In spring 2009, the second semester of my freshman year at Belmont University, I took two memorable classes: A black literature course and a civil rights history course, taught by Drs. David Curtis and Peter Kuryla, respectively. These were my Linked Cohort classes, so named because they consisted of two separate fields of study linked together, and complemented each other. A few months earlier, I was in my advisor’s office, and she was looking at ClassFinder on her computer to help me decide which set of these required general education courses I would be taking. She came across that pair, they fit into my schedule, and I was excited because I enjoy looking at the overlap between literature and history.
On the first day of Dr. Kuryla’s class, he asked each of us why we registered for this particular set of classes, and that was my answer. I said, “I like literature and I like history, so I’m excited to study both of them at once.” Another student said he was taking these classes because he’d come from a small, predominately white town, and was looking at the struggles African-Americans had endured through the years. In my mind, I dismissed his answer as a load of politically correct baloney. Little did I know that I would be doing the exact same thing as him over the next four months.
Before I took these classes, I struggled to understand racism’s relevance to today. Two months before the semester began, Barack Obama had become the first African-American President of the United States, and people across the country were excited about his achievement. The day after Obama’s inauguration, I was in Dr. Kuryla’s class, and we discussed the election. I started the conversation with a question. I asked “If race is no longer an issue deciding who gets to be President, why are we discussing Obama’s skin color?”
The whole class critiqued my remarks. Most of my peers’ replies have faded from memory, but one answer has remained with me even now. Jessica Anderson and Kierra Norman were two black girls who took these classes with me. They were the first to speak up and said, “You’re white. You don’t have to think about your skin color and the way it affects you like we have to.” And with those two sentences, everything I thought I knew about racism shattered before me like a crystal wine glass crashing to a hardwood floor.
As I was growing up, neither I nor my family was overtly racist or mean-spirited against non-white folk. We weren’t Neo-Nazis or involved with the KKK or waving Confederate flags. My mom and dad grew up listening to Motown artists such as Diana Ross and Donna Summer, and they watched TV shows with multi-ethnic casts such as The Jeffersons. I had done likewise, except that the pop culture figures and programs of my generation were different. Some of my favorite TV shows when I was a child were My Brother and Me, Kenan and Kel, Cousin Skeeter and All That. My siblings and I listened to popular musicians and bands such as Boyz II Men, TLC, and Destiny’s Child. And my family’s favorite baseball team was the New York Yankees, whose roster had men from all sorts of different racial backgrounds. All of us loved watching Derek Jeter, Cecil Fielder, and Tino Martinez make magic happen on the baseball diamond.
And yet, in our personal lives, we didn’t interact with people of color very often. We lived in a mostly white neighborhood, attended a predominately white church, and my siblings and I went to schools where almost all the students were white. Looking back, I don’t think we necessarily hated people who were different from us. We just didn’t get to know them as well as we should have.
Because of this, I heard all sorts of racial stereotypes, and I eventually started believing they were true. It was all I’d ever heard, and I never really understood how often I was labeling people I hadn’t gotten to know. People of Middle Eastern descent were described as “towel heads.” Once 9/11 happened, they became terrorists. All Asian people (aka “Chinese people”) did kung fu and worked in laundromats and talked like the Chinese restaurant owners from the movie A Christmas Story. All black people knew how to dance. If I was somewhere where there were few white people, I was uncomfortable because I was the minority. In church, I had been taught the Golden Rule. Yet somehow it didn’t occur to me that part of loving my neighbor as myself involved not labeling people who were different from me, because I would hate it if someone had done that to me.
As I grew older, I had a vague notion that I was holding onto pre-conceived ideas and fears about people of color. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d had several classmates who weren’t white, and I counted a few of them among my friends. I also had a few teachers who weren’t white. But I still wasn’t aware of the problems they faced because of their skin color, and I still hadn’t let go of some of the stereotypes that had been passed along to me. Instead, I unwittingly absorbed those stereotypes, and carried that mentality with me for years.
So when Jessica and Kierra spoke to me during that class discussion, it was eye-opening and disconcerting. I headed out of class that day knowing that I had been licked in that conversation. I also knew I would have to relearn everything I had been taught about racism over the years, and I was resistant to that process at first.
As the semester progressed, I was immersed into a view of America that was very different from the one I knew. It wasn’t the land of the free or the home of the brave that I’d been taught about ever since I was young. This America was struggling to become that type of country. We learned about the stereotypes of blacks that had been perpetuated since the Civil War era. We learned about black minstrel shows. We had an in-depth conversation about the debate between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington over black education. We read works by Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Lorraine Hansberry, among others. We read James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and discussed the struggle bi-racial people had in forming their identities. We wrote analytical papers about the Dred Scott and Plessy V. Ferguson Supreme Court decisions. We discussed lynching. We talked about the formation of the Ku Klux Klan as a social, political, and semi-religious institution. We learned about Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. We talked about the Nation of Islam. We learned about the Black Panthers and Huey Newton’s arrest. I watched my first Spike Lee movie ever. And with each lesson, Drs. Curtis and Kuryla would connect what we were studying to racial problems America was facing today. That bothered me because it felt like both of them were fixated on racism, and I wondered why they just wouldn’t get over it.
In my previous history and literature classes, I looked at America from a predominately white perspective. I didn’t know much about black history except a little about slavery, a little bit about Jim Crow, and a little about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. I had even less knowledge of black literature. I had read poems from Paul Lawrence Dunbar, selections from Oludah Equiano’s narrative of his captivity and enslavement, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy, and that was pretty much it. But either way, I thought it was great that America had come so far in overcoming racial discrimination, and I thought we should celebrate those accomplishments more than we did. It felt like I was being sent on a huge white guilt trip and I didn’t want to go along for the ride. And yet, Jessica’s and Kierra’s words continually echoed in my mind.
Towards the end of the semester in Dr. Curtis’s class, we watched Spike Lee’s movie Bamboozled. Damon Wayans plays Pierre De La Croix, a TV network scriptwriter who pitches an idea for a black minstrel variety show when his proposal for a Cosby Show-esque sitcom is rejected. Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, takes place in a watermelon patch and the actors are African-Americans performing in blackface. Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson are two impoverished street performers who agree to be cast as the show’s main characters to earn money. Savion Glover is Mantan and Tommy Davidson plays his sidekick, Sleep n’ Eat. Racial slurs and jokes about slavery and fried chicken and Alabama porch monkeys and incest are tossed around like seeds scattered in soil. Aunt Jemima, Little Nigger Jim, and Sambo are among the show’s characters. And the show becomes a hit.
As I watched this brutally offensive film, the whole semester flashed before my eyes. Every stereotype I’d heard as I was growing up, along with all the ones I had learned about during the previous 4 months, was right in front of me. It was overwhelming to see so much hatred at once, and I knew at that point that there was no turning back. I would never think about racism the same way as I had before.
That semester gave me so much to think about with regards to racism in America, and how I relate to people of color. In the following years, I had more revelatory experiences with learning about this issue in my classes. In spring 2010, I took an American history course that covered the period from Reconstruction through the Vietnam War. The professor, Debi Back, was Native American. We went over some of the same things I was taught in Dr. Curtis’s and Kuryla’s classes. We also learned about the Latin American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, and the American Indian Movement in the 1970s, which I never even knew existed until she brought it up. She had us read the autobiography of Mary Crow Dog, a leader in the American Indian Movement.
That fall, I took a folklore studies course with Dr. Cynthia Cox in the English department. We spent about half the semester learning about Native American folklore, since Dr. Cox has worked as an oral historian on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She had us read the book Neither Wolf Nor Dog, where the white author Kent Nerburn chronicles his experience of helping a Native American elder share his insights into the culture clash between Native Americans and non-natives. That was another edifying time for me.
Having these experiences hasn’t made me an expert on racism, or anything near it. And I will probably never stop learning. But when an engineer builds a bridge, he must first measure the gap between point A and point B. I’ve been given knowledge of how far the abyss between racial injustice and racial equity spreads, and surely that counts for something. At the same time, being anti-racist has to be more than an intellectual exercise for me. Alain Locke and Martin Luther King and all the other anti-racist activists and unknown folk for whom they advocated were flesh and blood people, and not just characters out of a history book. Today, millions of flesh and blood people around me are treated unjustly because of their skin color. So this new attitude my education has given me has to translate into how I interact with others. But this is where things get messy.
Since I’ve spent time looking at America from the angles of people whose racial backgrounds are different from mine, I’m more hesitant to accuse others of playing the race card when they feel the need to talk about race. When racial jokes are told and racial stereotypes are thrown around among people I know, it’s been easier for me to recognize these things as derogatory and speak out against them. But sometimes it gets frustrating to do that, since the people I talk to about these things have deeply ingrained prejudices, and I feel like a broken record telling people over and over again to let go of their bigotry. At the same time, I used to have that problem. I can see myself in these people, and I know firsthand it takes a while to unlearn mistaken things one has been taught. If I had more patience, it would be much easier to handle situations like this.
It also doesn’t help that I’ve been very shy and introverted my whole life. Saint Paul had his thorn in the flesh that plagued him every day. I have a tongue that gets tied pretty easily when I’m around other people and hinders me from communicating as effectively as I want to. I’m not using this problem as an excuse for not speaking out when I should, but it’s painful to deal with it when my voice can be a powerful tool for social change. Edmund Burke once wrote that “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” I don’t want to do nothing when people are treated unfairly. In any case, this has been the extent of my anti-racist activism. If I knew of other ways to get involved in this cause, I would do it in a heartbeat. I just need guidance to know what to do next.
My relationship with Jessica and Kierra was very casual. We’d see each other outside of class occasionally. Kierra lived in the same dorm building as me during our freshman year, so I ran into her every once in a while. And I’d see them both around campus sometimes in the years to follow. But we’d gone our separate ways once the spring 2009 semester was over. I never had them in another class again.
A lot has happened since then. In 2013, I shared this story as a submission for a contest at Belmont. The contest was a part of the school’s annual Humanities Symposium, a collaborative effort amongst the school’s departments of English, Philosophy, and Foreign Languages. Each year, they would choose a theme related to the humanities and host a week long program of guest lectures and workshops centered on that theme. As a part of the Symposium, the English department held its annual student composition contest, where students could send in essays, poetry, and short stories related to the Symposium’s theme. Winners had the opportunity to share their work during the week of the Symposium. The theme for that year was Encountering the Other, and I instantly thought of the semester I had spent with Jessica and Kierra. When I finished writing my essay, I was able to reach out to Kierra via Facebook and send it to her. She read it, and we had a brief but meaningful chat afterwards about how much her words to had meant to me over the years. Even though I lost the contest, I counted that as a win.
In the years to follow, many racially charged incidents happened around the country. In 2014, Tamir Rice was gunned down by police for the crime of playing with a BB gun. The following year, Dylann Roof killed nine black people having a Bible study at their church. In 2020, the country was reeling from the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis who was suffocated to death by white police officer Derek Chauvin, who suffocated him to death by placing his knee on his neck for nine minutes straight. People’s anger and grief manifested itself in nationwide protests, rioting, and cries for justice. The president’s response was to unleash the National Guard in cities across the country, tweeting “When they start looting, we start shooting,” as he sat safely tucked away in the White House basement. Statues of seemingly every person with even a slightly racist background in our country’s history were pulled down left and right. My own high school alma mater was embroiled in its own controversy upon the revelation that our school’s namesake was a Confederate sympathizer during the Civil War. On our alumni Facebook page, former students of color shared anecdotes of racism they experienced while enrolled there and asked for the school to change its name.
In the midst of all of this, I still haven’t been able to contact Jessica. I’ve tried reaching out to her on Facebook and Twitter with no luck at all. But I also can’t blame her if she never wants to speak to me again. Every time I interacted with her, she was kind and friendly. And I failed to return the favor. I wasn’t rude, but I shied away from her. Perhaps this was because I’ve struggled with shyness for as long as I can remember. Or maybe it was partly because I was taking a long hard look at the unexamined labels and prejudices I had built up against non-white folk over the years and was struggling to overcome those problems since they were so deep-seated. But either way, I squandered the gift of getting to know her. And it’s too late for me to do anything about it. She graduated from Belmont ahead of me, I don’t know what she’s doing with her life now, and it very well could be awkward for her to receive a Facebook friend request from me after I’ve clammed up around her so much.
And yet, I can take something away from the short time I knew her. If I could say anything to Jessica now, I’d let her know how much her words have meant to me. All these years later, they still echo within me. When I see news stories of men like George Floyd getting brutally killed by a police officer; or people like Dylan Roof shooting up a black church out of sheer bigotry; or Breonna Taylor dying because of a senseless no-knock warrant; in my mind’s eye I can imagine Jessica speaking to me as she did during that class discussion. I wonder if I’ve lost my chance to talk to her ever again. If I could, hopefully it would be meaningful for her to hear what I have to say. It would be cathartic for me to let her know it. “You’re white,” she told me when I asked why Americans couldn’t be colorblind towards each other in this day and age. “You don’t have to think about your skin color and the way it affects you like I have to.” Thanks to her and Kierra, I’ve been forced to think about it. It’s been impossible for me to look back.
Briana's Thoughts....Religion, Politics, Current Events 