National Museum of African American History and Culture Archives

This illustration by Jennifer Luxton was created for and originally posted by Yes! Magazine and is shared with permission.

America isn’t ready for it.

Yet!

Over the last couple of years, I have heard a lot of talk about racial healing. I have the same reaction every time: How can we heal without treating the wound, and how can that be done effectively without understanding it?

I want America to recognize the depth of the racial wound and to acknowledge how that wound, that injury, that disease… spread and infected society.

Recently when talking with a black friend, she reminded me that my perspective is that of a black person. In her view, white people want this conversation to go away. When she hears ‘racial healing,’ she thinks it is code for ‘Black people need to get over it.’ Hmmm. Get over it.

I am just beginning to understand IT; the extent and impact of racial inequity and injustice were hard for even me to see. I too was duped. I understood prejudice and discrimination, but I thought those who were prejudiced were ignorant people or those whose views were ill-informed because they hadn’t gotten to know black people. And then, ignorantly, for decades, I thought discrimination had ended with the passage of critical pieces of civil rights legislation. I believed this country was a meritocracy. I believed that if you worked hard and played by the rules, you would ‘win’ by American standards. I was so very wrong. I didn’t understand the facts or the subtleties, the biases that shaped how the world was presented to me.

It wasn’t until recently that I began to fully appreciate the white lens through which many stories and ‘facts’ are told. Even when the recounting is not directly by a white person, the story is influenced by the majority culture/lore/norms. With each visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, or when reading posts on the blog, The Root, for example, I get a deeper appreciation for how much I never learned of the history, the accomplishments, the positive impact of black people on America. And it still isn’t being told in the dominant media.

It took the injustice of Trayvon Martin’s murder, coupled with the lack of consequences for his murderer to shock me out of my stupor. And it took listening to countless podcasts like ‘Uncivil,’ absorbing the wisdom and in-depth racial analyses from leaders and thinkers like john a. powell (capitalization is his preference), Robin DiAngelo, Richard Rothstein, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram Kendi for me to learn the insidiousness, intentionality, and impact of structural racism; the structures in place for decades causing black people to be disadvantaged as white people moved farther and farther ahead. My learning until 2012 had been casual, family-influenced, experiential. After the horror of Trayvon, my eyes opened to an obscured reality. I started on a conscious learning journey to understand the depth, breadth, and impact of structural racism on society and on me.

There have been decades of Band-Aids placed haphazardly with no real sense of where the wound was or the fact that the injury may present as a flesh wound — a small cut, quickly addressed, but it isn’t. IT is cancer, invasive, and all-consuming. Those Band-Aids were insufficient unless their intent was not to heal but to both mask the problem and the fact that no one was trying to cure it.

That’s how I see the rush to racial healing. Another Band-Aid.

Even though wounds can be ugly and painful to look at, they must be revealed and their cause understood. That’s my issue. I don’t think the racial wound has been fully revealed and understood. Has it been diagnosed by people with the insights, knowledge, and sensitivity to determine the problem fully, i.e., has the cadre of diagnosticians gone through the educational rigor to understand the symptoms, how the problem operates and how to treat it? Who is studying how to prevent it from returning? Who is focused beyond treatment to eradication?

Personally, I want to heal. I want America to heal. I just know that if it has taken me, a black, educated person directly affected by structural racism and implicit bias, some time to see and begin to understand it, how long will it take those who benefit from the way the country is?

America doesn’t seem ready – as a country — even to admit that racism exists, much less to learn how it occurred, and how it continues. And there is no quick, easy fix. It will take years of work. Racial healing is a process, not an event. We must unspin the web that created and now perpetuates racism. Then, systematically, we must replace it with a new societal reality. Only then do I think we can heal.

“It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.”

– Ralph Ellison

Note: Look to the August Daughters of the Dream blog for my thoughts on how I think the racial healing process might begin. Continue reading “Racial Healing”

The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened on September 24, 2016. When the date was announced six months earlier, in February, Black History Month, I marked it on my calendar. I had already planned two trips for the late summer/early fall, a friends’ outing to Spain and Morocco and another to Memphis to visit the National Civil Rights Museum. Living in Washington, DC, I had been watching the building of the museum and looking for the “opening soon” signage to become a definite date. Now that I had it, both trips would have to be planned around the opening. I wasn’t likely to receive an invitation to the festivities, but nothing would prevent me from being on the museum grounds that day. I had to be a part of this incredible event, a museum on the National Mall dedicated entirely to the history and culture of my people.

“I was sitting at home watching the opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture on TV. I could feel the energy and I, too, had been anticipating the opening. I started to wonder why I wasn’t there, then I told myself well it wasn’t my museum. That’s when I had the epiphany. Of course, it was my museum, my museum as an American.”

A white colleague told me that a few weeks after the museum opened. I don’t think he was alone in his viewpoint. Many white people were supportive of a museum dedicated to the African-American experience, but they weren’t sure where/how/if they were a part of it. Even I thought of it as my museum and, interestingly, was, at first, surprised by the numbers of white people during the firsts of my multiple visits.

That’s the problem.

The history of black America has never been a part of the history OF America. It always had a place, and one of significance, in black America, but little visibility in white America. My teachers and principal—all of whom were black—in elementary school made sure I knew it. Biographies of black Americans were prominent in the school library. Pictures and commentary on black people and achievements lined the bulletin boards in the classrooms and throughout the building. Not just for what was then Negro History Week, but throughout the year. And, the successes and milestones of black people were the everyday conversation at my family’s dinner table and readily available as both Life Magazine and Ebony Magazine were delivered to my home.

That wasn’t the experience for my white colleague. No focus was placed on teaching him about black America at any point in his formal education. Without his commitment to broadening his understanding of America, his knowledge would be driven solely by happenstance personal experiences and by the manner of coverage by the ubiquitous electronic, social, and print media.

Black history had been, and still is, compartmentalized, marginalized.

In 1977, many Americans, black and white, were riveted by the television miniseries Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Never had there been as mainstream, and as public, an examination of the history of black people in this country. Every episode became next-day conversations at metaphorical water coolers just about everywhere. But, today, four decades after recognizing how much Roots had revealed that we didn’t know, black history still is not fully incorporated into the American past that our sons and daughters learn in school. Black American history is still niche history, not yet seen—at least by those who control textbooks and our educational system—as a part of a comprehensive examination of our country’s history.

The jigsaw puzzle of America’s history continues to have too many missing pieces. But, for those who understand that gaps exist, and for those who want to understand the fullness, richness, and inequities born in American history, the resources today are many to take that powerful learning journey.

Note: Daughters of the Dream, a book I believe is one, small piece of that puzzle, will be released next month. More info coming soon.

Continue reading “Missing Pieces of American History”