Reading While Black

In the wake of the words spoken by Bill O’Reilly and Adrienne Curry, I nearly forgot to mention the fifty year anniversary of the “Little Rock Nine until RfP linked a Vanity Fair article. Adrienne Curry wants Black American History to be American History? Well here it is, the legacy of hatred this country was founded upon and fostered long after the Civil War was fought. I remember watching The Ernest Green Story on TV, the documentary about the Birmingham bombings, even a bit of Roots my junior year, but with the same disdain most teenagers have for serious subjects, the implications of this never really hit me. So I was black and knew about slavery, but despite my working-class background, racism never really touched me. Perhaps because my school career began with myself being the only black kid in school, or because I was so wrapped up in my own personal turmoil what I wasn’t experiencing was chalked up to a Godsend, but nothing about this country ever really hit me until about a year or so ago.

It was when I looked at my grandmother, suddenly with new eyes, after attending a family reunion where I met relations in their seventh and eighth decades that it really hit me: Jim Crow was real. It wasn’t just some words in a textbook or a documentary I saw on TV. Here was living proof that until the 1960s, racism, bigotry and anti-Semitism was an accepted mindset in America. That these octogenarians spent the majority of their lives staring at “whites only” signs, reading (and maybe witnessing) lynchings, unable to walk into a shopping center or restaurant, and do many other things I and my generation take for granted simply because they were black. I used cackle over the fact that my mom, who was born in 1963, had the word “Negro” on her birth certificate and that twenty-one years later when I was born, it said “African-American”.

And Adrienne and other “color-blind” people have the nerve to denounce that word, a word black Americans had to fight use instead of the word the white majority placed on us, as “racist”? (Even other ethnicities had to fight for their own self-given label: prior to the ’60s Asian-Americans had the word “Oriental” and who knows what Hispanic-Americans were labeled before 1980 [Latino was coined in 1997].)

“Getting over it” and desiring a “color-blind” society does no-one any favors because of what this country was founded upon. All we should be doing is striving together, to appreciate differences without stereotypes or the extremely troubling existence of colonialist attitudes towards non-whites.

And if you didn’t know (as I didn’t until just now), the U.S. Mint has issued a commemorative $1 coin to honor the Little Rock Nine. Pretty cool.