I grew up in Washington, D.C., later named chocolate city, and the experience of growing up in Washington,
D.C. in Southeast Washington, which is right
on the Maryland/D.C. border with poor white
people on the Maryland border and working
black folks on the D.C. side was pretty crucial
in laying the foundation for my understanding
of humanity, not just of race. As a child,
as most children are, I was really inquisitive,
and so I knew that when I went to Northwest
Washington D.C., where The Capitol, The Monument,
and The White House were located there was
a different quality of life in the people
who matriculated that area and then right
down the street almost on T Street in Northwest,
where my grandmother and grandfather lived,
it was not that way. I mean they had their
own home but, directly opposite the street
they were on, people lived in abject poverty
and in the wintertime, as I got older, I was
saddened and horrified to think about what
people did in the cold winter if they didn't
have heat and many of them didn't. Mill Valley
is a primarily white town that is definitely
practices the ethos of colorblindness, is
what I would call it now, it's one of those
places that, you know, it is very white and
a lot of the white folks there proport not
to see race. You know, it's sort of, it's
seen as a benevolent gesture, to not notice
race. Color became part of the conversation
when I asked my mother, "why is it like this?"
And she said to me simply, "Sugar, white folks
have set it up like this." And I'm thinking
about the white children and the white families
I knew, they were too poor to set anything
up. And I asked her, because they were in
the same situation I thought that we were
in, and they really are. And I asked her to
explain it and she said,"Well, you know, you
know I grew up in the South," she said. I
said, "yes." And she said, "You know I was
there when the Klu Klux Klan ran the show
in North Carolina, and but before that, there
was you know, black people couldn't eat in
a restaurant where other...." She would say,
"The other people ate." What other people
are you talking about? She would almost censor
herself for me and I thought, "oh, there's
a lot here." And then she explained slavery
to me. And I remember I was really, you know,
in like elementary school and she described
slavery, that people, human beings were slaves
and I didn't understand what she meant. So
I asked her to explain that, "What do you
mean, they had them do a lot of chores?" Because
she had us doing a lot of chores at home,
but I knew that wasn't what she meant, but
I wondered, "what do I compare this to?" And
she said, "Oh no sugar, uh uh, they couldn't
be married, they couldn't keep their children,
they didn't have their own souls, everything
was taken from them and you know, your grandfather--she
meant her father--his father was a slave."
I said, "No way." She said, "Ya, that's why
he has that African name." I said, "Why did
the people let themselves be slaves?" And
she said, "Oh Ericka, it wasn't like that,
the whole government supported it." I had
gone to Mississippi because I learned about
this relative that I had, who was a distant
relative, but also one that I hadn't heard
about until college, which I found telling
about my own family, about what colorblind
racial ideology is. Because, he was the governor
of Mississippi from 1956 -1960. And so the
moment that I remember, I guess, is being
in the archives in Mississippi, right, on
this research fellowship. And reading these
letters that he wrote, mind you he was elected
into office four months after Brown II, and
one of the first things he did was set up
the State Sovereignty Commission and sort
of be in cahoots with the Citizens Council
and try to use the law to preserve Mississippi's
way of life. Right, so to subvert Brown to
aracial legalistic means. But it wasn't until
I read about the horrors of slavery, equal
to, if not worse than, the Nazi Holocaust
against the Jewish people, that I got angry.
When I saw that this had gone on for centuries,
not just a period of time related to a war,
and that the government had sanctioned it,
that the Pope at the time had sanctioned it,
I became angry. In the archives I was reading
this letter of this, this guy J.P. Coleman,
my grandmother's sister's husband--so distant.
But, it was this letter that, to me, echoed
of a sort of Ward Connerly colorblind approach
to the law as a way to ensure that, that racialized
hierarchies of power continue and are upheld.
And the letter was basically one of, you know,
in 1956 Mississippi, looking to remove the
language of race from the law so as to maintain
segregated schools. But right up until I began
reading and reading and reading and reading
and I wasn't reading, you know, just, I was
reading history that I could find that wasn't
telling lies. And that's the other thing that
made me angry, no one had ever told me in
school. No one had ever told me the truth.
They told me about Crispus Attucks, ok you
know I don't have anything against Crispus
Attucks, but I needed to know more than the
black men who fought in the American Revolution,
you know? But I didn't get the truth, I was
told a watered down story about Native Americans.
And I watched t.v. shows that showed Native
peoples as savages that didn't speak any language
that was discernible. African people that
had bones through their noses and had no language
except 'ooga booga,' when I realized that
this is what, not only I was being taught,
but all of the nation's children and people
were being taught this, I was so pissed off.
The Civil Rights Movement is easy to reduce
if it's only Mississippi god damn, if it's
only, you know, sort of the dogs and fire
hoses Bull Connor bigotry. It's easy to say,
that's not here anymore, we can't point to
that, we though we can sometimes, but I think
that that monolithic story is something that
needs to be looked at, something that I think
a lot of scholars look at. But something that,
looking at my great grand uncle's story, it
makes it more complex because Mississippi
wasn't all, you know, sort of, a rabid dogs
and fire hoses bigotry. It was also sort of,
sly purportedly, colorblind legalistic racism.
And I think that, so often we talk about the
interpersonal, when it comes to race when
we need to be talking about the structural
also. On the racism side, what I witness with
my dad in particular, was someone who was
very disturbed by racism. Someone who was,
is, very dark skinned. A dark skinned Mexican
man who hated being dark skinned. At the same
time there was tremendous pride in being Mexican.
There was tremendous pride in being brown,
my grandfather was a revolutionary in Mexico,
and there's a lot of pride about him having
been a revolutionary and fighting for the
rights of the poor. Right? So there's this
passion about revolution, there's this passion
about liberation that lives inside, at the
same time, there's that embarrassment about
being dark. I saw myself as ugly for many
years because, culturally, I was not light
complected, I have lips that are not thin
and I have kinky hair. I have all of those
things that the society at large, but in a
way its been internalized by my own community.
And it is not something that was overt in
my household because that is not so. But I
had somehow taken on and acculturated myself
to the expectations of society about what
I was supposed to be. The most staggering
piece truly about getting, working on, my
own internalized oppression had to do with
a dinner. I think it was a Thanksgiving dinner
in which we were telling these stories about
the ways in which my grandmother chastised
my mother's generation. And it was clear to
me in the telling of the stories, it still
makes me cry, that she both emotionally and
physically abusive. Not because this was her
intention, she was doing the best that she
knew, but that expectation that she had of
her children was absolute, unquestioning,
immediate obedience. I remember about ten
years ago, and I'm 54 so this wasn't that
long ago. Ten years ago, he was visiting and
he showed me a picture of himself when he
was four years old. Had never seen pictures
of him when he was young before, he never
showed any photos of himself to us. And he
showed me this picture, he was four years
old and he showed me this picture and he says,
"Look at this." I look at the picture, and
its this cute, beautiful four year old boy,
dark, dark and they lived in the desert, they
were even darker right? So they lived out
there in the desert, dark picture of this
four year old, cute four year old and I say,
"Dad, oh you're so cute, how come you haven't
shown me these pictures before? This is the
first time I've seen them." And he said, "Well,
look at it." And I look at it and he says,
"I look like a god damn piece of charcoal."
One day when my daughter, who's my oldest
child, age 12 did something. Talked back,
in a way that was inappropriate, and it was
really inappropriate, she was at that stage
of her own development, that she was self-actualizing
and I needed to make some room. And I said
to her, in a tone that I don't know if I can
quite capture, but I said, "Who do you think
you are?" And the intent was to stop her but
there was an unspoken expectation in the way
that that question was answered that she was
gonna say nobody. And that, that was the telling
point when I knew that there is something
here that has to be unpacked and I have to
do it, not for the world, I have to do this
so that my own family can survive and there
can be a healing inside of my family because
if I can't do that, then there's nothing I
can do in the world. So, as I began to unpack
the source of these behaviors, not just for
my family, but for other families, because
we weren't the only people that were telling
these amusing stories at Thanksgiving. I began
to look at why we engaged these and other
behaviors and they really have to do with
survival. There were periods of the history
of this country, particularly during slavery,
in which one's life depended upon how well
you could say yes sir, how convincingly you
could ingratiate yourself and how high you
could jump when told to jump. And, my grandmother
grew up in a time where lynching was a reality,
you know, nobody talked about in the past
tense, nobody talked about it as electronic.
It was the real deal, there were ropes and
torture involved. And raising your children
to know their place was critical. And had
there been a shift by the time my mother and
her brothers and sisters were born from my
grandmother's time? Certainly. And had there
been a shift from my mother's time to my time?
Most assuredly. But there were behaviors,
survival behaviors, that are embedded in both
cultures, both white and black, that support
this way of being and maintains a very specific
power structure that you have to sit down
and think about how you prepare yourself and
your children, not only to be oppressed, but
to be oppressors.
