DeesKo
06-06-2003, 12:26 PM
Glimpse Of a World Without Race
By Donna Britt
Friday, June 6, 2003; Page B01 - Washington Post
Where does race live?
Not onstage at Montgomery Blair High School's graduation, where at some point after my commencement address Monday, it hit me that what mattered wasn't students' cultures or skin colors but their shoes.
When students' bodies are almost completely obscured by ankle-length red or white gowns, their sandals, slip-ons, flip-flops and sneakers take on serious meaning.
If you thought their faces distinguished them, listen to an administrator who joined me and others in congratulating grads after they grabbed their diplomas.
"I hate to say it," the administrator whispered halfway through the handshaking. "But [the graduates] are all starting to look alike."
I'd noticed that, too. But Blair's 3,172-person student body is 31.5 percent black, 28 percent white, 25.6 percent Hispanic and 14.7 percent Asian.
These kids all looked alike?
Perhaps the filter of pride and affection through which we grown-ups viewed the graduates lent their faces similarity. Perhaps the satisfaction, joy and fear felt by seniors blended in ways to make the their features, skin colors and hair textures immaterial.
Somehow, more than 600 unique seniors melted into one glowing Graduate. Proving, yet again, that race isn't real.
Once, I doubted that. In my overwhelmingly black childhood, parents, teachers and neighbors frequently discussed race, both openly and obliquely, and often without mentioning the R-word. Their actions showed who mattered, who was smart, worthy and attractive and who wasn't -- providing unmistakable lessons on America's skin-color hierarchy. Who needed encyclopedias' descriptions of supposedly immutable differences between "Caucasoid," "Mongoloid" and "Negroid" peoples?
Without anybody they loved saying they were inferior, minorities learned every nasty thing there was to learn about race.
Except that it didn't exist.
However race's lies might affect their futures, the Blair students who glided, strutted and danced across the stage didn't seem to give a damn about it. Some surely knew what the years have taught me:
The notion that we're genetically predisposed toward certain attributes, capabilities and behavior is a crock. Blair's diversity taught them that among people of any shade, some are smart, kind and athletic, some not. They know what scientists' DNA studies have revealed:
Race is a construct. A myth. Nonexistent.
I knew that. So why did the three-part PBS series "Race: The Power of an Illusion" floor me? The program next airs on WMPT (Maryland Public Television) on consecutive Sundays at 3 p.m. starting June 15 -- a time slot that begs videotaping. "Race" explains, without railing, how that which biologically matters the least about us -- our appearances -- became everything. The show explains how contemporary science debunks old notions of race, how these ugly falsehoods evolved, and where race does live -- in institutions that disproportionately, and often invisibly, grant power and wealth to whites.
Powerful stuff. But listen to Gwen McKinney, a PR exec who screened "Race" for journalists. "Every minority who saw it was blown away," said McKinney. "Most, though not all, white people said, 'Don't we know enough about this?' "
Big surprise. In 11 years of columnizing, I've examined subjects ranging from parenthood to hair to politics -- a wide enough spectrum that a clueless newspaper writer once described me as "a white soccer mom."
But I often write about race. And though black readers often disagree with me, I can't recall one asking me to drop the subject.
A number of white readers -- some of them well-meaning -- have suggested just that.
Some people may dislike being reminded of the shameful past outlined by "Race" -- including the way slavery and the slaughter and displacement of Indians were made to seem palatable, even charitable, by racism. The subject raises tough questions about why people of color still lag behind whites economically, socially and scholastically.
Americans of every shade are sickened by how some minorities use racism as an excuse for every misstep.
But some white people, I suspect, wish the subject would evaporate because race isn't and never has been a central, negative fact of their daily existences. It's easy for them to say, "Get over it." Whereas, minorities, many of them victims of race's fallacies, embrace information about the lie that permeates their lives.
Only a fool would deny our nation's remarkable racial progress. That progress doesn't change this fact:
Being white still has untold advantages in America. (Those who doubt it should watch Part 3 of "Race.")
Until that fact changes, race will be real, if only in its effects. It will live everywhere and, at certain lovely moments such as Blair's graduation, nowhere.
So how might a world look where race doesn't live? A bit like Blair, perhaps, where college-bound graduate Cordelia Abrokwah, a 17-year-old native of Ghana, told me: "Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians are in almost every group. It's not just a color thing. Sometimes it's socioeconomic. Or the 'regular' students against the magnet students -- which is a class thing.
"Which can be as bad as a race problem."
By Donna Britt
Friday, June 6, 2003; Page B01 - Washington Post
Where does race live?
Not onstage at Montgomery Blair High School's graduation, where at some point after my commencement address Monday, it hit me that what mattered wasn't students' cultures or skin colors but their shoes.
When students' bodies are almost completely obscured by ankle-length red or white gowns, their sandals, slip-ons, flip-flops and sneakers take on serious meaning.
If you thought their faces distinguished them, listen to an administrator who joined me and others in congratulating grads after they grabbed their diplomas.
"I hate to say it," the administrator whispered halfway through the handshaking. "But [the graduates] are all starting to look alike."
I'd noticed that, too. But Blair's 3,172-person student body is 31.5 percent black, 28 percent white, 25.6 percent Hispanic and 14.7 percent Asian.
These kids all looked alike?
Perhaps the filter of pride and affection through which we grown-ups viewed the graduates lent their faces similarity. Perhaps the satisfaction, joy and fear felt by seniors blended in ways to make the their features, skin colors and hair textures immaterial.
Somehow, more than 600 unique seniors melted into one glowing Graduate. Proving, yet again, that race isn't real.
Once, I doubted that. In my overwhelmingly black childhood, parents, teachers and neighbors frequently discussed race, both openly and obliquely, and often without mentioning the R-word. Their actions showed who mattered, who was smart, worthy and attractive and who wasn't -- providing unmistakable lessons on America's skin-color hierarchy. Who needed encyclopedias' descriptions of supposedly immutable differences between "Caucasoid," "Mongoloid" and "Negroid" peoples?
Without anybody they loved saying they were inferior, minorities learned every nasty thing there was to learn about race.
Except that it didn't exist.
However race's lies might affect their futures, the Blair students who glided, strutted and danced across the stage didn't seem to give a damn about it. Some surely knew what the years have taught me:
The notion that we're genetically predisposed toward certain attributes, capabilities and behavior is a crock. Blair's diversity taught them that among people of any shade, some are smart, kind and athletic, some not. They know what scientists' DNA studies have revealed:
Race is a construct. A myth. Nonexistent.
I knew that. So why did the three-part PBS series "Race: The Power of an Illusion" floor me? The program next airs on WMPT (Maryland Public Television) on consecutive Sundays at 3 p.m. starting June 15 -- a time slot that begs videotaping. "Race" explains, without railing, how that which biologically matters the least about us -- our appearances -- became everything. The show explains how contemporary science debunks old notions of race, how these ugly falsehoods evolved, and where race does live -- in institutions that disproportionately, and often invisibly, grant power and wealth to whites.
Powerful stuff. But listen to Gwen McKinney, a PR exec who screened "Race" for journalists. "Every minority who saw it was blown away," said McKinney. "Most, though not all, white people said, 'Don't we know enough about this?' "
Big surprise. In 11 years of columnizing, I've examined subjects ranging from parenthood to hair to politics -- a wide enough spectrum that a clueless newspaper writer once described me as "a white soccer mom."
But I often write about race. And though black readers often disagree with me, I can't recall one asking me to drop the subject.
A number of white readers -- some of them well-meaning -- have suggested just that.
Some people may dislike being reminded of the shameful past outlined by "Race" -- including the way slavery and the slaughter and displacement of Indians were made to seem palatable, even charitable, by racism. The subject raises tough questions about why people of color still lag behind whites economically, socially and scholastically.
Americans of every shade are sickened by how some minorities use racism as an excuse for every misstep.
But some white people, I suspect, wish the subject would evaporate because race isn't and never has been a central, negative fact of their daily existences. It's easy for them to say, "Get over it." Whereas, minorities, many of them victims of race's fallacies, embrace information about the lie that permeates their lives.
Only a fool would deny our nation's remarkable racial progress. That progress doesn't change this fact:
Being white still has untold advantages in America. (Those who doubt it should watch Part 3 of "Race.")
Until that fact changes, race will be real, if only in its effects. It will live everywhere and, at certain lovely moments such as Blair's graduation, nowhere.
So how might a world look where race doesn't live? A bit like Blair, perhaps, where college-bound graduate Cordelia Abrokwah, a 17-year-old native of Ghana, told me: "Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians are in almost every group. It's not just a color thing. Sometimes it's socioeconomic. Or the 'regular' students against the magnet students -- which is a class thing.
"Which can be as bad as a race problem."