International Blog Against Racism Week

[rolanni]

I discover from Bear that it is IBAR week.

On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a woman named Rosa Parks refused to move to a seat at the back of the bus, even though the bus driver ordered her to do so. Black people were supposed to sit in the back of the bus in those days; the good seats up front being reserved for white people.

I was born three years before Mrs. Parks' act of civil disobedience, in Maryland -- a border state, lest it be forgotten. My father was born in 1928. His father was born in 1894, twenty-nine years after the end of the Civil War.

I remember my grandmother's horror upon discovering that "they" could sit anywhere on the bus that they chose, and that some of the "insolent ones" wouldn't even surrender their seat to a white person on a crowded bus. I remember people coming in school buses from their neighborhoods to our "all white" movie theater. I remember my parents searching for and joining a "swim club," the charter of which specifically forbade black members. I remember being bused an hour across town so that I could attend an integrated school. I remember bringing one of my classmates to a cookout, and the fixed smile on my mother's face. I remember my grandmother talking to me very seriously, afterward, explaining that the law might require me to go to school with "those people," but that didn't mean I had to socialize with them.

I remember my father refusing to take my sister and me to Gwynn Oak Amusement Park after it was integrated, because "...people get drunk there now, and it's too dangerous for you girls."

I remember one of my co-workers who was bilingual -- "street black" and "white."

I remember Morgan State University making the news when it refused to grant minority status to white students.

I remember people in cars on Liberty Road in Randallstown, Maryland, in 1986-or-7, throwing bottles at me as I was taking a walk a block from my home, screaming, "Go home, whitey!"

I remember moving to Skowhegan, Maine in 1988, and my befuddlement at seeing so many white faces.

I remember that people are complicated, that change takes time, that fear of the unknown is common to us all, and that there are those among us who use fear and distrust for their own gain.

I remember all that, and I tell stories.

Comments

[jack_calls_dances]

Thank you for this.

I REMEMBER...

[(Anonymous)]

1967 in (then rural) New Jersey, my sister's best friend was Black. When people found out she had asked her friend to be her maid of honor, we received a couple of burning crosses in our year. It wasn't only in the South.
Lorna Stutz

[mardott.livejournal.com]

I remember being 7 years old and sitting on my front porch with my New Friend, who had just moved in down the street. And my mother came to the door and told the girl to GO HOME and then she told me that I could never have a colored friend and MOST CERTAINLY could not allow them to sit on our porch where "everyone could see."

Even at 7, I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard.

[mardott.livejournal.com]

Oh I also remember that I hadn't noticed she was "colored." I didn't even know what my mom was talking about. I never have been the most observant kid on the block...

[magda-vogelsang.livejournal.com]

My mother tells of a professor of hers who went to the Dental School at her college in the 60s to have dental work done. He was apologetically told that the only dentist available was black, and asked if that was a problem. The professor replied that in fact, he preferred it because he suspected that this was one of their best students. The surprised receptionist remarked that yes, in fact he was.

She also speaks of going to see Martin Luther King Jr. talk at Michigan State University a year or so before he was killed. It wasn't something she would have taken the initiative to see, but afterwards she was very glad that a friend had asked her to come along.

I remember doing temporary light industrial work the summer before I started college, at a facility where most of the workers were black women from the Detroit area. I started unintentionally picking up the way they talked, and after getting a couple of odd looks felt the need to fight against the tendency so they wouldn't think the white girl from the suburbs making fun of them.

I remember my coworker Kenney, award winning pre-med honor student. Very nice guy, clean cut, respectful, well spoken, very well educated, and nonetheless periodically pulled over by the police during the 1990s for no apparent reason except "DWB" (Driving While Black), simply because he was a young black male in places where that was considered suspicious.

[baggette.livejournal.com]

I remember the first time I SAW a non-white person in person. I was sixteen and the national guard was encamped in a field near our play ground. I asked the soldier if I could touch his skin because it looked so different. He smiled and agreed to let me touch his face. He had freckles but they looked very different(to me) from mine.

I remember that when my children were young, I removed them from a family gathering in NY- rather than let them be exposed to the hateful racially-biased conversation. I had asked twice for the subject to be changed.

I remember being shocked and disgusted when my Father-in-law recently passed on a potential tenant for the up-stairs apartment, because he didn't want "the neighbors to be looking at him funny". It was a big reason (for me) in deciding not to go there to join my husband and look for work in NY. This is a man who taught in the NYC Public school system for 35 years! How sad.

[debmats.livejournal.com]

Mom told me about riding the bus into town while she was in Rohwer, Arkansas. Every once in a while, she'd get a pass to leave camp and go to town. She and her friends could sit anywhere on the bus, but black people had to sit in the back. Considering at the time, she was considered an "enemy" and was in an internment camp because of her Japanese ancestry (she'd been born in Isleton, California), she thought it very ironic.

[noiseinmyhead.livejournal.com]

I remember in 1982 my Aunt refusing to come visit us because we lived on where there were blacks and immigrants.

I remember the first day in my women's studies 101 class at the University of Washington the disbelief in peoples faces when I said that Seattle was one of the most segregated places I had ever lived in, with my southern accent and all.

I remember the looks in the airport as I took my black nice and nephew home to their parents.

Racism...

[pakwa26.livejournal.com]

In Australia, the (black) indigenous population wasn't even counted in the census until 1967, when a referendum was passed to include them in the headcount. They didn't have the right to vote until that time.

I remember my friend Jean telling me that she and her little brother were followed by young white men in a car who screamed at her to "go home darkie", in liberal, integrated Australia in 1972.

I remember my mother telling me just last year that England had about 50 million too many people and she knew which ones she would get rid of. I had never thought of my mother as a genocidal maniac until then. I am ashamed...

[(Anonymous)]

I remember filling in at a public elementary school in Boston in the 1980's. One of the regular teachers was complaining about one of her students "being fresh" and "mouthing off". Teacher's white, student is black. I'd taught that girl myself -- I doubt she was mouthing off, more that she was asking intellegent questions and making the teacher move beyond rote.

What really struck me was the teacher saying "Well, I should know better than to talk with her. Never get into a pissing match with a skunk."

A