racism – C-VILLE Weekly

‘The heartbeat of racism is denial:’ Author Ibram Kendi talks with Mayor Nikuyah Walker

The work of antiracism is “fundamentally focused on looking in the mirror” with the goal of transforming society, scholar and National Book Award-winning author Ibram X. Kendi told a packed auditorium in Charlottesville on Tuesday night. And, he added: “Because we live in a racist society, it is extremely hard to be antiracist.”

As Kendi’s conversation with Mayor Nikuyah Walker at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center made clear, there are particular challenges in a city he referred to on Twitter as one of the centers in the American battle between racism and its opponents.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Kendi—author of the newly released “How to be an Antiracist” and of 2017’s award-winning “Stamped from the Beginning,” a history of racist ideas in America—emphasized that torch bearing Unite the Right ralliers and hooded Klansmen are far from the only ones implicated in systems that disadvantage minority groups.

“I’m not concerned with whether someone is consciously recognizing that the policy that they’re supporting is leading to racial inequity,” he said. “I’m not worried about whether they intend to create that racial inequity, as much as the fact that the policy that they’re supporting, or not challenging, is leading to racial inequity.”

At times during the conversation, Walker pushed back on Kendi’s argument that there is no such thing as a non-racist: that all people, of all races, are either racist or anti-racist, either fighting unjust systems or tacitly supporting them.

“As a black woman who has seen people try to survive in this climate, inaction doesn’t necessarily mean that you are upholding or wanting to perpetuate racist ideas,” she said, drawing a contrast between her grandmothers, “who learned to keep their head down, to not make any noise, to just try to get through and survive,” and a figure like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who has had an active role in producing policies.

At points in her own life, “I tried to use all the power that I had, which was a lot, but it was also exhausting and it also took moments for me to just kind of retreat to heal from the environment that I was subjected to,” she said. “And I don’t know that everyone has the ability to do that. … How do people survive and do the work? I think if people were more sure of those answers, they would be more willing.”

Kendi argued that different people can play different roles in fighting racism, depending on their circumstances. That includes white people, who also suffer from systems that enforce inequality, he contended.

“What we have now is a massive hoarding of resources and wealth, by extremely wealthy and powerful white people, and they’ve long been using racist ideas to essentially divide and conquer the rest of America,” Kendi said.

In particular, “you have white people now who are worshipping Confederate monuments,” even as those monuments commemorate a war waged in the South largely on behalf of a small land-owning class, he argued. “This is delusional.”

“This racial struggle, this struggle between racists and antiracists, is not a struggle fundamentally over morality, although morality is part of it,” he said. “It’s not fundamentally a struggle over ignorance and hate, although that’s a part of the struggle. What’s fundamental about the struggle is that it’s a power struggle, and it always has been a power struggle.”

In Charlottesville, Walker said, some people are still drawn to a “return to what is normal” two years after Unite the Right – a concept that she said looks like an “escape route” from accountability.

Near the end of the night, an audience member put a finer point on the matter.

“This conversation is happening now because you wrote a book and it’s being presented to us,” she said. “But among ourselves here, this conversation, I have found in Charlottesville, to be impossible. Because white people do not see themselves as a racial group.”

“I think that first and foremost, the heartbeat of racism is denial, and it always has been,” Kendi replied. “I think we have to recognize just how deep-seated the denial is.”

Walker said some people’s reluctance to have uncomfortable discussions presents a challenge in Charlottesville. With a new City Council election approaching in November, “I feel like the community is moving back towards that very comfortable status quo: ‘What I used to have, what I used to be like, and who on this ballot can get me back to that space,'” she said.

“What’s happening here is happening in other places, but at the same time what’s interesting here is, people imagine themselves as liberal and progressive,” Kendi said. In reality, he added, “If you are not part of the movement and the struggle to challenge racism, then you’re being racist.”

Walker said many voters are motivated by a desire to challenge her prominence.

“Not ‘What do we want our city to look like, what is true equity, what is antiracist?'” she said. “But ‘Who can I put in place with my vote that can challenge her, who won’t stop having the conversations, who won’t stop talking about racism, and who won’t stop calling it out when she sees it?'”

“So, they don’t want to be healed?” Kendi said.

“Listen, you have to ask,” Walker replied, laughing.

“But,” he said, “pain is essential to healing.”

Monuments men: It was never about a statue, say Landrieu and Bellamy

Former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and Charlottesville City Councilor Wes Bellamy have a lot in common. They’re both Southerners who, as elected officials, have gotten death threats for daring to say it’s time for Confederate monuments to go.

And they’ve both written books on the topic, which brought them to the same Jefferson School African American Heritage Center stage March 20 for the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Bellamy, who signaled he was going to run for a second term on City Council, talked about the toll his 2016 call to remove the statue of General Robert E. Lee has taken on him and his family. His therapist suggested he write about it, and he wrote what became Monumental: It Was Never about a Statue to tell his side of the story and get it off his chest, with little concern about whether it ever got published.

“Deep down I was hurting,” he says.

A lot of people blamed him for bringing white supremacists to Charlottesville, he says. He had to grow up publicly following what he calls “Tweetgate,” when earlier offensive tweets were unearthed and he lost his job with Albemarle schools. And there was the unrelenting stream of “vile” threats.

“If it was about a statue, people wouldn’t tell me they’re going to hang me from a tree or harm my wife and children,” he says.

Landrieu says he also got hate mail, typically in a white envelope with red ink, that his wife hid from him.

The statue issue is “about race in America,” he says. “It’s about institutional racism.”

Landrieu, who wrote In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History, never thought too much about the Confederate monuments when he was growing up in the Big Easy. Then a friend, jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, “popped” him on the head and asked, “Have you looked at it from my perspective?”

In May 2017, Landrieu made a landmark speech about his decision to remove four Confederate statues. In Charlottesville, he referred to one of its points, a scenario in which an African American parent has to answer a child’s question about a statue of Lee, in which the girl asks, “Wasn’t that the side that wanted to keep me a slave?”

As Southerner and as a white man, Landrieu holds no truck with the “heritage not hate” argument often posited by Lost Cause adherents. He lists historic facts that some whites have a hard time with.

“The Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity,” he says. The Civil War “was fought for the cause of slavery.” And that needs to be acknowledged to get to the point where the country can heal, he says.

Even though progress has been made, there are a lot of people in the country who are afraid and there’s a lot of dehumanization. “Donald Trump is not the cause of it but he’s an accelerant,” says Landrieu. “White nationalism and white supremacy are having a field day,”

Bellamy expounded on why he’s called on Governor Ralph Northam, “a personal friend,” to resign. “It’s not his place to believe he can lead a discussion about race and equity after what has transpired.”

The worst for Bellamy was the day after Northam apologized for wearing blackface, when he attempted to moonwalk. Northam didn’t understand how offensive and degrading minstrel shows are, says Bellamy. And when Northam followed the press conference by calling the first African slaves “indentured servants,” says Bellamy, “That shows me you don’t get it.”

He did suggest ways the governor could use his position and privilege to redeem himself: by funding “historically underfunded” black colleges, by reforming marijuana laws and the criminal justice system, and by talking to his conservative friends in the General Assembly “who block the legislation we need to move the statues.”

Those, notes Landrieu, are “institutional racism.”

While Landrieu called for having those painful conversations on race, Bellamy seemed talked out when such engagement results in no action. “You shed a couple of tears and you go home.” he says of those privileged to live in nice homes while most in poverty are black and don’t have the same luxuries. “That is not equity,” he says. “I’m the bad guy for saying that.”

Both men believe it’s necessary to repair the damage that’s been done by racism. “There can be no repair and reconciliation without the redistribution of resources,” says Bellamy. “If you mess something up, you fix it.”

He also touched on civility, which he describes as “almost synonymous with comfortable.” People were yelling at City Council meetings because they’ve been ignored for years and it was an expression of their rage, says Bellamy.

He thinks that’s had an effect. “We got your attention,” he says. More resources have been allocated to affordable housing and the county banned Confederate images in schools. “You think that came from being civil?” he asks. “Pffft.”

With the Democratic primary deadline looming March 28, Bellamy says he’s still debating whether to run again for City Council, but indicated he was likely to because to change policy, “the best way to do that is through elected office.”