Today I saw an eight-year-old girl for her first visit to our clinic. She was a bright, healthy girl, and her mother seemed very nicely attuned attuned to her. The girl was a good student. I asked her mother if the family ever got to eat together--amongst Pediatricians, this is felt to be a good thing for families: drugs and other risky behaviors occur a lot less when families are able to have dinner and other kinds of quality time together. I assumed that this must be the case because the girl seemed so together.
I learned that in fact, dad spends a lot of time in Mexico helping his family, and this mother cares for her three children AND works two jobs--one from 8:30 to 4:00 and the 5:00 to 10:30PM. She kind of joked that her chldren are raising themselves--but clearly she is doing a great job because this girl just shined--and wanted to be a teacher when she grew up--but there has to be some cost.
Mom had four siblings, and felt she was so short because they had been malnourished. Like many immigrant parents, she had left school and gone to work at an early age, eleven, in her case, taking care of other children. I can only picture her own mother being a skilled manager of scarce resources, and who taught this mother well.
I would give anything for her to have a chance to finish high school someday and have a chance to go back to school and enjoy learning, run a day care or become a teacher--to have a chance to do something for herself. It's unfair that it is so hard for working people, that immigrants are scapegoated. And I know a many more immigrant parents as worthy as she is. We need a better world for that to happen.
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
A few Good Books
I love reading history, and presently at my bedside is Reconstruction, America's Unfinished Revolution, by Eric Foner. We may have heard a lot about the civil war: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, then some stuff happened ..... But we are terribly ignorant about Reconstruction, the period after emancipation. Foner emphasizes, for one thing, that slaves were very much protagonists: as the Union Army moved through the South, slaves fled their masters and plantations well in advance, and many slaves joined the union army. People organized to demand land and services. Some abolitionists and government officials supported the slaves, others pressured them to return to their former masters as wage laborers and sharecroppers. Large amounts of confiscated land was given to the freedman, only to be taken back, as the North tried to win back some of the Southern gentry. The right to vote was not passed by the US Congress, after much resistance North and South, until 1967.
Both freedman (ex-slaves) and poor white farmers pressed to get land--land to be taken from the wealthy secessionists, the plantation masters. In one instance in Georgia, freedman and poor whites found common cause. This quote is from a petition by poor white farmers demanding land:
Appropriate out of the vast amount of the surplus lands of the wealthy, a comfortable home for the helpless and dependent black man whose arduous labor for the last two hundred years justly entitles him to such inheritance... We believe the freedman is just entitled to a home out of the lands of the secession party who tried to dissolve the Union in order to perpetuate slavery as the children of Israel were to the promised land.
While the wealthy schemed to perpetuate the plantation system by different means including convict leasing, freedman pressed for the right to be individual contractors, and have the law protect them when landlords failed to pay them. In South Carolina--which had the highest percentage of black people in a state--one freedman proposed a bill to regulate the profits of merchants and allow laborers to "meet and fix by ballot the rate of wages which their employer shall pay them." Hmmm ... sounds like an idea whose time has come.
Both freedman (ex-slaves) and poor white farmers pressed to get land--land to be taken from the wealthy secessionists, the plantation masters. In one instance in Georgia, freedman and poor whites found common cause. This quote is from a petition by poor white farmers demanding land:
Appropriate out of the vast amount of the surplus lands of the wealthy, a comfortable home for the helpless and dependent black man whose arduous labor for the last two hundred years justly entitles him to such inheritance... We believe the freedman is just entitled to a home out of the lands of the secession party who tried to dissolve the Union in order to perpetuate slavery as the children of Israel were to the promised land.
While the wealthy schemed to perpetuate the plantation system by different means including convict leasing, freedman pressed for the right to be individual contractors, and have the law protect them when landlords failed to pay them. In South Carolina--which had the highest percentage of black people in a state--one freedman proposed a bill to regulate the profits of merchants and allow laborers to "meet and fix by ballot the rate of wages which their employer shall pay them." Hmmm ... sounds like an idea whose time has come.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Racism Number 73
I picked up some ironing today from my former housekeeper B., a black woman who grew up in the south. She hated ironing but liked me enough to do it for me, and now that she's retired and scraping by, it's a way for us to have a visit and for her to make a little extra cash.
I've hear a lot of tales of woe from her. Just now Social Security cut her off for two months because they overpaid her some, and she's worried about paying the rent. I'll never forget the story she told about one of her wealthy clients who gave her a ride down to some poor part of town, and parked to drop B. off. The woman noticed that she was in a red zone and said she should move, but B. said to her, "It''s okay, they don't give white people tickets." B. Said I should have seen the look on the woman;'s face--we had a good chuckle over that.
Lately I've been hearing that two of her great grand children were sleeping over at her house sometimes. I had thought that it was to keep B. from being alone too much, but today the real story came out. Their mother lives about an hour east towards Sacramento, and she gets up at 3:00 AM to drive them to B.'s place, arriving around 4:30. They sleep a couple of hours and then go off to school, while the mom drives over to San Francisco to work. The town where they come from is pretty redneck, and one of the boys was being beat up by the white boys, and the schools were poor. Now they go to schools in Berkeley and the boy who was being bullied has improved his grades quite a lot.
I've hear a lot of tales of woe from her. Just now Social Security cut her off for two months because they overpaid her some, and she's worried about paying the rent. I'll never forget the story she told about one of her wealthy clients who gave her a ride down to some poor part of town, and parked to drop B. off. The woman noticed that she was in a red zone and said she should move, but B. said to her, "It''s okay, they don't give white people tickets." B. Said I should have seen the look on the woman;'s face--we had a good chuckle over that.
Lately I've been hearing that two of her great grand children were sleeping over at her house sometimes. I had thought that it was to keep B. from being alone too much, but today the real story came out. Their mother lives about an hour east towards Sacramento, and she gets up at 3:00 AM to drive them to B.'s place, arriving around 4:30. They sleep a couple of hours and then go off to school, while the mom drives over to San Francisco to work. The town where they come from is pretty redneck, and one of the boys was being beat up by the white boys, and the schools were poor. Now they go to schools in Berkeley and the boy who was being bullied has improved his grades quite a lot.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
When Racism Masquerades as Something Else
This was forwarded to me by an old friend: one of the first black students at Duke University in 1967.
Don't let the virulent hatred of Obama's presidency - veiled in "policy differences" - fool you. Just ask someone raised around bigotry.
Carlos Dews is an author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome.
‘'The nigger show."
I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer of 2009. I understood what the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president lacks legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support. I was not surprised to hear such a phrase.
I grew up in the 1960s during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where many of the books in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning they had been brought to the white school when the town was forced to integrate the public school system. I recall my parents had instructed me, before my first day of elementary school, not to sit in a chair where a black child had sat. And I remember my sister joked that her yearbook, when it appeared at the end of her first year of integrated high school, was in "black and white."
The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don't hesitate to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of truth I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught and how to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also learned another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something else.
More than 40 years after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of miles away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community program called the Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage communities to come together to read and discuss a single book. I chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in part because I thought that some of the most salient issues in the novel - racism, classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era - were perhaps relevant to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.
That there is racism in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to current affairs. In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a story in one of Italy's national newspapers detailed the experience of a Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty nigger) by two women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.
But I never imagined that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant to a country that had just elected its first black president. Ironically, until the election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in the United States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, the country had turned a corner, that the slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps inevitable. Now, my personal experience of Southern racism feels current and all too familiar. A news story about the Big Read that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20 (unaware that my grant was awarded during the Bush administration), presciently brought Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together in its headline: "Obama brings antiracist book to Rome."
Jimmy Carter was lambasted for having recently explained that the vehemence with which many Americans resist Obama's presidency is an expression of racism. Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding by labeling as "racist" what on the surface could be perceived as legitimate policy differences. Like Carter, as a white Southern man, I can see beyond the seemingly legitimate rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much of the opposition to Obama and to his administration's policy initiatives. I also have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct confirmation of the racial hatred toward Obama.
The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are, because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.
Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This obfuscation makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing out their racist motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing "the race card." But I know what members of my family mean when they say - as so many said during the town hall meetings in August - that they "want their country back." They want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person. They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their country.
During a phone conversation a few weeks after Obama's election, my father lamented that he and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in Shreveport, La.: Given Obama's election, "the niggers are already walking around like they own the place. They won't even give up their seats for white women anymore. I don't know what we're going to do with 'em."
My students often ask me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in racism offered by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old - roughly the same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - I recall knowing that I didn't agree with racism More important, my paternal grandmother provided me with the encouragement that I could ignore what I was being taught. She provided me with the courage to resist.
My grandmother hoped that my father and his father represented the last generations of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life - virulently racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and self-defeatingly stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and prayed I could avoid becoming.
However, my father and his father were not the last of their kind; their racial hatred has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would recognize the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down politicians and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the only change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with more euphemistic language.
Rather than seeing my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over time, pulled in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent of what is called the Walmartization of American retail.
It might be easy to see literature as impotent in the face of the persistence and adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the transformative potential of literature and its ability to provide an alternative view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill a Mockingbird can provide inoculation against the virus that is racism.
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Don't let the virulent hatred of Obama's presidency - veiled in "policy differences" - fool you. Just ask someone raised around bigotry.
Carlos Dews is an author, a professor of English literature, and chairman of the Department of English Language and Literature at John Cabot University in Rome.
‘'The nigger show."
I first heard this expression used to describe the Obama administration during a visit to my hometown in East Texas during the early summer of 2009. I understood what the epithet meant: Our minds are made up, the president lacks legitimacy, and there is nothing he can do that we will support. I was not surprised to hear such a phrase.
I grew up in the 1960s during the ragged end of the Jim Crow era, where many of the books in my school library were stamped Colored School, meaning they had been brought to the white school when the town was forced to integrate the public school system. I recall my parents had instructed me, before my first day of elementary school, not to sit in a chair where a black child had sat. And I remember my sister joked that her yearbook, when it appeared at the end of her first year of integrated high school, was in "black and white."
The outward signs of racism of my home state have now disappeared, but racial hatred remains. My father and his friends still use the word nigger to refer to all black people, and the people of my hometown don't hesitate to spout their racist rhetoric to my face, assuming I agree with them. I hold my tongue for the sake of having continued access to this kind of truth I learned long ago how not to accept the hatred I was being taught and how to survive not having done so. More recently, I realized that I also learned another lesson: how to recognize racism when it masquerades as something else.
More than 40 years after my first experiences with racism, I am thousands of miles away in Rome, but surrounded by ghosts. Last year, I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for a community program called the Big Read, which sponsors activities to encourage communities to come together to read and discuss a single book. I chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, in part because I thought that some of the most salient issues in the novel - racism, classism, xenophobia, the Jim Crow era - were perhaps relevant to an increasingly diverse, contemporary Italy.
That there is racism in Italy is obvious to anyone who pays attention to current affairs. In fact, during the first week of the Big Read Rome, a story in one of Italy's national newspapers detailed the experience of a Nigerian woman being called sporca nera (essentially, dirty nigger) by two women she asked to stop smoking on a Roman bus.
But I never imagined that consideration of the novel would prove so relevant to a country that had just elected its first black president. Ironically, until the election of Barack Obama, my discussions of racism in the United States seemed historical. I felt that with the passage of the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, the country had turned a corner, that the slow evaporation of overt racism was perhaps inevitable. Now, my personal experience of Southern racism feels current and all too familiar. A news story about the Big Read that appeared in La Repubblica on Sept. 20 (unaware that my grant was awarded during the Bush administration), presciently brought Rome, Obama, To Kill a Mockingbird, and racism together in its headline: "Obama brings antiracist book to Rome."
Jimmy Carter was lambasted for having recently explained that the vehemence with which many Americans resist Obama's presidency is an expression of racism. Carter was accused of fanning the flames of racial misunderstanding by labeling as "racist" what on the surface could be perceived as legitimate policy differences. Like Carter, as a white Southern man, I can see beyond the seemingly legitimate rhetoric to discern what is festering behind much of the opposition to Obama and to his administration's policy initiatives. I also have access, via the racist world from which I came, direct confirmation of the racial hatred toward Obama.
The veiled racism I sense in the United States today is couched, in public discourse at least, in terms that allow for plausible deniability of racist intent. And those who resist any policy initiative from the Obama administration engage in a scorched-earth policy that reminds me of the self-centered white flight, the abandonment of public schools, and the proliferation of private schools, that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools. The very people, like my own rural, working-class family back in East Texas, who stand to gain from the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are, because of their racism, willing to oppose policies that would benefit them the most. Their racism outweighs their own self-interest.
Unfortunately, racists in the United States have learned one valuable lesson since the 1960s: They cannot express their racism directly. In public, they must veil their racial hatred behind policy differences. This obfuscation makes direct confrontation difficult. Anyone pointing out their racist motivations runs the risk of unfairly playing "the race card." But I know what members of my family mean when they say - as so many said during the town hall meetings in August - that they "want their country back." They want it back, safely, in the hands of someone like them, a white person. They feel that a black man has no right to be the president of their country.
During a phone conversation a few weeks after Obama's election, my father lamented that he and my mother might have to stop visiting the casinos in Shreveport, La.: Given Obama's election, "the niggers are already walking around like they own the place. They won't even give up their seats for white women anymore. I don't know what we're going to do with 'em."
My students often ask me how I managed to avoid accepting the lesson in racism offered by my family. From the time I was 4 or 5 years old - roughly the same age as Scout Finch, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird - I recall knowing that I didn't agree with racism More important, my paternal grandmother provided me with the encouragement that I could ignore what I was being taught. She provided me with the courage to resist.
My grandmother hoped that my father and his father represented the last generations of the type of Southern man that had shaped her life - virulently racist, prone to violence, proud of their ignorance, and self-defeatingly stubborn. It was a type of Southern man that she hoped and prayed I could avoid becoming.
However, my father and his father were not the last of their kind; their racial hatred has been passed on. My grandmother, if she were alive, would recognize the same tendencies among many of the people who shout down politicians and bring guns to public rallies. She would also see how the only change they have made is to replace overt racist epithets with more euphemistic language.
Rather than seeing my home state and its racist attitudes, slowly, over time, pulled in the direction of more acceptance, the country as a whole has become more like the South, the racial or cultural equivalent of what is called the Walmartization of American retail.
It might be easy to see literature as impotent in the face of the persistence and adaptability of racism. But I continue to believe in the transformative potential of literature and its ability to provide an alternative view of the world. And for children who are not lucky enough to have grandmothers like mine, I believe that books like To Kill a Mockingbird can provide inoculation against the virus that is racism.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Race in America: We anti-racists need to be more visible
Race in America: it could make you hopeless. It started last week with the sentencing in the trial of the BART policeman who murdered Oscar Grant. Johannes Mehserle, white man, kills a black man: 2 years in jail. Michael Vick, black man, accessory to dogs being killed: 4 years. Mark McGwire abuses steroids: no years, Marion Jones, 4 years. Etc.
It all started again tonight when I Googled the first two lines of a rap song I heard, "No more health care/no more dreams" and the name "The Panther," all that I heard while listening in my car last week. There were a lot of right wing, anti-Obama, anti-black sites. These sites took up a lot of space for anyone searching on themes of race.
On the positive side was a site about a new curriculum on the history of racism in Oregon, in their public schools, and another called whiteantiracistparent, and on her blog a number of anti-racist blogs she follows.
It got me to thinking that we who oppose racism need to be as visible as we can, to have more blogs than the racists, that we need to speak out about it to white people and not leave it for people of color. That we need to the visible ones and not the Tea Party bigots.
It all started again tonight when I Googled the first two lines of a rap song I heard, "No more health care/no more dreams" and the name "The Panther," all that I heard while listening in my car last week. There were a lot of right wing, anti-Obama, anti-black sites. These sites took up a lot of space for anyone searching on themes of race.
On the positive side was a site about a new curriculum on the history of racism in Oregon, in their public schools, and another called whiteantiracistparent, and on her blog a number of anti-racist blogs she follows.
It got me to thinking that we who oppose racism need to be as visible as we can, to have more blogs than the racists, that we need to speak out about it to white people and not leave it for people of color. That we need to the visible ones and not the Tea Party bigots.
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