Growing up in a progressive white family I developed a commitment to social and economic justice yet missed the breadth and depth of my own caste privileges. As a New Yorker witnessing the Civil Rights Movement on television I believed segregation and racism was a southern issue. I was wrong!
I am grateful for those who helped me see how I benefit from racial divisions, my responsibility to change and helped me understand these are national and international issues. Today I reflect on institutional racism and incidents that forced me to broaden my perspective. The first came in 1963 when I entered a Catholic seminary in Baltimore. Discussions about civil rights revealed that in southern parishes white Catholics received communion before African Americans. It wasn’t just separate but equal schools. It took courage for priests to integrate their churches.
Five years later I was part of a military operation in Vietnam’s central highland. I took this photo of a black soldier looking askance at his lieutenant carrying a Confederate flag. One can imagine his thoughts. “Did I get drafted to fight for racist leaders?” Military bases bore the names of traitorous Confederate generals so this southern lieutenant felt comfortable bringing his flag on an operation.
My third example proved racism was more than a southern issue. Home on Staten Island I participated in the defense of a Black family moving into a white neighborhood. Then their house was burned down. I grew up believing my northern neighbors were better than that.
In subsequent decades I was challenged to explore where I have benefited by being white. I invite us to investigate where institutional racism exists in our voting rules, government contracts, schools, financial and personnel systems, hospitals, housing regulations and more. It can also reside in our willingness to not know.
Thanks for this honest reflection, Ed. It’s timely to read it on this Juneteenth. With your permission, I’d like to use this picture in classes I teach. It illustrates the sense of privilege and obliviousness to that privilege that those of us who were born and raised “white” have to keep struggling to see in ourselves and to shed.
The examples you provide – the black soldier having to contend with an officer carrying a Confederate flag and black Catholics receiving after whites – provide proof that the federalizing of Juneteenth is more of a beginning than an end.
My African-American Lit students told me 20 years ago that Juneteenth needed to be a federal holiday. They were correct.
in heartful solidarity brother
Thank You for the very beginning of our white, bumpy but liberating and eventually empowering effort for us to be free from the mental, emotional and institutuonal handcuffs (Read “Mindcuffs”) our culture and conditioning contributes to our inescapeable acculturation from truth and literally… reality.