Category: Daughters of the Dream

Posted on

Will we ever really live as neighbors?

Last weekend, I drove through my childhood neighborhood, Northside, in Richmond, Virginia. It was a pretty, spring-like afternoon. Battery Park, the neighborhood park two blocks from my house, was full of activity. All the tennis courts were being used and kids were playing on the basketball courts.*  I saw adults, old and young, out walking or sitting on their porches enjoying the day.

It is as lovely a neighborhood today as I remember from growing up there over 50 years ago or visiting my dad twenty years ago. There was just one thing that was different. Everyone I saw was white. Everyone. My neighborhood had been Black.

Gentrification? Not exactly.

This wasn’t a neighborhood that declined, and then wealthier people moved in. Surprisingly, this little enclave stayed pretty much middle-class for decades. People kept up their property, the lawns were tended to, and there was never trash on the sidewalks or in the streets. This neighborhood simply moved from a stable, white neighborhood in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s to a Black, middle-class neighborhood in the ’50s and well into the early 2000s when white families started to trickle back in. Now, it’s a white neighborhood. Why?

Why aren’t young Black families moving into this community?

The homes seem desirable to me. The neighborhood is walkable.  The park is an asset.  What is missing?

I asked a Richmonder for an opinion. Here’s the gist of that response.

When buying a home, Black families may be making more permanent housing decisions than their white counterparts.  They can’t move into a neighborhood in which the schools aren’t good because they may not be able to afford private schools. They need to know that the amenities in the neighborhood will grow, not falter, and close. Unlike their white counterparts, Black young people may not have family resources to fall back on should their housing decision in the city not work out. Black families are more likely purchasing a forever home. White families may see it as a starter house. And while Northside has generally withstood that test of time as far as maintenance of the housing stock, it still doesn’t have those cultural markers of a stable, middle class, white neighborhood – a Starbucks or a Whole Foods.  The neighborhood is seen by some as risky. Seemingly, white families can take the risk.  Black families can’t.

Hmmm…. this theory makes sense to me.  Once again, the racial wealth gap is a critical factor.

As I was reflecting on that, I had another shock when I went out to dinner in Churchill, a historically Black section of Richmond. Churchill was the area in which my mother had been born and raised. For most of my young life, Churchill had been an all-Black community.  In the ‘60s, my grandmother was forced to move when a transit improvement – the building of a bridge – wiped out her immediate neighborhood. Even with that, Black folks stayed in the community. In the late 1970s, white families started to drift back into this neighborhood. At that time, it was just a few people here and there. Last weekend as I drove through historic Churchill  and dined in a Churchill restaurant, just like in Northside, I only saw white people.

I was reminded of a phrase that James Baldwin made popular, “Urban renewal means Negro removal.” The transit decision that affected my maternal grandmother’s home was mirrored in my paternal grandparents’ reality. The building of a new highway in the ’50s decimated their all-Black neighborhood of Jackson Ward. The financial and social status of the residents of Churchill and Jackson Ward made them of little concern to the powerbrokers in Richmond. Just as the wealth gap is a factor today in housing decisions, it also was decades ago when my grandparents were being impacted by racism.

I reminded myself that I am fortunate. Unlike my parents’ experience, my childhood house is still there and the neighborhood is very much the same even though the residents have changed. I was sad not to see young Black families enjoying the neighborhood as I had.  I began to wonder if we will ever see really integrated communities. Not ones with a few of that kind of person, or this kind, but neighborhoods that don’t tip to one race or ethnicity, one religion, or one sexual orientation which seems to be the pattern. I’m talking about a residential equilibrium where all are welcome like those signs say and have the resources. Is that even possible?

 

*The Battery Park amenities were left from when the community was all white.

Posted on

Racial trauma is real

Just imagine, every day you are poised for something bad to happen.  You may not be conscious of the tension, but it’s there. You’re primed for fight or flight. That’s a part of what it’s like to be Black in America.

Sometimes you’re just ready for someone to follow you in a store thinking you’re a thief or for someone to make a disparaging comment about a section of town or to offer the backhanded compliment (microaggression) of how articulate you are. But often you’re waiting for the next big shoe to drop.

I’ve been tense, expecting something bad – some racially motivated event — since 2012, the year that Trayvon Martin was killed.  The catalyst wasn’t just Trayvon Martin, it was the series of lost lives that came after his, but there is no doubt that Trayvon Martin was my ground zero. I experienced his death personally, viscerally. It was hard for me to read the news or watch the coverage. My son and Trayvon were born 364 days apart. When I learned of Trayvon’s birthday and the normalcy of that evening when he was killed, I immediately connected my son and Trayvon. My son could have been walking home from the grocery store near our home. Nothing but time, space, and fate caused this to happen to Trayvon and not my son. 

While incidents of violence against Black people, especially boys, and men, have always been known and discussed in the Black community, it wasn’t until the years immediately following Trayvon’s murder that we started to regularly see the images. Suddenly, video cameras were everywhere – home and business security cameras, police body cameras and just citizens with their phones. We weren’t only hearing about tragedies; we were watching them, a lot of them, one after another.  

Imagine, for example, watching violence happen routinely to women with blonde hair. If you were a blonde woman, maybe you’d choose to wear a wig or dye your hair until the source of the violence was discovered and addressed. As a member of this subset of the white community — blonde and female — you would probably feel confident that the source of the violence would be identified quickly and taken care of. 

Photo by Julian Myles, Unsplash

Now, imagine you are a Black man or boy. You cannot and don’t want to camouflage your skin color or race. The causes of much of the violence you face are already known – racism, prejudice, ignorance, and fear. Unlike the anticipated response to the blonde women, there isn’t a widespread effort to address the causes of violence against the Black community. In fact, some want to ignore the causes, like the response to teaching the entirety of our country’s racial history. Or the response takes an inordinate time (anti-lynching legislation was first introduced in Congress in 1918 and passed over one hundred years later in 2020 following the televised “lynching” of George Floyd). So, there’s little to make the Black community think this violence/ trauma will end.

I don’t live in fear for myself, primarily because of my age and my gender, but I do live in fear for my son. He assures me that he isn’t afraid. I hear him, but I believe he carries this fear with him every day, subliminally. He knows that his physical presence alone is causing some white woman to fear him and to know that she can call the police and say a Black man is threatening her and be believed.

This feeling of being in danger or having a loved one in danger is constant for most Black people. It may not be at the surface of one’s day to day life, but it’s there. According to all that I read, living with stress – and this fear certainly causes stress, acknowledged or unknown — contributes to high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, all conditions in which Black people are disproportionately represented. 

A few days ago, I was watching the evening news with three friends, two of us were Black, two were white. The anchor began to discuss the death of a Black man, Keenan Anderson, after he was tasered by Los Angeles police officers. The video came on. I averted my eyes. Every time I see another incident, the fear for my son increases. The other Black person in the room didn’t watch either. I guess we’ve both seen enough. We can’t watch the inhumanity against Black people any longer, but I’m glad that our white friends watched. While the images cause me pain, they have revealed our reality to many in white America. But, must our continued pain and death be necessary to open eyes, hearts and minds to the need for change?

NOTE: This post was written before the murder of Tyre D. Nichols in Memphis. 

Posted on

A Milestone: Time to Reflect

I’ve written this blog for five years. You’re reading the 82nd entry. Some have garnered a great deal of interest. Others, not so much.

“Why would anyone care what I’m experiencing or what I think? Is anyone reading this stuff?” I’ve often wondered.

And, on particularly hard days, I think, “Is focusing so much on racism making me feel sad and angry?”  Life can be swayed by too many negative emotions.

In those moments, I decide it’s time to quit.

“Five years is a good endpoint,” I tell myself, firmly decided.

Then I pause and reflect.  The news, not historical documentaries, the daily evening news, along with 24,7 streamed headlines, thrusts me back into current reality. That’s when I know.  I must keep at it.

Racial bullying continues. Governors and school superintendents don’t want the complete history of our country taught. Inaccuracy is preferred, at least, preferred by some.  And, structures are still in place providing preferential treatment to white people.  There’s a lot of misinformation and ignorance about race, racism, and what it means to be Black in America.

It was 2017 when I started writing this monthly blog. At first, it was connected to my book by the same name. All the early posts related to the decades-long, racially underpinned experiences I’d had along with my female friends, the “daughters” of the dream. I was simply sharing glimpses of our racial reality.

Over time, the posts have evolved. While my friends are featured periodically and sometimes, I focus on our youthful experiences in Richmond, Virginia, it is more about my reflections as an adult, as a Black woman in America.

Based on interactions with white friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, I know, for example, many think my experience is the same as theirs. This seems to be particularly true if they think we share a similar educational background, financial means, and professional status or because we’re both women. I can understand why they might think that, but it’s not true. None of those factors makes a difference.

No one knows, or perhaps cares (or should care), about my education, finances, or profession when they see me on the street or in a store. What they absolutely know for sure is that I’m Black.  From that one piece of information,  certain assumptions are made, assumptions that are often founded in untruths.

There continues to be an invisibility to racism, a lack of understanding of the depth, breadth and impact of structural racism and implicit bias and, basically, a lack of understanding of what it means to be Black in America. This is what keeps me writing. Maybe one person will have an aha moment that leads them to open the mind of someone else and then someone else.

While I know that some choose to be uninformed or to believe in a skewed, untrue sense of America’s racial reality, I believe that others haven’t been exposed and that if educated, they would be on the side of justice, racial justice. I hope to be a part of that education.

So, here’s my goal. I want to help non-Black people see the America that I experience every day. I want to prompt reflections on what may be a new insight, to promote reading and learning about race and racism, and to urge more people to be a part of the push for racial justice. I’m not Pollyanna. I don’t think of myself as naive.  This process won’t be easy and it certainly hasn’t been quick, but I choose to be hopeful. I believe that information matters, that knowledge can lead to individual behavior change and, ultimately to societal transformation. I’m just one, small part of that ongoing, necessary swirl of information about race and racial justice.

If you think it’s worth a 4-minute read once a month (or so), become a follower (maybe even read some of the earlier posts), pass it on to a friend, a family member, or a co-worker and encourage them to learn more. We all have so much to learn — and to unlearn — as we work in 2023 — and beyond —  for a racially just America.

Happy New Year.

 

Posted on

Two brown girls

Is watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade a tradition in your family? It is in mine. As a child, on Thanksgiving morning, we’d drive across town to visit my maternal grandmother. After being greeted by her big hug and the wonderful smells of dinner cooking, I’d be drawn to the TV. The parade would be on. I’d plop down with my cousins watching the balloons and all the magic of the parade.

This year’s Thanksgiving wasn’t a lot different. Now, it’s me in the kitchen making my one obligatory dish, apple-sausage stuffing. The parade is usually on mostly for background noise and nostalgia, but this year something caught my eye.  I stopped to really watch. There were two brown-skinned women in the lineup for the Rockettes. They weren’t so light skinned that I barely noticed them as people of color. These were brown-skinned women who stood out in the mostly white precision line. I called my best friend, my Black best friend. She had noticed them too.

Founded in 1925, it’s not surprising that the Rockettes was an all-white dance troupe. Segregation was the law and the custom. What is a bit surprising, and disturbing, is the organization’s depth of commitment to being all-white and the length of time that it remained so. At one point, the founder, Russell Markert, forbade the dancers from even getting a tan because “they might look like a colored girl.” Violet Holmes, a former director and choreographer said when asked about integrating the troupe, “Blacks would distract from ‘the look of precision,’ the Rockettes’ trademark.”

The first woman of color, Jennifer Jones, wasn’t added to the troupe until 1987 for a special Super Bowl performance. 1987. This was after the pinnacle of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, after Beverly Johnson became the first Black model to be on the cover of a fashion magazine, Vogue, in 1974 and after a Black woman, Vanessa Williams, had been named Miss America in 1984, and, most importantly, after the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act which prohibited employment discrimination. This dance group remained committed to being all-white for as long as possible.  So, even when the Rockettes finally integrated, it was not surprising that the lighter skinned candidates had a greater chance of acceptance, regardless of the dancing skills of browner girls, because the lighter ones would blend in with the look the organization was seeking and the Rockettes could check the “integrated” box.

So, in 2022, is it heartwarming or saddening that I found a moment of joy in seeing two brown-skinned girls proudly on the Rockettes’ line in front of Macy’s this Thanksgiving Day?

Pictured here — one of the two brown skinned girls in the Rockettes’ 2022 Thanksgiving Day performance.

There are so many components in defining American culture.  The Rockettes and Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade are a part of Americana. When my cousins and I were watching the parade decades ago, we didn’t see many, if anyone, who looked like us.  Subliminally, that lack of Black people sent us messages about where we could/should be and what we could do.  Representation matters in every aspect of American life and not just to children, to adults, too. While two brown-skinned girls dancing on the Rockettes’ line is not a deeply meaningful testament to the lessening of racism in America, it is another building block in creating a more racially just country … and it made me smile.