January 6, 2016 at 3:52 p.m.
Racial justice educator to speak at commemoration of MLK Jr. Day of Service
Racial justice educator to speak at commemoration of MLK Jr. Day of Service
By By Cheryl Hanson-
The event, organized by the Northwoods Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (NUUF), is free to the public.
Partner organizations sponsoring the event include: St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Rhinelander, St. Matthias Episcopal Church, Minocqua; Many Ways of Peace, Eagle River; League of Women Voters of the Northwoods; American Association of University Women Rhinelander-Northwoods Branch; Northern WI Center for Working People; North Central Labor Coalition; Ascension Lutheran Church, Minocqua; Holy Family Catholic Church, Woodruff; and Marywood Spirituality Center, Arbor Vitae.
Irving, the author of the book "Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Race," will talk about her personal struggle to make sense of racial tensions she experienced but did not understand.
Raised in a wealthy family in an all-white suburb of Boston, Irving moved to culturally diverse Cambridge, Massachusetts and worked as a community organizer and teacher for 25 years. Her ambition was to help people of color. Her motives were well intentioned. She saw herself as a good person. But in a long and often painful process, she discovered that her beliefs about colorblindness and helping people she considered disadvantaged, actually perpetuated her false ideas about race.
Diane Reupert, chairperson of the NUUF Social Justice Committee, said that the idea to invite Irving to the Northwoods came after hearing her TED talk on National Public Radio (NPR).
"Her discussion about the advantages she enjoyed because she is part of the dominant white culture really resonated with me," said Reupert. "This should have occurred to me a long time ago, but it didn't."
Reupert is not alone.
According to U.S News and World Report blogger, Jeff Nesbit, the former director of legislative and public affairs for the National Science Foundation in both the Bush and Obama administrations, most white Americans hold a narrow view of race relations based on their dominant status in the culture.
"Dozens of national polls in America in the past two decades consistently show that more than three-quarters of us don't believe we have a problem with racial tension in America," he wrote. "Fewer and fewer Americans will admit that they have any racial biases."
Given this denial, Irving's presentation on her understanding of white privilege and racial bias could not be more timely.
"In the past 12 years, since NUUF began sponsoring the MLK Day celebration, we've brought many different speakers to the Northwoods," Reupert said. "None have been more important or brought a more personal message than Debby Irving."
Less than three years ago the Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote, struck down the key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, freeing nine mostly southern states to change their election laws without federal approval.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the law, originally enacted to prevent lawless officials in certain states from denying voting rights to blacks, was "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day."
This led many pundits to declare that the country had entered a "post-racial" period.
Recent events suggest otherwise.
The national movement Black Lives Matter emerged in 2012 after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
In 2014, mass demonstrations erupted in Ferguson, Missouri after Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, was shot and killed by a white police officer.
Other high profile deaths of black men, at the hands of white law enforcement officers, have met with wide-spread protests - Eric Garner on Staten Island, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in North Charleston, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Laquan McDonald in Chicago, and Tony Robinson in Madison.
According to an analysis of federally collected data on fatal police shootings, conducted by ProPublica, an independent non-profit news organization, young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than their white male counterparts.
This past June, a mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina resulted in the deaths of nine people, including the pastor. The assailant, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, told police that he hoped the shooting would ignite a race war. Instead, inspired by their faith and the teachings of Dr. King, the victims' families publicly forgave Roof.
In the fall of 2015, campus protests, centering on the treatment of students of color, erupted across the country.
At the University of Missouri, students forced the resignations of President Tim Wolfe and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin after the football team announced it would boycott playing until they stepped down. The Dean of Students at Claremont McKenna College in California resigned under similar pressure.
Faculty members assigned to each of Harvard's undergraduate residences voted to discontinue the use of the term "house master" because of its association with slavery. Yale, Ithaca College, and UCLA remain the sites of ongoing protests over campus racial tensions.
Dr. King said, "A riot is the language of the unheard." His words, spoken more than 50 years ago, seem prophetic.
He also talked and wrote about his hopeful vision of a "Beloved Community." He believed that it was possible to create a truly brotherly society of racial, class, and national integration. In this community, there would be justice for all. His vision would be realized when people of different backgrounds understood that we are all interconnected.
In his" I Have a Dream" speech, Dr. King famously said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Today his dream is far from realized.
The intolerant rhetoric of some politicians seeking national office is clear evidence of our distance from that ideal.
But Dr. King's vision, based on his faith, was not a short-term hope. It was rooted in the long arc of history. He knew that desegregation could be brought about by changes in the law, but integration would require a change in people's attitudes.
"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will," he said.
In her upcoming presentation, Irving promises to address that very issue.
"Color-blindness, a philosophy that denies the way lives play out differently along racial lines," she wrote, "actually maintains the very cycle of silence, ignorance, and denial that needs to be broken for racism to be dismantled...White people must learn how to listen to the experiences of people of color for racial healing and justice to happen."
If white Americans are not motivated by conscience alone to improve race relations, they may eventually be motivated out of a change in the demographics of this country.
Today three out of four Americans age 70 and older are Caucasian. Of Americans age 10 and younger, however, only one out of four is Caucasian. And by 2042, white Americans will no longer be a majority.
While Irving will be in the area to give a single presentation, the goal of event organizers is to continue the dialogue on race.
In the upcoming year, there are plans to offer a curriculum which addresses white culture as it relates to racial justice. The hope is that through the process of self-examination and by opening our eyes to a different way of seeing race, we will advance racial understanding.
Perhaps we can inch closer to realizing Dr. King's dream.
For further information, contact Diane Reupert at (715) 282-5400.
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