My participation in Dr. King's 1965 march into Montgomery, Alabama, was the beginning of my journey to participate in the struggle for racial justice that emerged in the 1960s. As I wrote in a blog entry about that event, I joined a group of Mundelein College students who rode a bus from Chicago to Alabama. Our goal was to join the last leg of Dr. King's historic march. It was the first time I was in a racially diverse setting and the first time I saw that I could participate in the civil rights movement of that era. Of course, I still had a long way to go in my understanding of racism, a process that continues to this day. This blog is about what happened in years afterwards and how my thinking changed.
The march experience energized both the students and the administration of my college after we returned to Chicago. In 1965 the Johnson Administration launched the Upward Bound Program, and my school was among the first to sign up. Upward Bound was based on the premise that minority and inner city students were disadvantaged because of poverty and inferior schools. Many could succeed, however, if they were given a chance to get study skills, tutoring and encouragement. Colleges could play a role in bridging the gap between them and their more privileged counterparts by offering summer programs designed to provide these things. Perhaps because of my experience with the Montgomery march, I was hired for the first two summers. I think the program reflected what I then understood the struggle to be: bridging the gap while supporting all efforts to end poverty and erase prejudice.
I loved my work as a tutor-counselor for Upward Bound and felt that I learned much. It was emotionally powerful as well. Perhaps the strongest benefit was the chance to be a tutor for the first time and also to get to know students who were African-American, the largest category of participants. Wanting to refresh my memory about the program, I started with Wikipedia, learning that the program exists to this day. And I was even more surprised to learn that a short 30-minute documentary was made in 1968 about the program. It's called A Space to Grow, and can be viewed on YouTube. Narrated by Henry Fonda, it was nominated for an Oscar. As I watched it this morning, I was incredibly surprised to see that I was in it! (My brief scene is at 15:08.) This is the only fragment of my 20-year-old-self that I have, never having owned a video camera. Our lives are probably over-documented today, but for those of us who came of age then, finding such a fragment is is akin to a surprise discovery on an archeological dig. I digress.
As we all know, progress is not a straight line. Dr. King came to my city, Chicago, in the late sixties as a leader in the open housing marches held there. Due to what I later came to know as "red-lining"--the practice banks and mortgage companies used to limit where black people could live--Chicago housing remained starkly segregated: a largely white North Side, and largely African-American South Side. The exploitive parts of the real estate industry reinforced that through "block-busting"--the practice of selling a house in a white area to a Black family, prompting other white families to sell cheaply to avoid the threat of collapsing property values. And then there was my father. He was not a hateful man, but he nevertheless expressed a common form of racism at the time: segregation was good for everybody because "birds of a feather flock together", and attempts to change that often result in violence or economic ruin; furthermore, individuals should have the right to sell to whoever they chose. I didn't think I believed that, but I lacked a place to discuss it (Why I didn't raise the question in class I don't know.), a support group, or a way of dealing with the fear I probably felt about joining. (Marches were peaceful, I remember--except for angry whites who tried to disrupt them.) Things had seemed more clear-cut in The South: laws preventing African-Americans from voting amid the practice of Jim Crow.
In 1968 it was time to graduate and enter the workforce as a community journalist. At my first job, as a reporter for a community newspaper chain, I wrote a series with another reporter on poverty in Chicago, and I also covered a story on the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton by police. News stories of Hampton's death, including my own story, clearly pointed to a police massacre, but those stories led nowhere. We were still decades away from a reckoning with police violence against people of color. The miscarriage of justice then was part of my growing understanding that news reports would not, by themselves, lead to any change. Other concerns were growing at the time as well: the ongoing Vietnam War and my own fledgling understanding of feminism. It wasn't until the 1970s that my understanding went to another level.
In 1977, shortly after my move to Colorado, the TV miniseries Roots was broadcast, and like millions of others, I watched it. Much of the research behind it, based on Alex Haley's novel of the same name, has since been challenged, but for me at the time it was my first real introduction to the history and brutality of slavery. And though I may not have it explained it as such, I began to see the links between that tragic episode of racism--along with more reading about the early wars against Indigenous people in the US-- and the issues of the day. The 70s were also a time when people challenged many of the assumptions of the 60s--that government programs like the War on Poverty and Upward Bound--could reverse intractable problems like war and racism.
But there was a new program that I thought might really help. As in Chicago, housing patterns were segregated in Denver and there were calls for change. During the early 80s, for a few years, I drove a school bus for the Denver Public Schools. I was one of many drivers hired for the district's attempts to desegregate schools through busing. Every morning and afternoon I drove white kids to largely black schools and vice versa. The aim was to boost the academic achievement of minority students, but once again real change failed to materialize. Years later, after I left my driving job, the program ended, and school choice became the focus of efforts to mitigate racial disparities in education. During those years, I had no ready arguments for what should be done, and my focus shifted to feminism.
By 1981, I had joined the volunteer collective of the Woman to Woman Feminist Book Center in Denver. In the larger feminist world, white women were being taken to task for insensitivity and neglect of issues important to women of color. (See This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.) The bookstore collective, which had some diversity but was primarily white, had disagreements about many things, and in that year, about racism. White members were challenged by Jewish women and women of color, who said they, including me, were insensitive to communication differences (e.g., spontaneity vs. rules), religious symbols (a Christmas tree in the window, for example) and insufficient materials about diversity in the movement. At a collective meeting one night, four other members besides myself were told to leave. I was devastated, but the event led to a year-long study group that the five of us started for ourselves to try to understand what had happened.
Eventually I developed an interest in different communication patterns among cultures and then followed my decision to go back to school with the aim of becoming an English teacher for foreign students. New understandings showed me that racism was not only prejudice and discrimination but also insensitivity to cultural differences and what is now called intersectionality.
By 1990 I had graduated with an MA in Education and had left Denver to teach English in Japan. During the 20 years I spent there I saw in different ways how race, gender and economic privilege can intersect and contradict each other. The setting shifted from US issues to those in Japan. For example, how did I look at my status as a white woman hired to teach a prestige language--and also a foreigner and a non-citizen in another country? There was a lot of debate among my friends about this.
At the same time, I was also absorbed in language learning and its various aspects. One was cross-cultural communication--a rather new academic field at the time. It invited us to examine how communication involved much more than learning vocabulary. Also important were a culture's values, non-verbal practices, communication strategies and cognitive processing. More and more I began to learn how important it is to really understand how our minds work in order to understand motivation, memory and many other aspects including bias and decision-making. In the 10 years since I retired and left Japan, it's psychology and cognitive bias that have come to fascinate me. More on that in my next blog: Racism: Part 3.
