Tag Archives: Talking About Race

The Long March to Justice

By Bobbie Kirkhart

Pho­to Cred­it: “Mia­mi Protest, June 7, 2020” by Mike Shaheen

When I was five years old, I announced my new dis­cov­ery: “Negroes (the polite term at the time) are bad.” My par­ents tried to cor­rect me, but I felt my log­ic was unshak­able: When the radio report­ed a crime, the per­pe­tra­tor was often black. They nev­er said that a sus­pect was white. I didn’t know any black peo­ple in our seg­re­gat­ed town, but I knew many white peo­ple, and none of them were crim­i­nals. This was an open-and-shut case in my five-year old’s mind.

A few weeks lat­er, my father took me down­town to see a parade. He struck up a con­ver­sa­tion with a black woman we were stand­ing next to. She had a baby, who cap­tured my inter­est, though I was more entranced by her Kraft Caramels (my favorite can­dy at the time) she shared gen­er­ous­ly with me. This, of course, com­plete­ly shat­tered my baby bigotry.

When I was approach­ing mid­dle age, I reflect­ed on the inci­dent. Only then did I real­ize that when I was young, parade-view­ing areas – as well as every­thing else – were strict­ly seg­re­gat­ed in Enid, Okla­homa. It must have tak­en some plan­ning and more than a small amount of courage to arrange for us to stand in the “col­ored area” next to a friend­ly woman who just hap­pened to have a cute baby and my favorite candies.

The issue of race did not come up often in our small, most­ly white town (at least not in the white com­mu­ni­ty), so I had lit­tle need to reflect on what I had learned until Emmett Till’s mur­der on August 28, 1955, made nation­al news and pro­voked nation­al outrage.

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A Call for 60s-Style Teach-ins on Anti-Racism

By Sabrina Völz

 

Pho­to Cred­it: “DSC8902 – The Ele­phant in the Room” by damienconway30

Let’s start off with a few telling facts: The ori­gin of the word “racism” stems from the French word racisme which appeared dur­ing the last decades of the 19th cen­tu­ry. In Eng­lish, how­ev­er, accord­ing to the Mer­ri­am Web­ster Dic­tio­nary, “Racism appears to be a word of recent ori­gin, with no cita­tions cur­rent­ly known that would sug­gest the word was in use pri­or to the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.” Now, let that sink in. The peo­ple at Web­ster are also quick to point out that just because the word is “fair­ly new” doesn’t mean that “the con­cept of racism did not exist in the dis­tant past.” No won­der we – and with we, I mean all soci­eties – have a prob­lem with racism. So let’s get to the root of it and root it out.

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