movable type

Rosa Parks is dead. The next generation of civil rights heroes must be white people.

This morning, I got an email about the death of Rosa Parks.

 

“I’m 46,” the man wrote. “It’s hard for me to imagine that only 50 years ago prejudice was so rampant. I feel good about the progress that’s been made, but I also know that prejudice is still alive: stagnant and dormant in some people and ‘in your face’ in others. As a modern civil people, we must continue to fight prejudice, stand up against intolerance, and educate our youth about the importance of acceptance.”

 

“Where are the heroes of today?” he continued. “We need another Rosa Parks. We need another Martin Luther King. We need to do a lot more than what we have been doing.”

 

What we actually need, I replied quietly, are more white people who are willing to be civil rights heroes.

 

We need white people to be as outraged about racism as people of color are. We need white people to realize that racism is not a black issue—it’s a white issue. We need white people to refuse to participate in a system that privileges them over fellow human beings. We need white people to actively, visibly, and publicly examine their own role in perpetuating racism in subtle and unconscious ways, acknowledge and own their part in the problem, verbalize the unearned privileges that accrue to them simply because of their skin color, and demand those same privileges for people of color.

 

Fighting racism isn’t only the job of people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. The next generation of civil rights activists in this nation must be white people who realize that winning this fight will be the result of individual, daily actions on their part, not grand pronouncements and history month celebrations.

 

In “The Color of Fear,” a remarkable film shown during the community dialogue program, Building Bridges, a young African-American man named Victor puts it this way: “Most of the lethal racism we face isn’t the KKK burning crosses; it comes from people who experience themselves as decent folk, moral churchgoers.” “Racism is so deep.” he continues, “that you don’t think about it. It is insidious. It is in the very air that you breathe. White people don’t talk about what it is to be white; they talk about the human experience. Because in the U.S., white is human.”

Some say we should live in a colorblind world—that we are all human, after all. But if we are unable to see race, we cannot see racism—and denial is not a strategy. After hearing Victor’s story in “The Color of Fear,” a white man named David asks, “How can I help you?” “Help me by understanding yourself and the invisible protection you have because of your color,” is the reply. There can be no progress on the issue of racism, Victor explains, “unless you’re willing to be changed by my experience as much as I’m changed every day by yours.”

 

As long as we wait for national heroes to emerge, nothing will change. As long as we relegate the solution to the very people we’ve oppressed in the first place, nothing will change. Unless we wake up every morning determined to eliminate racism even when that work is difficult, nothing will change. Many times, racism has existed around me, but I didn’t notice—because it didn’t affect me. It’s this subtle racism we must fight. And to fight it, we must see it, not minimize it.

 

If Rosa Parks had waited for a Bi-Partisan Task Force on Unilateral Bus Seating, she’d still be standing on that bus. Sometimes, we just need to act. But let’s not confuse movement with action. Being a strong white ally doesn’t mean that we should take over, assume we know what is best for people of color, or ask them to speak for their people. Rather, it means that we should find out about people of color by listening to their stories, teach our children about racism, talk to other white people about racism, interrupt racist jokes or comments, and stand by people of color—not just when it’s easy or convenient, but always.

 

As Nelson Mandela once said: “your smallness will not save the world.” To end racism, we must make bold strokes and be active anti-racists. We must acknowledge our unearned privileges, accept our own racism, and own this problem ourselves, each individual one of us.

 

The police officer who fingerprinted Rosa Parks after that fateful bus ride was named Drue Lackey. When asked to comment on Parks’ death, Lackey simply said that he had no problem with black people and that he was just doing his job. As long as we “just do our jobs,” racism will prevail.

Why don't we know who Tamika Huston is?

What do Dr. Mark Warschauer and Michelle Gibson have in common?

Let’s see.

Dr. Warschauer has written seven books, including Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide, which discusses “haves” and “have-nots” and how differential access to information technologies contributes to economic stratification.

Michelle Gibson has not written any books. In fact, she is one of those “have-nots” about which Dr. Warschauer writes.

Dr. Warschauer is Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine, and has also taught at the University of Hawaii, Moscow Linguistic University, and Charles University in Prague.

Michelle Gibson works several jobs cleaning up human waste in nursing homes.

Dr. Warschauer's research focuses on the integration of information and communication technologies (ICT); the impact of ICT on literacy; and the relationship of ICT to institutional reform.

Michelle Gibson’s research focuses on having enough money to feed her children.

As noted on his website, Dr. Warschauer's personal interests include “bicycling, chess, water sports, and, of course, his family.”

Homeless, Michelle Gibson’s personal interests include finding a place for her family to live.

Dr. Warschauer is white. Michelle Gibson is black.

On August 8, 2003, Dr. Warschauer drove to work, forgetting that his son Michael was in the car.

On May 22, 2005, Michelle Gibson didn’t have a babysitter and did the only thing she knew to do: she left her son Devin in the car as she started her 16-hour shift at Mountain Trace Nursing Center.

What do Dr. Warschauer and Michelle Gibson have in common? They both killed their children. And that’s where the similarity ends.

Dr. Warschauer intended to drop his 10-month-old son at day care before going to work. Instead, he drove to his office and parked, leaving Mikey sleeping in his car seat in 80 degree weather. As Warschauer walked back from lunch, he spotted paramedics in the parking lot. Mikey was dead from heat stroke.

When Michelle Gibson checked on her 8-year-old son, he was also dead.

Prosecutors did not press charges against Dr. Warschauer, ruling the death accidental and his loss punishment enough. There was no doubt, they said, that Dr. Warschauer adored Mikey.

Michelle Gibson was charged with second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and felony child abuse. She and her grief remain in Jackson County Jail on a $100,000 bond. Why are we so quick to question whether she, like Warschauer, adored her son?

And why such disparity in treatment? Both babies are irretrievably dead. One parent was well-off, well-regarded, and white; the other poor, anonymous, and black. Both were sleep deprived. Both made disastrous judgments.

These deaths are a horrible tragedy. Is one criminal and one not? I don’t know. But I wonder why we are so quick to judge Michelle Gibson and so fast to pardon Dr. Warschauer. Didn’t both parents, both working hard and both exhausted, neglect their children? Is Michelle Gibson’s sorrow less sorrowful, her tragedy less tragic, her poor judgment poorer? Does our dismissal of her also point to an insidious pattern of privilege that disadvantages and even erases the dark-skinned and the poor?

Young women of color go missing in great numbers each year, yet our national attention is riveted on wealthy, white women: Elizabeth Smart the harpist, Chandra Levy the Capitol Hill intern, Jennifer Wilbanks the runaway bride. Why don’t we know the names of Tamika Huston, Tyesha Bell, or Alexis Patterson? They are missing like their white counterparts, but their names and stories are unknown. Why?

The leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S.is murder, disproportionately high for mothers of color, yet People magazine focuses on Laci Peterson and Lori Hacking and not their dark-skinned compatriots like Evelyn Hernandez, her pregnant torso also found in the San Francisco Bay.

Is it less important, less newsworthy, less relevant to lose people of color? Are minority victims, in effect, less human? Is their sorrow not as sorrowful, their tragedy not as tragic?

We tend to see people who are like us as three-dimensional, with detail and specificity afforded them: for example, you know much more about Dr. Warschauer than Michelle Gibson after reading this essay. Gibson remains one dimensional: faceless, she is just one poor and homeless single parent among many without the same level of specificity we give ourselves. She is the “other”; we can’t see ourselves in her story. In creating that distance, we ignore and disregard her, we de-humanize and erase her. We simply judge her.

Dr. Warschauer forgot Mikey because he was up late working on a research paper and was exhausted, he said. We can see ourselves in that story, we identify, we feel personally vulnerable: “if this smart, professional man could forget, maybe I could, too.”

But we must not only see ourselves in Warschauer’s story. We must also recognize part of ourselves in Gibson’s life, homeless and exhausted from manual labor in 16-hour shifts, unable to find a way out, without access to affordable childcare. We must not look away, rendering her existence as undifferentiated and one-dimensional.

Michelle Gibson, like Mark Warschauer, is a three-dimensional human being—not just a destitute, homeless, black woman with poor judgment. And until we know her story and can see ourselves in it in the same way we identify with Warschauer’s—until we can acknowledge that she has the same hopes and dreams as we do, and until we are as transformed by her experience as she is by trying to survive in our world—then she and others like her will never get our full attention and they will never get justice.

Why can't we have White History Month?

There is a petition being circulated on the Web that is addressed to “All Whites.” It has been signed by thousands of people, and reads in part: “We believe that if African Americans and now Hispanics can have their history month for their heritage, why can’t the White Americans have White history month? Wake up Americans before we become extinct! Please, sign my petition so that we can also have our White history month.”

This is an issue that surfaces every February, like clockwork, when Black History Month rolls around. I have the answer to the question: it is, quite simply, because every month is White History Month. 

When scholar Carter G. Woodson created what was then called Negro History Week in 1926, he hoped for the day when it no longer would be needed, when the contributions of people from various races, ethnicities and even genders would be taught fairly and properly. Woodson believed that Negro History Week would accomplish two things: build self-esteem among blacks and help eliminate prejudice among whites.

It was needed. As professor Yaw Boateng of Eastern Washington University reminds us, “between 1619 and 1926, African Americans and other peoples of African descent were classified as a race that had not made any contribution to human civilization; they were continually dehumanized and relegated to the position of non-citizens and often defined as fractions of humans. It is estimated that between 1890 and 1925, an African American was lynched every two and a half days. Peoples of African descent were visibly absent in any scholarship or intellectual discourse that dealt with human civilization.” This was the world in which Woodson lived.

But Woodson’s dream that Negro History Week would no longer be needed still isn’t a reality, nearly 80 years later. He dreamed of a day when every student's education would include such African-American figures as Crispus Attucks, who died in the Boston Massacre; Dr. Daniel Williams, who performed the world’s first open-heart surgery; Matthew A. Henson, who co-discovered the North Pole with Robert Peary, and Benjamin Banneker, the pioneer scientist who helped conduct the first survey of Washington. If you’re like me, those names weren’t mentioned in your history classes, and still aren’t today.

After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Black History Week was expanded into Black History month. I’ve heard people joke that February was chosen because it’s the shortest month. Cute. But no, that’s not the reason. It was chosen in part because the birthdays of slave abolitionists Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, as well as poet Langston Hughes and musician Eubie Blake, are in February. It’s also the month the NAACP was founded (in 1909) and the month that its co-founder, W.E.B. Dubois, was born (in 1868). On February 3, 1870, the 15th Amendment granting blacks the right to vote was passed. February 25, 1870, the first black U.S. senator, Hiram Revels, took his oath of office. It was on February 1, 1960, that a group of black Greensboro, N.C., college students began a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter. February is an important month in Black history, though few of us in the White community know it. The intention of Black History Month was not to confine our study of Black history to those 28 days of February. Rather, Black History Month must be the climax of a study of the Black experience throughout the year.

So back to the question of the petitioners: why is there no White History Month? In the words of a Tulane University Black History Month website, a “White History Month is not needed because the contributions of whites are already acknowledged by society.” In other words, American history is white history, plain and simple. And as Thomas Sowell has written, “You cannot understand even your own history if that is the only history you know.”

Being white in the United States means that when my daughters attend school, the curricular materials they receive reflect the color of their skin; the same is not true for my African-American friends and colleagues. When my children hear about their national heritage or about “civilization,” they are shown that people of their color made it what it is; again, not so for the children of my African-American friends. Scholar Peggy McIntosh, associate director of the Wellesley Colllege Center for Research on Women, listed these and other realities of what it means to be white in this country - simply conditions of daily experience which, as a white person, she once took for granted. Not only do “flesh” colored bandages match her skin color, she noted, but when she turns on the television or looks at the front page of the paper, she can see people of her race widely represented—and not just as criminals or sports figures. The same is not true for African-Americans.

Last year, the Long Beach Grunion announced that January 2004 would be the first annual “White History Month.” They reported that White History Month festivities would include mass viewings of the latest Pixar and Disney brand films, the NBC’s Frasier farewell season, wine-tastings, and free Jet Blue travel. “White Americans,” they reported, “are in a celebratory mood, eagerly anticipating their first month where they can finally pay respect to their culturally rich traditions and the lifetimes of all the white people who have made the world a better place to be white in.” It was written as satire, but truer words may never have been spoken than those last seven: a better place to be white in.

Let me change my answer to the opening question: we don’t need a White History Month - not because every month is White History Month, but because every year is White History Year. In fact, a colleague of mine put it even more aptly: “it’s even more than White History Year…it’s White History Life – just look at the names of bridges, mountain ranges, parks, universities, colleges, streets, cities, management styles and philosophies, pictures on money, constellations, the color of Santa Claus...”

Quick! Who were Otis Boykin, Garrett Morgan, Lewis Latimer, and Patricia Bath? If you don’t know, don’t tell me we don’t need Black History Month.

 

 

Otis Boykin (1920–1982) invented the electronic control devices for guided missiles, IBM computers, and the pacemaker. Garrett Morgan (1877–1963) invented the gas mask and the first traffic signal. Lewis Latimer (1848–1928) invented an important part of the light bulb — the carbon filament. Dr. Patricia E. Bath (1949–) invented a method of eye surgery that has helped many blind people to see.