Listening to Black Women

Hello and welcome to another Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is June 20th.

How can it be we only have ten more days until July?

Like most families, we have been adjusting to Summer 2.0. A month in Czech Republic, a 4-H State-to-State exchange to Oregon, Laketrails camps, church camp, and summer theater have all been replaced with summer jobs for the oldest kids and business as usual for the rest of us. Fortunately, swimming lessons have resumed on a limited basis. The Second Grader (er, soon to be Third Grader) got in on a class that started this week and the Toddler is signed up for a two-week stretch after Independence Day.

I want to bring attention to one of the today's historic highlights in the "On This Day" section. On this day in 1942,  four prisoners successful escaped the Auschwitz concentration camp. Escape from Auschwitz, an action drama commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, was released just this year in March.

This brought to mind another successful Auschwitz escape I read about. Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, two Slovakian Jews, escaped the camp on April 10, 1944. After their escape, the men wrote the Vrba-Wetzler Report, which was the first report shared with the world that outlined the conditions and activities of the Auschwitz concentration camp in extensive detail. Vrba immigrated to Canada and wrote a memoir, I Escaped from Auschwitz: The Shocking True Story of the World War II Hero Who Escaped the Nazis and Helped Save Over 200,000 Jews, which I heartily recommend.

As we feel the tension ramping up around prejudice in the U.S. and witness the momentum of another civil rights movement -  corporations issue new policy changes daily, citizens protests, and governments scramble to respond to toppled statues and reconsider Confederate-named entities - history, I think, is something on everyone's minds.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about answering the call to listen and I shared what I heard my neighbors saying in response to George Floyd's death and the nationwide protesting and rioting. This week, I watched a Facebook event, Black Women's Voices: White Women in which a panel of eight Black women addressed questions or comments from the breakout session of a prior Facebook event, Black Women's Voices: Motherhood. Humans of Minneapolis hosted both events.

Understanding that I, as a White person, have been asked to listen, what follows are the comments I've collected from the Black Women's Voices: White Women talk. I've tried to capture the actual words, however in some cases, I did write the thought expressed instead of the actual words. Given my challenges in the hearing/listening department, I encourage you, dear Wannaskan Almanac readers, to watch the videos. [Note: I haven't watched the Motherhood video.] If I've missed something or haven't relayed something correctly, please comment below or send me a message.

The conversation began with prayer. The pastor prayed, calling on all present to depend on God, to help us in the fight for human rights, and to remember to give all the glory to God.

What follows are the panel’s responses to the bolded comments:

“I don’t see color.”

• This is something White people can afford to say.
• This comment is white privilege.
• For a Black woman, skin color is a constant awareness from the time she wakes up until the time she goes to sleep.
• It’s an intrusive statement.
• This statement is the signal that Whites don’t want to deal with color, but instead to remain in a neutral state.
• It means they want to avoid something.
• I get triggered because this kind of statement is the most dangerous because it’s said by the kind of person who’s going to stay silent while she (the Black woman) gets beaten down.
• I want you to see me because I love this body.
• Avoiding confrontation.
• When a micro-aggression occurs, if you say you’re blind it translates to my feelings don’t matter. For example, your house burned down and the other person says, “I didn’t see the fire.”
• One panelist said because of the people she meets through her healthcare business, she doesn’t see color either, but she feels a certain type of way when White people say it.
• This statement negates our experiences.

“I want to be more anti-racist. I want to be a better ally.”

• First, acknowledge that you do have prejudice and conscious bias.
• Ask for clarity. Are you truly racist or prejudiced? Prejudice is when you see a Black person as a threat. The panelist offered an example that when she walks by an elderly White woman, the latter might clutch her purse tighter to her body.
• Own up to your bias.
• Own up to your fear due to the negative narrative.
• One panelist said, “I don’t want to be seen as “an angry, loud, Black woman.”
• Do your inner work. What are your biases in general; we should all do that.
• Righteousness should come from your heart. You should want to deliver that care, love, and support. If I have to teach you, it’s not genuine.
• Whites have bias and prejudice they don’t even know about because they haven’t had to know.
• We have to confess so we as a race can be healed.
• How can we have justice unless we heal from what has been passed on to us from our families?
• Basic human courtesy – allowing your children not to be raised or taught by people who hate people based on color. We all need to come back to basic human courtesy.
• It is human nature to desire to know where we came from. This is why we desire to know God.
• It’s wrong that someone can think they have the right to take someone else’s life. That person is also a child of God. That person is someone’s child. What about when it happens to poor Whites (that layer of society just above Black people) and then Whites above that layer?
• We are equal in the eyes of God.
• The problem is when someone thinks they are better than someone else.

“This is just an isolated incident.” (Referring to George Floyd’s death)

• White people need to be awakened. This is not an isolated incident. 
• That’s the mentality that is imprinted on the way people are culturized.
• It’s so often, it’s overlooked.
• We experience this kind of behavior every single day.
• Minnesota Nice is NOT nice and this is the type of MN Nice comment.

The discussion facilitator then read some comments pertaining to the history between Black women and White women during slavery.

• 1619 – the year when the first slave ships arrived.
• White women have to understand the role White women played in history as silent bystanders to their White husbands especially during slavery, e.g. in creating the role of mammy, nursing White women's babies, being domestic servants, and manifesting a complicity of going along with their White husbands.
• White women shut off that part of their bodies because they love their family. (Considering this part of history as a silent bystander.)
• White women watched as their husbands took Black mistresses because they themselves may not have been able to birth a child. White women feeling powerless themselves against these husbands and taking it out on the Black women servants in the home.
• 53% of White women voted for Trump.
• In 2020, the White woman vote does count.
• Take action.
• Start by questioning your own assumptions.
• Join a discussion group.
• Call out racist jokes when you hear them.
• Vote and elect candidates that you know are going to be equitable and fair to all races.

What else?

• Racism is about power. Ultimately Black people don’t have enough power to take control of the system. But the people who do have the power are White women.
• We’re tired of actors and allies. We need some accomplices. We need White women to take full responsibility for their White men and actually take action in changing themselves and their belief systems. Own that role.
• We need more Esthers.
• It is not Black women’s responsibility to educate White women.
• Something happens to your soul; stop avoiding and deal with it.
• Some of the most important work needs to be done by White women now.
• Develop new intentions.
• White women have the same issues among themselves as Black women, for example, they voted for Trump because they hated Hillary. White women’s hatred of Hillary was greater than seeing who Trump was for real. White women have the same bias challenges within their own identity group. They have to unpack these issues among each other.
• We have to put our differences aside for the greater good. (I took this to mean both within our racial groups as well as interracially.)
• White women only speak up in history when it personally impacted them.

[Note: At this point the Wannaskan Almanac Kid Writer-in-Residence (WAKWIR) chimed in, referencing Susan B. Anthony and her pursuit of the right to vote. White women got the right to vote in 1920. However, Black women didn’t get the right to vote until 1965.]

Next, the conversation shifted to feminism.

• “White women ask Black women to jump on the feminism band wagon and I hesitate because I’m still working on Black rights.”
• I’m not a feminist, I’m a Black womanist.
• Alice Walker (author) defines a womanist as being family oriented while a feminist is female oriented.
• I’m about building my home.
• I am a mother and looking at the role of a woman in society from the viewpoint of a mother. 
• I’m about repairing the broken breach.
• There’s no consciousness or awareness around human rights.
• This time is a moment for Black people to have a voice.
• White women have deep historical wounds.
• As Black women, we forget there are other bodies in this history. Your husband taking a mistress or raping slave women. The White woman was taught, or saw it was okay, to abuse that woman. White women need reckoning with this. White women wanted power (too) in their own home.
• Relationship to power gives them power and rather than relinquish that power, White women abused the Black women too. 
• The Black woman is struggling to be heard.
• The power hierarchy is: White men, White women, Black men, Black women.
• When is it enough, or the right time to say, “This is enough?”
• “Black women are tired of being the lowest on the totem pole for what should already be ours and that is the freedom to choose.”
• Black women are at the bottom and when they try to voice that get labeled as the “angry Black woman” when all they’re trying to do is explain their point.
• Black women are not underdogs but equals.
• Black women feel like they are a precious jewel that has no value.
• Perhaps educating White people is not Black people’s responsibility but it is our expertise.

_________

I hate that opportunity has been born from tragedy, yet I'm grateful for all the conversation that is taking place in my home, especially with the WAKWIR, who has been reading and learning along with me. While watching this Facebook live discussion, what came to mind was the final comment in Kimberly Jone's How Can We Win video:

"And they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge."

That has circled my brain ever since I first heard it two weeks ago. She is so right.

When the history of the oppression of Black people is placed at the center of public conversation and Black Americans demand the United States as a nation hear it, see it, learn about it, reckon with it - I can see the rationalization for revenge. When I get hurt personally, I admit that I think about how to hurt the offender so they will know how it felt. Melania Trump once said of her husband, “If you hit him, he will hit you back ten times harder.” (Yes, I heard this with my own ears. That’s why I so vividly recall it.) And then I stop myself.

Revenge is an intent to cause harm. Revenge is a form of violence. To make sure this wasn't crazy talk, I asked my older kids if they thought revenge was violence. Their answer? Duh.

Violence begets violence. If we inflict violence onto others, we invite violence onto ourselves. In simple parenting language, as I explained to the Toddler, “If you hit someone, expect to be hit.”

Whether you are religious or non-religiously spiritual, we have a higher calling for fairness and equity across humanity. In my Catholic faith, instead of “an eye for an eye,” Jesus instructed to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:38-42) and to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48). This is the ideal that Christians are taught to aim for. I imagine there is a similar message across world religions.

We have no choice but to give priority to equity and fairness above revenge.

The Founding Fathers asserted this in the Declaration of Independence. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

And emphasized it again in the preamble of the Constitution of the United States. "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Whether the Founding Fathers actually intended this powerful verbiage to really apply to all people living in the United States in their time, is another matter. What we understand today, as Americans, is that, yes, today it absolutely does.

Black neighbors are asking their White neighbors to use their power to take action against systemic racism and to help create that equitable and fair world. Ignoring this call by saying you are colorblind, by rationalizing George Floyd’s death as an isolated incident (or deserved because of his past behaviors), or by tokenizing one Black person’s claim that institutional and systemic racism doesn’t exist in order to negate or dismiss the experiences of thousands of BIPOC who have, in fact, experienced prejudice based on the color of their skin – is just another form of revenge.

On This Day

Historic Highlights (credits)

1991 - The German parliament moves to Berlin
Bonn had been the capital of West Germany until the country's reunification in 1990. The “Hauptstadtbeschluss” (capital decision) stipulated that the seat of government and the parliament also be moved to the “new” capital Berlin.

1975 - The film Jaws is premiered
Steven Spielberg's thriller about a rogue great white shark terrorizing a summer resort town is often regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.

1963 - The “Red Telephone” is instituted
The hotline between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was established following Cuban Missile Crisis. Contrary to popular belief, communications between the two superpowers occurred via teletype or fax, and today, via email.

1942 - Kazimierz Piechowski and three others escape from Auschwitz concentration camp
In a feat of “exceptional courage and gallantry”, as stated by the Polish author Kazimierz Smoleń, the four prisoners left via the front gate in a stolen SS staff car, dressed as SS officers. During World War II, the Nazi regime murdered 1.1 million people in Auschwitz. Only 144 are known to have escaped.

1837 Victoria becomes Queen of the United Kingdom
During the 64 years of her regency, the United Kingdom became one of the world's most potent powers. The British Empire soon encompassed large parts of the planet. Queen Victoria died in 1901.

Happy Birthday to You!🎶 

1978 - Frank Lampard, English footballer

1942 - Brian Wilson, American singer-songwriter, musician, producer

1905 - Lillian Hellman, American playwright

1887 - Kurt Schwitters, German painter, writer

1819 - Jacques Offenbach, German/French composer

Remembering You

1999 - Clifton Fadiman, American game show host, author

1966 - Georges Lemaître, Belgian priest, astronomer, cosmologist

1837 - William IV of the United Kingdom

1820 -  Manuel Belgrano, Argentinian economist, lawyer, politician

Read some great history books, talk about them with your family, and make it a great Saturday!

Kim

Simon Wiesenthal (1908 -2005)