on A Racially-Conscious America II

The confirmation of President Obama’s choice of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court could be another historic milestone. If confirmed Sotomayor will become the first Hispanic to sit on the Supreme Court.

As conservatives build their case against Sotomayor, one of the cases they are paying attention to is her ruling on Ricci v. Destefano. In 2008 Sotomayor supported the city of New Haven Fire Department after they threw out a test that was to be used for promotions after too few minorities scored high enough on it. Ironically enough, if Sotomayor is confirmed soon, she may end of ruling again on the case which is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court.

Sotomayor has said, “Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see.” She goes on to acknowledge, “I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and Latina heritage.”

Obama’s nomination is illustrative of how we are attempting to address the question I posed on my first blog about “A Racially-Conscious America.”

How does America move forward from a history of injustices?

Though not everybody may agree on the method, bringing diversity to the various branches of government and ensuring that multiple perspectives are represented is our current answer to this question. With a Yale and Princeton pedigree, Sotomayor also has more experience as a judge than any of the other sitting justices had when they were nominated. There is no question that she is qualified, and her status as a minority female will bring a unique and beneficial perspective to a panel that is dominated by white males.

So let the battles begin.

on Loving Georgia

As an expatriated Yankee, I’m often asked why I love Georgia so much. During my recent Memorial Day travels, I was reminded why.

It’s driving down back country roads, the bass from my speakers flowing from my car interrupting the peace of the country. “It’s that city noise,” I imagine the cows cursing at me underneath their breath.

It’s how naked porches look without the presence of a rocking chair. The fact that there’s the indoor broom, but then the one over there, worn and aged after a diligent life spent indoors, is now solely responsible for all outdoor spaces. It's a lifestyle of leisure. One that allows you to sit on your porch, watching cars pass by, speaking to people who, simply because they live in your neighborhood, automatically lose the title of ‘stranger’.

On the back roads in towns like Midville with fewer than 500 people and a mere 2 square miles, you can still find gas stations with pumps circa 1960s, trusting you not to prepay. Because as a resident, self-described as being just about everything in town– police chief, county commissioner, etc– explained as he assisted me, the city girl, “We figure down here, that we can catch up to you before you get to where you’re going.”

It’s when I step into the gas station to use the bathroom, and I come out with an aroma of fried chicken or barbeque smoke trailing behind me, because the gas station is also a popular restaurant.

Or when you see people walking along back roads, and you start wondering where they’re going because you don’t see anything in sight.

I may be an urbanite by upbringing, but I’m a small-town girl in spirit. And in the South, small towns never mean only few black people as they do in the North– a product of the end the Civil War, as newly freed slaves either claimed their old plantations as home or scattered a few miles away before establishing all black communities.

It’s the one-room churches, appearing mile after mile, Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal, Jehovah’s Witnesses. . . with Euphrates, Jordan, and Zion in their titles.

Or the abandoned, dilapidated, southern mansions, whose histories are rooted as deeply as the age-old trees that shade them. It’s how making up stories is a must when driving Southern back roads. The ones that make you wince: whose spirit was broken in that house? Then there are the ones that are comforting: is that house a forgotten stop on the Underground Railroad?

It’s standing squarely with my back to the future and it being impossible to ignore how far the South has come. It’s my grandmother’s pound cake. It’s where my family is from.

And for me, it’s the first and only state that has ever truly felt like home.

on Confederate Memorials & Monuments

After being in Georgia for a little over 2 years now, I thought it was finally time to see what Stone Mountain was all about. It has great laser shows, people tell me. And during my first summer in Georgia when drought conditions were at an all-time high, it was front-page news when Stone Mountain considered canceling their show due to fire safety concerns. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I learned Stone Mountain was also known for its Ku Klux Klan and Confederate history. So when I found myself in Stone Mountain visiting a friend from high school I hadn’t seen in a while, my curiosity took me on a detour that landed me at the entrance to Stone Mountain Park.

At the gate, the parking attendant handed me a pamphlet outlining the history of Stone Mountain which, as a native of Massachusetts, I knew nothing about.

The central attraction in the park is arguably the Stone Mountain Confederate Monument, where the faces of Confederate stalwarts– President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson– are carved into the stone at 90 by 190 feet. It forms the largest sculpture of its kind in the world.¹

“It’s a giant memorial to the Confederacy,” I thought, genuinely in shock.

I first wondered what specifically was the monument meant to memorialize. If you had a good history teacher (or someone at home to fill in the holes), you learned that there are complexities to the Civil War. The Confederate states in the South fought to maintain their economic infrastructure and for their “state rights,” the desire to remain free from interference of the federal government. But I have to wonder how a Confederate Civil War monument could memorialize its fallen heroes without inadvertently memorializing the bondage of Black people which was at the heart of the South’s economy.

At the forefront of the monument project was Helen Plane. After her husband died during the war, she went on to become the first president of the Georgia State Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Although the idea for a Confederate monument on Stone Mountain was not hers alone, it was Plane who organized the Stone Mountain Memorial Association through the UDC. It was to the Association that Samuel H. Venable, the owner of Stone Mountain, deeded the face of Stone Mountain to in 1916. “Georgia yields to none in its love and veneration for the departed heroes,” declared the first volume of the Stone Mountain Magazine published by the Association.² On the surface, the monument does appear to be built to honor those who died during the Civil War, but if you look deeper, memorializing the bondage of Black people was not, in fact, completely inadvertent.

On the evening of November 25, 1915, William J. Simmons revived the Ku Klux Klan on the site of Stone Mountain, only days before Birth of a Nation was set to premiere in Atlanta.

After seeing the movie, the next month Plane wrote to Gutzon Borglum’s, the first artist commissioned to work on the monument. She said “. . . I feel that it is due to the Ku Klux Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpet-bag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain. Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance?”

Though this never materialized, Borglum would later become an active member of the KKK, along with several other members of the Association. Venable, who still owned the remaining parts of the mountain, allowed the KKK free reign to gather each Thanksgiving on Stone Mountain. So though its primary purpose was to honor those who died fighting for the Confederacy, for many the monument also mourned the loss of slavery. ³ Incidentally, Stone Mountain helped boost his reputation and Borglund went on to create the Mount Rushmore monument in South Dakota in 1925, with the heads of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

Today, the Stone Mountain Confederate Monument, as massive as it is, serves only as a backdrop to the other park festivities. Stonewall Jackson Drive, Robert E. Lee Boulevard, and Jefferson Davis Drive, circle what is now referred to simply as “Stone Mountain.” As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum, there was a push to finish the monument where work has ceased after the start of World War II. Purchased by the state of Georgia in 1958, the park is now a huge tourist attraction. But how many people know the history of Stone Mountain, or does the exhilaration of the lightshows and fireworks overpower it? Is it necessary to know this history, or is “forgetting your past” an indicator of progress? It was an eerie feeling to be at the entrance to Stone Mountain, questioning the purpose of a monument to the Confederacy and deciding what to do with this new bit of historical knowledge preceding the theme park.

Because my detour came at the end of a long day, it was admittedly brief. Now armed with a historical foundation, I plan to return and participate in some of the mountain festivities and see if the eerie feeling remains.

I wonder if they have a celebration for Juneteenth?

on A Racially-Conscious America

As we await the Supreme Court’s decision on Ricci v. Destefano, here are some of the places I went to brush up on the details of the case. I’m always curious about what varying news outlets are saying.

The Root
The Center of Individual Rights (make sure you read their homepage. . .)
The New York Times
The New York Times
The New Haven Independent

A group of white firefighters are suing after the city of New Haven “threw out” a promotional exam over concerns that it was racially discriminatory. Of the 77 test-takers, none of the 19 African American firefighters qualified for a promotion based on the exam. The Root article does a good job of defining exactly what is meant by the language “threw out,” which recurs throughout the newspaper coverage.

The members of the board that certify the use of the exam for promotion use voted 2-2. With a deadlock, the exam cannot be certified, therefore preventing any promotions being made based on the exam. It is unclear whether or not the city rejected the exam in order to ward of cases brought by black firefighters or whether they rejected it under an interpretation of the “disparate impact” law which deems practices that result in an “unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class,” even if unintentional, as discriminatory.

If the test had been certified, adverse impact would have been on the African American firefighters, with only white firefighters being promoted. The group of white firefighters argues that because the city did not use the promotional exam, they, in turn, were discriminated against based on race. It’s a complicated case that has been going on since 2003 when it was first brought in front of the lower courts. The case was heard in the Supreme Court in late April.

There’s no denying that race was considered in the city’s decision not to use the test. Instead, the question has become whether it is okay to consider race if you’re seeking to protect a particular group from obvious disparities. As the New York Times put it, it is the difference between “race-consciousness and unlawful race discrimination.”

Rulings from cases like Ricci v. Destefano or the University of Michigan’s Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger deal explicitly with the way America treats race. They are part of a larger, age-old question that nobody seems to agree upon: What is the best way to move forward from a history of past racial injustices?

No, the white firefighters did not benefit when the test was thrown out, but in a sense, aren't they now on equal ground with the black firefighters, none of whom would have promoted using the exam? Is this not what we are trying to accomplish, a society in which race is not a disadvantage, one in which everyone starts on equal footing?

Or are we trying to create a country where race is not a factor? There’s a significant difference, and I always cringe when people promote ignoring race. You can move past your history, but you can’t forget it. Nor should we try. With a past littered with imperialism, slavery, forced removal–and all the other debris– is a such a society even plausible? And would this mean that it is wrong for a fire department in a city that was 37 percent black at their last census to reject a method that prevented them from promoting any black firefighters into leadership roles commensurate with their numbers in the population?

If we ignore race, we are left with a country that is still rife with disparity, with the upper levels overwhelmingly white in areas like supervisory positions, socioeconomic status, or higher education enrollments.

To ignore race at this particular point in our history would be premature. It would render certain groups invisible. It’s a peculiar sensation, this feeling of looking out and not seeing yourself reflected back. For me, this feeling is tempered by the fact that I know it’s not always with intent; there is often no malice involved. It is simply the growing pains of our country as she matures.

So we’ll wait for the rulings and statements surrounding Ricci v. Destefano because it is rulings like these that in large part determine who America will grow up to become.

on The Color Spectrum

I’m halfway through Marita Golden’s “Don’t Play in the Sun,” a memoir about her experiences growing up as a darker-skinned black woman and her feelings of inferiority and invisibility within the black community. As Golden puts it, it is “African Americans’ pernicious, persistent dirty little secret­– colorism, color-conscious, color-struck, color complex.” I’ve found the book enlightening, mainly because it’s personalized. It contrasts with another one of my favorite but more academic books, Tatum’s “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race.” Though a memoir by genre, Golden, a professor, sprinkles bits of context-setting historical facts throughout her work, which makes it easier to extend the intimate experiences beyond just her.

If you were to ask me if I was dark- or light-skinned, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I’m not ‘high yella’ nor am I 'blue-black,' as they say. While some use dark to describe me, others say I’m on the lighter side. I don’t think I’ve ever really cared. I lighten up when deprived of sun in the winter and love to lay out in the sun with a good book and 'sunning' during the summer. I’ve never been overly self-conscious about where I fall on the color spectrum, but Golden’s book has me thinking about why I seem to have been spared from this color complex struggle.

If I had to identify what color I was, I would have to base it off of my experiences talking with other people about 'shade' and say that I fall pretty close to right smack dab in the middle. So as I journey through Golden’s book, I ask myself, is it possible that I have not thought about the color complex struggle because I am what colorists would say to be the perfect shade? Not too light, nor too dark, but just black enough.

Growing up I remember liking the light-skinned boy. That was okay. But I also remember liking the dark-skinned boy. One experience stands out to me. As a middle schooler I was sitting with my girlfriends in the cafeteria.

“Look,” one of my friends said, spotting my current girlhood crush.

“Where?” I asked, eager for a look.

“Near the coke machine,” she answered.

“Where?” I asked again, “I don’t see him.”

“That’s because he’s so black he blends in with the side of the coke machine,” someone else

giggled.

I can’t tell you why I remember this moment. I do remember that it took me a few more seconds to spot him, and indeed he was standing right to the side of the coke machine, in a black shirt and black pants. I never considered the teasing that I received for liking a dark-skinned boy to be any different from the teasing that was inevitable when your girlfriends found out who your crush was. But I remember that when they teased me about this crush, it was about skin color.

As someone who rides the middle of the color spectrum, is my lack of experience in never feeling like I was too light or to dark somewhat equivalent to white people living in an American society where ‘whiteness’ is the standard? (I look foolish in ‘nude’ stockings and most ‘skin-colored’ band-aids are definitely not my skin color.) Is white being the perfect shade in race-conscious America similar to my shade of blackness being the perfect shade in race-conscious Black America? And more importantly, was I spared from feelings of inferiority because of this?

I don’t think the answer is a resounding yes, but it is questions like these that have sent me on a welcomed journey of newfound self-awareness regarding my position in society as determined by my skin color. Along this journey, I find myself rethinking the accusation that black people, myself included, have been known to remind white people: “you’ll never understand what it means to always know that you are judged against a norm that looks nothing like yourself.” Because my brown skin with its golden undertones is a standard against which some colorists judge others, it places me in a similar category of being the ‘norm’ within the African American community.

. . . Or at least until I start up my daily visits to the back porch, laid out with a good book, with a newfound gratitude of growing up in a family and a decade that has been more supportive of my love of playing in the sun. . .