever eaten. I remember the day as delicious and very, very
special.
My mother was proud of the event. She always put her heart
and soul into each excuse for a holiday and party. She spoke of that day for
years afterward, but not so much my “butterfly birthday”. Instead, she referred
to it as my United Nations birthday. Having recently moved from the Blackstone
Valley of Massachusetts to the extremely liberal town of Berkeley, California,
she was often pleasantly surprised how different, diverse and interesting our
lives, and especially HER life, had become.
That university town across the bay
from San Francisco was certainly the most diverse culture I have ever lived in
– and it was a welcome change for my mother, the small-town girl who had broken
away from a New England rural life.
That said, I was not a minority as a
“white girl” in Berkeley. Many of my neighbors and peers were from all over the
world – Indonesia, Belgian Congo, Pakistan, and Russia. Many others were from
other heritages. My best friend’s parents were from Japan and I now suspect
they were interned during World War II. The war against Japan had been won less
than a decade before. Many other of my friends were first generation Hispanic,
their parents having arrived from Mexico and Latin America. And many others
were African Americans whose families had either lived in California for
generations or had recently moved across the country from America’s southern
states.
I grew up never realizing that I was white-privileged. My
family was a liberal, welcoming household in what I considered a multicultural
environment. Yet, that New England heritage and culture and upbringing and that
middle-classed whiteness in California was the privilege that I’m just now
beginning to understand.
As a young white woman, I never
questioned my right to a college education. My white privilege includes a
belief that everyone can overcome the barriers anyone faces. As a young wife, I
took for granted that we could and would purchase a home in a safe
neighborhood. My white privilege caused me to drive by the neighborhoods I was
uncomfortable in. As a young mother, I entitled myself to sending my children
to a good school system. My white privilege afforded me both the lifestyle and
the expectation.
I am just beginning to understand
this.
As a history major in college, that
very own white privilege complicates my feelings behind the recent attempts to
remove monuments to the Civil War. Erase
history, I thought? Why? The answer lies in my own poor attempts to
confront my inherent privilege, my denied racism, and my simply ridiculous
belief that life will become what I think as normal again. The events in
Charlottesville, Virginia and the editorials, articles, and essays are opening
raw wounds of antisemitism, racism and prejudice - wounds that I had denied
existed in conservative AND liberal America.
I’ve made a commitment to myself to
become more educated and aware and I’ve researched a list of books that I will
begin with. I have yet to read any of them so I am relying on others’
recommendations and reviews. My hope is that I will become both enlightened and
justice-minded through my reading.
Because the truth is so very hard to
swallow, I’ll begin my journey with Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book Stamped from the
Beginning - The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Kendi explains
and illustrates that racism is very alive and well in what we might have
considered a post-racial America. We must begin to believe that there is a
modern-day racism beyond the prejudices we know we all harbor.
It’s “deeply entrenched in our nation’s history.”
In 2016, author Ta-Nehisi Coates
wrote a letter to his son about his own survival and identity as a black man in
America in Between the World and Me. I understand it is a “devastating and
affecting read” and one I should have read a year ago when it was published.
Choke Hold - Policing Black Me by
Paul Butler was published just months ago. The 2016 award-winning documentary
“13th” exemplified that incarceration of black men in the United States since
the Civil War has been an extension of slavery. Criminal justice has been
one-sided and the powerful story in Chokehold reveals the same.
There are a dozen more on my list
that can help me with my own enlightenment. Tim Wise has written many books
from the perspective of a white male and the benefits of white privilege that
have shaped his life in so many ways — to the detriment of people of color.
Michael Eric Dyson’s Tears We Cannot stop is a plea to Americans, and
especially white Americans, to become uncomfortable enough to address their own
racial biases. This September, the newest book to explode the myths about our
racism is Gene Dattel’s Reckoning With Race. Now is the time to reserve it for
your own reading list.
The bias of white privilege is much
broader of course and prejudice has a far reach into Latino, Asian,
Middle-Eastern and Native American ethnicity and identity in our country.
Yellow - Race in America Beyond Black and White by Frank Wu (2002) explores the
Asian-American experience and the stereotypes that have blocked racial
progress. When our grandson began
university last year, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? was a required
all-college read. In the book, Moustafa Bayoumi explains what it like to be a
young Arab in American culture. Open
Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano presents the story of European and
American influence on Latin America along with the issues of the Latino
experience in the U.S. And included on my list is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’ history
of our own country’s displacement of the Native Americans in An Indigenous
People’s History of the United States.
After the recent marches and
demonstrations in cities around the country - especially those that espouse
antisemitism and Nazism, we must all read The Devil That Never Dies which
exposes the “rise and threat” of global antisemitism by Daniel Johan Goldhagen.
Old stories are being retold in a new horrific narrative. It’s time to start
listening, reading and understanding in order to change those old stories into
a new one of acceptance, assimilation, and equality.
