I had little interest in learning from the professor or textbook after that. Once I saw that I was at a singular disadvantage from all my classmates who could easily conjure up images of France or Germany or England, I gave up on learning anything useful in that class. Their comments seemed insightful because they could visualize the sites. They spoke with authority because they understood the settings and context of places and historical landmarks and personalities.
Although this proved to be an agonizingly long semester, the experience began to sow a seed of desire in me to see the world with my own eyes. I wanted to become worldly and knowledgeable from direct experience, and not through the hand-me-down tales from books and TV shows that I had depended on for information. I knew I wanted to be the well-traveled person who could respond affirmatively to the question: “Have you ever been to Europe?” I eventually was. Mais oui, j’ai bien réalisée ce rêve. Yes, I achieved that dream.
Duke was also the chosen destination for many international students, including many South Africans fleeing the last vestiges of apartheid. I was especially attracted to two black South African students because I had only seen white South Africans on television. These two students defied everything I knew about South Africa and belied all that I had heard about the continent. They were always smartly dressed and articulate, using good grammar, and speaking English with British accents. I never heard them use any strange or native dialects. “Guma…guma…,” as I heard on frequent episodes of Tarzan, was pretty much everything I knew about Africa other than news accounts about the current apartheid system. What was happening in South Africa in terms of racial oppression did not seem too far-fetched from what was happening to me, in Durham, in my opinion.
As we were walking together from class one day, I remarked, this time, aloud to the South Africans, how well they spoke English, and I wondered how long it had taken them to learn it. They looked at each other, thanked me and muttered something about how all South Africans speak English. The irony in their voices did not make much of an impression on me at the time, and it did not keep me from making a fool of myself.
“How do you get information from home about what’s going on in your village?” I asked. “How do the mail carriers get from tree to tree to deliver your letters? Aren’t you scared of the lions?” They looked at each other again, and this time, they did not hide their disgust.
“May I ask you a question?” one of the young men responded. “Are all Afro-Americans as ignorant about Africa as you are? We don’t live in trees!” They both walked away, leaving me bewildered about what I had done wrong.
My quest for knowledge about Africa began at that moment, when I realized that I had been lied to all those years, and that I did not know that I had been lied to. And I resolved to leave Durham to find out for myself. I was no longer content to just be a Duke student (or soon, a Duke alum). I had led too circumscribed an existence, and I could not even claim that I had left home to go to college. At least most of my high school classmates had done that.
It would be foolish to attribute my career path to any one factor or institution. I feel blessed to have had experiences and people who believed in me from College View Nursery to Whitted, then Hillside, Duke, and the University of North Carolina.
My determination to stick it out at Duke can be credited to a supportive community in Southeast Durham. I survived and graduated in four years because of their love and from sheer force of will. I persisted because I knew I would be the first in my family to graduate from college. I knew that a lot of people were counting on me to do well. I could not bear to disappoint them, and I couldn’t think about anything other than proving that I really did deserve to be at this university. I believed that I had earned my admission ticket, and I managed to tread water when the sharks were circling and the expectation was that we black students would all drown at sea.
I didn’t talk to my parents much about my challenges at Duke because I didn’t want to worry them. They also did not know about internships and networking with alumni and the benefits of pledging one of the sororities. And because they hadn’t gone to college, they couldn’t tell me that I should pursue those opportunities, so I didn’t. I hoped that completing the degree would be good enough.
11— Taking It With Us
Eleven
Taking It With Us
Our discussions about this book always began with conversations about every other part of our lives besides the memoir—our children, our spouses, our parents, friends, politics, work, play, all of it. This is a memoir about race, but we also reflect upon our personal lives, our lives today, because as we wrote about our school experience, it was impossible not to think—together and individually—about what has happened since our school days and continues to happen. We found ourselves thinking about what all of this calls us to do and how to act on our concerns.
Cindy
When we first realized that we had both gone to Hillside and started talking about our experiences there—before we even thought about writing this book—I think I said something to the effect that being at Hillside had had a big influence on my life. I might have even stated that I was grateful for this experience because I had learned so much that I might not have learned any other way. When I heard from LaHoma that she had not exactly been a big fan of integration at Hillside, I was fascinated. And these stories that we told each other became our book. Having gone through the process of writing this book—really going back in my mind to remember specific people and incidents I had not thought of in years, remembering them in the context of all of my life that followed—I still agree with my initial, if somewhat (at the time) blithe answer, but I now am grateful for reasons that are more concrete and nuanced.
I carried a story about Hillside in my head for many years, bringing it out only occasionally when it seemed relevant or when I needed some race “cred.” The events that led to writing this book, and even more the writing of this book itself, however, have given me the opportunity to revisit the story I was holding on to, to re-remember, question some assumptions, and see how I may have reconstructed some of it to fit with a simpler life narrative. It is in understanding these inconsistencies that I have gained the most useful knowledge about myself as a white person who wants a better way for America when it comes to racial equity and justice. Stripping back some of the varnish—owning up to my past and present biases—has helped me see myself as a “work in progress.”
Going to high school at Hillside physically situated me in a black space for most of my day for most of the week for most of the year for three years. What I learned there that I carried with me into further schooling, my career, political involvement, volunteer work, marriage, and childrearing was what it was like to be a minority (though not an oppressed one) in another culture (albeit not a completely foreign one). I was more inside another kind of life than I would have been otherwise, and it was not harmful to me, and in fact, there was much to celebrate about it and to feel affection for. I learned a certain kind of ease in being with others who, outside of Hillside, would have been a minority in my usual space. I learned to feel comfortable across “difference.”
I have no illusions that I had the “inside out” version of black students sent to predominantly white schools. I was never expected to assimilate, and black students would have thought it odd if I had tried. We white folks were visiting and were expected to be as polite as our hosts were being to us. Southern rules of etiquette apply to all races. Even if there had been a continuing white presence at Hillside beyond the few years it occurred, no one would have expected assimilation ever, just a greater understanding between us and greater acceptance and tolerance for the differences in our lives.
I have no doubt that being at Hillside meant I had greater exposure to issues of concern and interest to black people than if I had been at the predominantly white Durham High School. I studied black literature and art at Hillside, and this was consciousness-raising for me. I heard more
black music and liked it more than I would have otherwise. I sometimes saw how Hillside was treated differently (with less respect) because it was a predominantly black school, despite our relatively small white presence. All of these things stayed with me, inside of me somewhere as I went on with my life.
An “ah-ha!” moment for me in writing this memoir was realizing how much my world, while I was in high school, was still a very white world outside of Hillside. Though I shared physical space with black people during the school day, so many barriers still existed between us. During high school, most of my life was still in a very white world. LaHoma and I walked the same halls for a whole school year—and I might have recognized her then as a fellow student—but our lives were lived very separately. Then, when I left Hillside for college, I was solidly back in a white world.
And though I had concern and sympathies and perhaps I even thought I understood something about racial prejudice, I did not rush headlong into trying to fix it because of my experience at Hillside. Awareness of racial prejudice was tangential to many of my academic and career interests, but never front and center—at least not initially. I was all about righting wrongs, but I was more focused on sexism and the rights of women and girls (of all races).
That interest in women’s causes led me to do volunteer work with more than one organization as a reproductive health counselor. After I did coursework for my master’s degree, that interest led me to apply for a job as a research assistant in international family-planning research. After six years, I returned to graduate school so I could refocus my interests on the social and behavioral aspects of reproductive health. I specifically focused on adolescents, remembering both the amazing (in retrospect) information I got in 10th grade biology class and the girls at my library table from my world history class who already were mothers. I could not put those two things together. Now I can—but that lack of understanding on my part led me down a career path that had me thinking a lot about the role of race and poverty in women’s lives. After my coursework for my doctoral degree, I took a job at a public-interest organization whose mission was the reduction of teenage pregnancies. Most of its work was domestic, and the research I did there opened up my consciousness in many ways, but I think I had been primed for these insights by my experiences in high school.
One way having been at Hillside influenced my personal life—which for me was very intertwined with my work life—was that I had a level of comfort with being in black spaces and with black people, and I developed an interest in black culture. I believe it made me more receptive to listening to what my adult friends who were black were telling me about the way racism operates in their lives. For example, a black colleague told me that during a work meeting where we both were present and talking, another white person in the room looked only at me when she was talking. I had missed this non-verbal transgression, but the observation sensitized me to see it in many subsequent cross-racial work interactions and to be mindful about not doing it myself.
My first husband and I consciously tried to raise our children to value everyone and be inclusive in their relationships. It was hard for them to understand what had gone on before; when we watched Eyes on the Prize on PBS with our daughter, then in elementary school, at one point she turned around to us and said, “This didn’t really happen, did it?” She could not believe that policemen would turn hoses on peaceful protestors, black or white. We neither encouraged nor discouraged friendships on the basis of race or wealth (we were firmly in the middle of the economic spectrum in our highly resourced community). We spoke out about big and small injustices when we saw them and encouraged our children to do the same. But the main thing we did was teach them that the Golden Rule applies to everyone. Neither of them ever questioned this belief or behaved in a way that made us doubt their commitment to equity.
Another part of the answer to how being at Hillside influenced my life is revealed by more recent events. Fast-forward to about eight years ago. I had begun thinking about what else I might want to do with my life, things that I had not been able to do in my job. Throughout my life, I had been interested in writing. My job required very academic writing, restricting some of the more soulful and passionate ideas I wanted to share. I started taking creative nonfiction writing classes and workshops. At the same time, I saw how racism was still afflicting people around me. Perhaps I had just reached a tipping point after an accumulation of experiences and years of thinking about the issue. I felt a calling to do something, anything.
I became aware of a theology that provided a framework for community and action around the issue of racism, under the broader banner of “peacework,” a concept central to what my spiritual faith meant to my life. If faith was not about compassion for everyone, what was I missing? I was inspired by a talk by author Tim Tyson to join the NAACP. Rev. William Barber II, a North Carolina and national NAACP leader, inspired me to join in Moral Monday marches at the General Assembly building in Raleigh to protest the dismantling by Republican-led state legislators of every kind of political protection and social safety net for North Carolina’s most vulnerable citizens. My participation in a two-day anti-racism workshop conducted by the Racial Equity Institute of Greensboro, N.C., turned my thinking upside down as I saw the truth of America as a white supremacist country. I grew more aware of unconscious racial bias and began to see my white privilege in action. I thought I had known something about the effects of prejudice, but I came to understand through this multiracial workshop the greater power in understanding structural racism and the need to dismantle systemic racism, so that black lives truly matter.
As I was preparing to leave a career of nearly 30 years as a reproductive health researcher, I was also preparing myself for a fuller commitment to activism for racial justice. I joined our town’s Justice in Action Committee and learned about the school-to-prison pipeline, the difficulties in transitioning from incarceration to “normal” life, and the many challenges of finding affordable housing in my town. There are many avenues for working toward racial justice, because the effects of policies to maintain the advantages of being white seep into every aspect of life one can imagine.
My experiences at Hillside planted a seed and prepared the soil. Schools cannot, in one year or 12 years, upend centuries of institutionalized racism and unconscious racial bias. But what being at Hillside did was open my consciousness to the possibility that the world is different for different people, and that race most certainly creates different opportunities and barriers for people who might have the same set of abilities. My time there gave me a certain comfort level with people who were different from me. It allowed me to be in those spaces, to hear the conversations and, most of all, to believe what people tell me about how their experience is different from mine. There is probably no straight line between my having been at Hillside and a particular thing I say or do now, but that experience has led me through a series of other experiences that have made me feel the urgency for anti-racism activism at this moment. There was not an instantaneous moment in which my (conscious or unconscious) racial bias was eradicated, a moment when I became a perfect conduit for dismantling racism. I am still not without this bias. But my consciousness did change, even if it changed in some ways that might not have been translated into action until later in my life. My experiences at Hillside led to or connected to other experiences. Change of consciousness is a slow-building process—an iterative process—with each new idea or action building on previous new ideas and experiences.
Writing this book with LaHoma is part of this journey for me. It is important that we have written it together. Hearing each other’s stories opened us up to remembering stories we had forgotten, or to see our own stories in a new light. Bringing together our separate narratives illustrated the need for our differing perspectives to be told side by side, as a way of generating discussion to heal the harms inflicted by racism.
LaHoma
Years ago, if you had asked me whether “the letter” a
nd grade school integration had been a positive influence in my life, I would have responded with a resounding “Yes!” Over the course of writing this book and as memories surfaced, I started to have my doubts. Now that we have come to the end of our project together, the doubts have largely subsided, but my initial enthusiasm is far more circumspect, my answer less confident and more likely to be qualified by “Well, it depends.”
I have mused incessantly over whether there are indeed benefits to forced school integration of black and white communities. I found blogs of white students who hated Hillside and cursed their days at the school. Of course I am sympathetic, because when I was going through that social experiment myself, I resented it as well, but not because I hated the white students; I just didn’t see the point of making us go to school together. My attitudes have softened, and now I find myself somewhere in the middle of this discourse. I can easily champion a defense of either side. Let me explain.
For the affirmative, I embrace the notion that attending junior high and high schools with students from different racial groups gave those of us coming from segregated communities the chance to interact with white students on a level playing field. Yes we could go into a store and see a white person, we could go to the movies and we saw white people all over television, but in school we were equal, we were classmates and we were friends who interacted with each other based on similar interests, from the band to the French club.
Going to School in Black and White Page 16
