I’m white. And in December of 2016 I hired a black nanny to watch my three-month-old daughter. I didn’t hire her because she was black. I hired her because she was also a Christian, she made me laugh and she gave me high fives when I showed her around the house during her interview. We clicked. We seemed to share the same sense of humor. Over the next year, we became like family. Recently, I got the courage to ask about her life growing up. This conversation changed my perspective on black struggles in the United States.
She spoke of her grandmother, the lady who raised her because her mother had twelve other children. She spoke of her beloved “grandfather”, a janitor, who worked picking cotton as a boy in Mississippi. He was deaf and didn’t come when called. His fellow field workers assumed he was stupid, but the plantation owner believed he needed proper schooling to learn sign-language. So he got to go to school instead, and later taught sign language to her. She spoke of her sister, her only other sibling that she lived with growing up together at their grandparent’s house. You might think she sounds relatively fortunate, but that’s not the case.
She also spoke of generations and generations of alcoholism and abuse. For punishment, her grandmother would lock her and her sister in a dirt cellar outside the house. She didn’t know her biological father, her beloved grandfather was also not her biological grandfather. I kept asking her about each generation, farther back and farther back, until she couldn’t give any answers. So many issues with drugs, so many issues with alcoholism.
I could have stopped the conversation there. But I wanted to know more. Alcohol and abuse seemed to repeatedly show up within her family, and she talked about it like it was normal. But it didn’t sound normal to me.
Then I did some research and discovered the sliver of an answer, watching the Netflix documentary 13th and Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Ava DuVernay. Institutional racism and the profitability of the U.S. prison system definitely seemed to perpetuate the issue. DuVernay gives a compelling argument that the current prison system creates a darkly beneficial underground economy to exploit “criminals” through unpaid or underpaid labor. In the early days of Jim Crow Laws, municipalities would round up black citizens for minor crimes like loitering or possession of illegal substances, then they’d dole out punishments far worse than the crime. After that, I watched the PBS documentary about the Black Panthers, also available on Netflix.
I came away from that experience with a timeline in my head. That timeline began in 1865 with the end of the Civil War. You see, I was always taught that slavery ended with the civil war, and I guess, technically it did. A liberal interpretation of the word slavery is any condition combining exhausting labor and restricted freedom. But the inequality never ended. As a society, we continued to exhaust and restrict black communities. After the failure of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872 (it only last for seven years), the KKK and Jim Crow prevailed in the South. White republicans who supported black freedom migrated west out of frustration with the current political climate. For thirty years, white people continued to stifle the success of black people in a time when they needed support and aid. In 1901, the Democratic Governor of South Carolina was so enraged that Theodore Roosevelt dined with Booker T. Washington, that he pledged to kill thousands of blacks in order to put them in their place.
In the early 1900’s, black universities, fraternities and sororities persevered, and for a decade things looked promising. But in 1914, Woodrow Wilson ordered a resegregation of federal workspaces that had been desegregated for nearly 50 years. Two generations! The following year, the racist film The Birth of a Nation won accolades as a cinematographic masterpiece. The film featured a white man playing an African American rapist. What?!? (Wikipedia Timeline of African-American history)
Lynchings and society’s inability to accept these “free” citizens as our own, perhaps led many to frustration. To the street gangs we see surface in the 1920s and 1930s, and the car gangs that we see in the 1950s and 1960s. These gangs evolved, and this ultimately led to the formation of the Bloods and Crips. But do you see the long line of issues that led us to this place? With difficulty finding jobs and gaining acceptance by other races in the country, it’s easy to see how generations upon generations met hardships. Heck! I feel sorry for myself when I get cut-off on the highway with my turn signal on.
Here is what I ask in honor of black history month. Please watch the above-mentioned documentaries. Think about these things. Read about them. If you have questions, ask those questions. And instead of focusing on Black v. White, or why you disagree with #BlackLivesMatter, let’s move beyond the surface. Let’s now understand we’ve got a lot of work to do to move forward.