Why Everyone Should Care About Racism

 As the protests arising from the failure to indict in the Ferguson and Michael Brown cases, play out in the media I have been surprised and touched by the number of white people who are also outraged by injustice in the system. Racism was once a legal and socially acceptable part of life from the inception of our nation, which incidentally was founded by revolution and civil disobedience, lest we forget, to the late 1960’s civil rights movement. Since then it has been driven underground, but has remained a virulent force. It is time for it to go.

Beautiful lives are being destroyed everywhere from this pervasive moral decay of society. One that comes to the top of my mind is that of my younger brother Gabriel. He was a bright and gifted child, who happened to be born into an impoverished family. He was intellectually curious, so at the all white school he attended briefly (our family moved frequently due to evictions), he was excited to be assigned readings about the Incas in Peru. He read what the teacher assigned, and then went to the library to check out more books on the subject and read them too. When the teacher held a discussion on the assignment he excitedly raised his hand to contribute to the conversation what he had learned from his additional reading. The teacher scolded and shamed him in front of the class for not restricting the conversation to the reading she had assigned. My heart was heavy when he told me the story. I told our parents about it, but they did not go in to talk to the teacher about it. After that Gabriel lost interest in school, and a couple of years later he dropped out before graduating.

By the age of 17 Gabriel grew to be a tall and handsome young man of 6’4” with a quick wit who was very popular with the ladies. He wasn’t able to earn more than 3 dollars an hour at MacDonalds, and that money was taken from him by our always needy family. He learned that he could make quick money and buy new clothes by selling drugs. He almost died, but miraculously survived when someone cracked his skull open in an alleyway two months before his actual death. He promised me he would stop, but then, just before Christmas he wanted to do one last deal to buy presents for his family. He did not survive this time. My soul felt crushed and I mourned for well over a year. I could not enjoy Christmas for nearly 20 years. He was much younger than me and felt more like a son than a brother to me. There were many years in my life and my early education where I tried to ignore issues of race and social justice, and just focus on school and homework, and getting a job, but I came to learn that issues of social justice were an important part of my education and my full participation in life.

My family is bi-racial. My mother was white, and my father was black. They were so in love they bucked the social system in the early 1960’s to get married and have a family and had 3 children together. Dad went on to marry two more times and had 10 more children from each of those unions. All of the children , except the three from his second wife grew up with my father. Two of those children died in infancy, and one was adopted into a different family. We have reconnected with him, and he, incidentally, is a police officer. For his own protection in the current climate I will not share his name. Race was never discussed in our household, which never prepared me for the real world, where it mattered very much. I could see the devastation that being a black amputee married to a white woman was causing on Dad’s earning opportunities myself, whether or not he chose to acknowledge it. Every Spring Dad would put on his suit and tie and go out to look for a job, and most times come up empty handed. He would then take to his bed and drink, before starting the whole cycle over again. We barely scraped by on his disability check, and a lot of the time we went hungry, until the 3rd of the month, “big shopping day.”

All of my siblings have now grown up, and some of them are still struggling and living in poverty, which leaves them more vulnerable to crime, but in each of them I see a spark of hope, great spirit, and a will to survive. I see it even more in their children. We need a society with more open doors and less judgment. We need to start as early as possible with the children, encouraging them to make friends with others who are not like them, and share their toys. We need to make society a place that is safe to play on the streets, and to be curious about learning. At every stage in life there needs to be place, a door to walk through where there is opportunity for growth and change for the better. It is true that some individuals make bad choices that lead them to where they are, but then again, we need a society with more good choices.

I see many parallels between racism and misogyny. Women are told that they won’t get raped if they don’t dress too sexy, and blacks are told by the likes of Bill Cosby and others, that if they just dressed right and spoke proper English they wouldn’t be oppressed by racism. That is simply not true. The most fastidiously dressed, well educated, and well behaved black people still experience racism. Moreover, they are often afraid to speak out, or reach out and lend a hand to other black people who are struggling, because they feel their own positions are tenuous and highly dependent on the beneficence of white people. That is not true freedom.

Black people need and depend on leadership from everyone in the struggle for a more just society. They have become America’s scapegoats and bogeymen. They are randomly chosen as demonstration dummies for legalized murder, as if to say “let me demonstrate my power and authority on this life that doesn’t count. If you step out of line it will happen to you too.”

Tribute to Gabriel from Desiree Goodwin on Vimeo.

A Late Question From the Audience, My Thoughts on Theaster Gates in Conversation with Bill T. Jones at the MFA

Since artist/activist Theaster Gates came to the GSD as a Loeb Fellow in 2011 and I saw his introductory lecture to the GSD community I have been a big fan. He sang rather than spoke the words to his speech, while showing visuals in a slide show of the spaces he had converted in blighted neighborhoods using art (refurbished shoe shine chairs) to finance his projects to rebuild the economic infrastructure. Occasionally he paused and spoke like an erudite professor, before breaking into street slang, and then bursting into song again. It was unexpected, riveting, mind blowing, thought provoking and dynamic. This man powerfully expressed the pain of excluded and alienated people, and announced at the same time that he had arrived to the heights of academia and that his intellect was a lethal weapon conquering and overcoming the obstacles of oppression. I have not missed an opportunity to see him since then, and was really looking forward to his conversation with famed dancer, choreographer, and AIDS activist Bill T. Jones.

What I encountered at tonight's lecture were two esteemed African American artists with an easy rapport having a very elevated and mostly polite intellectual conversation about artists as fertilizers of a community, using the worm and the elephant as a metaphor, the worm being the artist who digests and breaks up the ground, and the elephant, I suppose being the entity that has the capital to finance art projects that will benefit the community. They discussed an artistic collaboration they had worked on, but showed only stills, no video, no song, no motion! Instead, they used words and conversation to discuss each others roles in creating and defining space, the importance of ownership of space for agency to express oneself artistically, and to invite others in, and the importance of funding art to revitalize communities. The element of race occasionally entered the conversation, but not racism, which seemed to be ignoring the "elephant in the room," given the nationwide and international protests against police brutality playing out in the media. Even Drew Faust, the President of Harvard University tweeted a photograph of herself wearing a "Black Lives Matter" T shirt this week.

When the time came for questions from the audience my thoughts were percolating, but I didn't know what to say. A professor in the audience raised an observation of the two of them playing out the roles of the wise elder (Bill T. Jones) passing down knowledge to a disciple (Theaster Gates), but how Theaster Gates quickly reversed the roles in conversation coming up the the level of his elder. Another person asked a question about coping with being an aging dancer, and passing down the art to others, and another audience member asked a question relating to compassion. I was tongue tied until I left the lecture and wandered into the gallery upstairs to see Theaster Gates' work on display, entitled "Sweet Land of Liberty" a framed wall hanging composed of fire hoses used by the police against civil rights protesters in the 60's, an item made from material representing the fabric of society's infrastructure used to suppress marginalized black people fighting for inclusion.

As I left the museum my question came to me: "what do you think the role of the artist is as an agent of social change?" After all, his many accomplishments in that role were extolled and highlighted in the description of the lecture on the MFA site. I'm sure the audience would have been all ears, but it never came up.

http://www.mfa.org/programs/lecture/theaster-gates-the-artist-and-cultural-spaces

A Evening At Wegman's

Last weekend my boyfriend and I checked out the new Wegman's in Burlington, partly motivated out of my nostalgic memories of Wegman's in Rochester in my childhood. There the store evolved in the 70's from a regular store to a high end supermarket with grocery dioramas with fancy names like "Olde Worlde" featuring gourmet foods like aged cheeses, dried meats, and preserves. The first thing we noticed was the covered enclosed parking lot, shielding us from the snowfall that evening, making this supermarket resemble a high end department store.

I didn't see the fancy food displays with polished wood produce stands I recalled from my childhood, but there was a large food bar with a seating area for dining on two levels, and an escalator leading to restrooms on the second floor. The sprawling store was unusually quiet, and not too crowded that evening.

We explored the meat section and deli, finding some high end options like dry aged steak, and a very large section of marinated meats, and pre-sliced deli meats, as well as a large liquor section. We didn't want to spend an extended period of time there on our first visit, so we decided to seek out the specific items I was looking for: cat food and tea, and mulling spices. Here we were pleasantly surprised. I was able to find Purina Cat Chow Complete for $3.99 for a 3.15lb bag, almost half of the price it is at other grocery food chains, so I had to buy two bags! I was also able to buy a 12 pack of Fancy Feast cat food for $6.59. I also found crystal cat litter for only $5.99 for 4lbs. Usually crystal cat litter is sold in 8lb containers for about $15.99, and can only be found in pet stores or online, not in the average grocery store. Crystal cat litter has a special dessicant that absorbs moisture from pet waste. I like to mix it with clumping litter, which can be extremely heavy used on its own. This was a bargain price, so again I had to buy 2. Another coup in the pet supplies was the Wegman's brand of clumping litter. I bought a 21lb container for only $6.19.

When we looked for tea we found a cornucopia of high end brands, most often found in gourmet boutiques, cafes, and health food stores: Tazo, Stash, Tea Forte, Tulsi, and Republic of Tea, as well as some of the average brands like Constant Comment, Celestial Seasonings and Lipton, in a variety of exotic flavors. I bought the Tulsi Cinnamon Rose tea, Celestial Seasonings Red Zinger, and Constant Comment (a childhood favorite). They didn't have mulling spices in the store, unfortunately.

We were pleased with the bargains we found, but for our average shopping needs Market Basket still has better bargains for meat and produce, though Wegman's is now my number one choice for pet supplies and tea. The store is so large I'm sure there are more treasures waiting to be discovered by discerning shoppers.