White Girl. Black Guy: The Good Men Project Conversations on Race

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Welcome to the first installment of The Good Men Project’s Conversations on Race, where we invite friends and strangers alike to discuss and explore their awareness of racial identity in America.

This week’s conversation features Lisa Duggan and Jackie Summers.* 

◊ • ◊

Lisa Duggan

Hi there 🙂  How are you today?

Jackie Summers

Tough days. hon.

Lisa

I’m so sorry Jackie.

Jackie

Don’t be; they’re all tough days.

Lisa

Yeah, well. My biggest desire is to live to fight another day.

Jackie

Funny. My biggest desire is to live to not have to fight another day.

Lisa

🙂

So…what are we talking about today? Are we solving racism? Sexism? Poverty?

Jackie

I really like the idea of framing a discussion around discovering race and its implications. From opposing perspectives

Lisa

Me too. Maybe we should introduce ourselves first, but in the context of American race:

I’m white. A woman. At least, people see me as white. But that wasn’t my understanding growing up . . .

Jack

OK Lisa. How old are you, what do you do for a living, where did you grow up, and when did you find out you were white?

Lisa

I’m 51. Born in 1965. My parents were getting married and having babies while other people were burning bras and history down. I was born in Brooklyn, a fact I wear like a badge. I was raised in Brooklyn but also in Staten Island. My father was an engineer for the city of New York in water treatment. My mother stayed home.

My mother’s family is Italian. She’s first generation American. My father’s family is Irish. He’s fourth or fifth generation. My father’s father died when my Dad was four, so his family struggled economically, in part because my grandmother had four kids under six to feed.

You asked me what I do. I’m in publishing, that’s the short answer. I’m also an entrepreneur, having started my own magazine a few years ago. That’s a longer answer.

When did I find out I was white?

I think I only fully came to understand this after moving to South Orange, New Jersey, where the population is almost 50/50 black & white.  I certainly didn’t think I was white growing up!

The story of my family in two parts is; Italian trying to become American, and Irish, struggling to be solvent and successful. An outsider struggling to assimilate.

Also contemptuous of Americans. Proud of being Italian.

Your turn.

How old are you, what do you do for a living, where did you grow up, and when did you find out you were black?

Jackie

I’m 48, born in Queens NY in 1967. My dad was a jazz musician who toured with all the greats: Louis Armstrong, Count Bassie, Duke Ellington. My mom was a research scientist doing early work on cancer and cigarettes, until she became a stay-home mom. I’m the youngest of five; three boys and two girls, and as you might imagine, providing for a family of five on a jazz musician’s salary wasn’t easy. We didn’t have much, but our clothes were clean, and we were all taught how to read and write before we entered school.

I spent 25 years in corporate America because that’s what I was told to do: go to school, get an education, work my way up the corporate ladder. I was an art director at 18, ran the graphics department on Wall St. for many years, before spending a decade each in advertising and publishing. Six years ago, a cancer scare got me out of corporate America for good; now I own my own liquor brand.

I had no idea I was black until i started elementary school. Race wasn’t something I remember being discussed as a child, but on my first day of first grade in Bayside Queens, a little girl told me I was the first black person she’d ever met in real life. I got home from school that day and my mom asked me what I’d learned and I informed her: Guess what mommy? I’m black. Why didn’t you tell me?

Lisa

🙂

It’s hard to convey how outside American culture we lived, and I felt. My cousin Angela probably summed it up best; she said that it was only after seeing the movie “Saturday Night Fever” that she understood we were a subculture. (We’re from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where the movie is set.)

Jackie

Of course I didn’t know what being black meant; I had a sense of my Caribbean ancestry from the cultural activities my family participated in; it didn’t give me any sense of the complexities of what it meant to be a person of color in America.

♦◊♦

Jackie

Which leads me to my next question: When and how did you become aware of the complexities of being white, and did you interact with people of color at all?

Lisa

Oy.

Answering this question, of course, makes me realize that my awakening to being white came earlier (than 1999, when we moved to NJ) and in stages.

Growing up I didn’t have any friends of color. I had Jewish friends and that was considered progressive. My brother Anthony’s best friend was Jewish, I remember going to his bar mitzvah. But again that was an extension of the way my mother and father lived in Brooklyn — Catholics and Jews living together. My grandfather’s best friends in the garment business were mostly Jewish people and my mother is very culturally Jewish, as well as staunchly Italian, if that makes any sense.

My Irish grandmother was appalled that my mother named me Lisa, because, “That’s a Jewish name!”

I went to public elementary schools which were not diverse in color, and then Catholic high school were only two of my fellow students were African-American. And then college. New York University. Where I made friends of color for the first time in my life. During college I had some people over to watch a Tyson fight, including my buddy Ronnie DeCastro, whose family was Caribbean. I had my shoes off and — Ron had brought a bunch of buddies — they looked at my bare feet and said, “Damn, you’re white!.”

Another night I invited Ronnie and Nick, and… I want to say Sean, I can’t remember his name, all beautiful black boys, and another friend, Craig from NYU, to come out to Staten Island to party at my house, when my parents were away and then to a bar on the North Shore of the island. I was so fucking naive….They wouldn’t let us in! I was confused. Mortified, when I realized what was happening. The boys just wanted to leave. Craig started screaming at them: “Do you know who my father is?!” (No? Who? Big rich Jewish lawyer, as if that would help.) I just wanted to die. And in hindsight, I see now that I put my friends in danger that night, not understanding shit about race, assuming I could go anywhere with anyone I liked . . . Ugh.

Jackie

That’s both hilarious and kinda sad. I knew from early on that there were somehow negative connotations around being black, but none of them made sense as a kid. I remember changing for gym and a kid being shocked that I was “black all over”––he expected me to have a white underbelly, like a monkey. I remember having lunch at a jewish friend’s house and being utterly confused by Wonder Bread––it was so weird and squishy––my mom baked for us daily. By junior high school factions had formed; there were a handful of black kids––maybe a dozen in each grade–scattered among white kids, and people picked sides. Black kids liked R&B, white kids liked Rock & Roll.

Lisa

Soul Train vs American Bandstand 🙂

Jackie

Black kids were supposed to be good at basketball, were supposed to walk a certain way, be tough, have a particular language. It was weird and sometimes tense; there was one time someone got into a fight and we had to run home from Bayside back to Jamaica Queens, like Alcibiades leaving Persian territory.

And I remember white girls wanting to fool around, partly because they were curious, and partly because they wanted to piss off their parents.

High school was different; I spent one year at Cardozo in Bayside Queens and knew it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t black enough for the black kids, and I wasn’t white, and the education didn’t seem to do anything but prepare you for college, so I applied to a specialty school. I went to the HS of Art and Design in Manhattan, and it was a racial oasis. Kids from all over the city–White, Black, Asian, Spanish––all with one thing in common: we loved to draw. It was neutral ground; a demilitarized zone.

Lisa

I love that description. My friends went there, but they’re older than you.

Can I pause for a moment?

I can’t help but think of all the things we have in common…Brooklyn, musical parents (my mother sang, but not professionally), NYers, our age, entrepreneurs, publishing backgrounds, writers. Lovers. I guess I’m always looking for connection. But to an outsider, or a cop, we couldn’t be more different.

And I’m looking with a searching honesty throughout my life and I can see the places where being white probably moved me forward. I think of my father at 15 lying about his age to drive a truck across the state because he was so desperate for money and he never got pulled over. He had dropped out of HS to work. He had to. Got his GED when I was a kid. So he could become a stationary engineer. Sorry to digress.

Jackie

(It’s okay — you’re making our point, but we have to go through the process.)  Let me move to the next question: How did being white––and being a woman––affect your job opportunities, and when did you become aware of this?

Lisa

Good question. I’m going to talk about being a woman first only because my early career was successful but definitely marked with a lot of sexist bullshit.

I did a year of college. My parents got divorced. I stopped going to school and started working. My family support kind of fell apart and my summer job turned into an offer for a full-time position at the Wall Street company I was doing data entry for between semesters. It was a Canadian firm. Could you get more white?

The traders were all Americans, New Yorkers, but the people who owned the firm were Canadians. I was teased & vilified for my accent. I worked really hard to stop talking that way.

My Italian friends would tell me I was “talking white” when I answered the phone at the office.

The men I was sent out to train on the data analysis system we created hit on me. Almost every single one. So I feel being a woman hindered me in my career, needless to say. It never felt like an advantage. Or a privilege.

On being white— now I have to question the success I did enjoy. At the time I called myself lucky. I was lucky to get the job on Wall Street, I was lucky to be sent out to see clients, I was lucky to turn that job into a job in IT, as a technical writer, at of all places Orion Pictures. They may not have been paying me the same as my male colleagues but they were paying me a LOT of money.

After Orion went bankrupt (it wasn’t my fault!) I took the opportunity to work in the nonprofit sector, to see if I truly wanted to serve people (my first career choice was therapist). First I worked at God’s Love We Deliver, an organization that feeds people with AIDS. And that, Jackie, was truly my first awakening to the two different America’s that reside in New York City. We served anyone who had HIV or AIDS. Some of our clientele was well-off. But many many, many people we served were poor and people of color, and living in the worst fucking housing in New York City. I had never seen poverty like that in my life. The next place I worked was NY Cares. This organization provides volunteers to service organizations throughout the city.

I was part of the team that ran NY Cares Day, the largest single fundraiser for the organization. It’s a day when people from all over the city do service in public schools. In order to participate the schools had to write to us and ask us to come. I took it upon myself to make sure that we were serving people equally throughout the five boroughs. So I took the “blue books” the city published, which provided all of the census and economic data for every borough. I wanted to be sure we were equally serving every population. Jesus, what I learned about the city then! The median income for the South Bronx was $11,000 a year. This was in 1994. That job taught me more about the privileged childhood I had than anything else up until that point.

Let me stop and ask you the same question now…how did being black—and being a man—affect your job opportunities, and when did you become aware of this?

Jackie

I became aware of it slowly. Not because I was dull; I was just raised to believe that if you were smart enough, good enough, talented enough, it would be enough. It’s a terrific lie that people of color tell their kids, and you wonder as an adult: why didn’t they let me know that I could be smart, hard-working, talented, ethical, and there would still be people who wouldn’t work with me, just because I was black?

I was an art director right out of high school, which made me the youngest officer in a company of about 500. I was the first person of color to ever be a director at that company.

Later when I worked on Wall St. I was one of maybe 5 black males in my building which housed a thousand people who wasn’t delivering mail or working the security desk. There was a class action lawsuit going on at the time––which the plaintiffs won––suing the company for not promoting people of color.

Then in the 90s during the Bush recession I was unemployed for a year and a half. I sent out 1,200 resumes, got around 60 calls back, went on two dozen interviews. Twice it got down to me and one other person, and they took the other person. It’s easy to say it was just a rough time for everyone, but I remember instances where I had great phone interviews, yet was treated differently in person. One woman looked at me for the first time and exclaimed “Oh my god; I had no idea you were black.” Another man quoted me a third of the salary he’d offered, and told me I “wouldn’t want to work for that.”

I was always the only black guy at the ad agencies I worked at. When I switched over to publishing, I was the only black person who held the title of Director in a company of thousands. Human Resources asked me to join the Diversity Counsel; I told them if they ever got some diversity, I’d join.

When I finally left corporate America after 25 years to launch my company––a liquor brand––I soon discovered I was the only black person in America with a license to make liquor. Four years later, there are exactly TWO of us––not what you’d call a diverse field.

♦◊♦

Jackie

Before we dig deeper, let’s have some fun. Any “interracial” dating?

Lisa

🙂

Well. I had my first apartment in the East Village at 19. My NYU boyfriend went off to MIT and I sublet his place. I got my friend’s girlfriend to rent it with me. Between the two of us we paid $350 for a one bedroom apartment on East Fourth. What did we do with all our money you ask? Partied like the world was about to end!
Like two repressed Irish-Catholic girls from the boroughs would party, given the chance.

We went out to the clubs every night (Palladium, Danceteria, The Limelight). I had one African-American lover named Robert. He liked me a lot, but I didn’t feel the same way, and I never returned his calls after a few nights together. I’m sorry to report that I never had a long-term relationship with anyone not white.

I don’t know if that was my own racism, my family’s racism, my culture’s racism — actually it was all of those things right? My loss for sure. You?

Jackie

It’s tricky because it’s so deeply engrained. We live in a culture that for centuries has held a particular standard of beauty, culture, and intelligence. We all develop bias––mostly, but not all subconscious––about what we find attractive, and unless we dig deep into our own perceptions, we never understand WHY we find certain things attractive.

Lisa

I think too, it was a lack of opportunity. I literally didn’t know any boys of color! Until college. And then it may have been too late. Also, honestly Jack…I did not feel worthy of black men or culture. I think it’s superior to white culture.

Jackie

I married a black woman of Caribbean descent. It was disastrous; she was verbally and physically abusive. After my divorce, the first woman I dated seriously was Latina, which made sense because my first girlfriend was Latina. When that ended in flames, I entered an extended period of serial dating: I went on 4-5 dates a week for years, with women of every pantone shade.

In-between the thousands of dates I went on, I managed to have committed relationships. Their ethnic breakdown is as follows: Greek/Venezuelan, Israeli, Philippina, Austrian, and Egyptian. I think it’s fair to say my standard of beauty wasn’t limited to skin tone or culture. The white women I dated fell into two categories: either they only dated black men, or I was the only black man they’d ever been with. A strange juxtaposition.

I dated plenty of black women; just didn’t get into committed relationships with them. Not for any particular reason; it just didn’t go that way.

The Israeli woman I dated is sephardic and darker than my mom; same with the Philippina woman.

Lisa

Were you ever questioned or criticized for being with white or non-black women?

Jackie

By whom? The parents and families of the white women always rejected me.

Lisa Duggan

What about your friends or family members?

Jackie

My friends and family members couldn’t care less, as they are a bag of skittles.

Lisa

🙂

Rainbow!

My cousin’s husband is from Puerto Rico. One my of nieces is from China. Another niece is half Mexican. That’s all we got baby. We’re pretty white.

♦◊♦

Jackie

Ready to hit the hard part of this conversation? 😀

Lisa

The interracial dating question wasn’t the hard part???

Jackie

Hell, that was super-easy.

Lisa

I’m terrified of what this conversation reveals about me. Or will.

But go ahead. I’m ready.

Jackie

So here’s my question: your upbringing was pretty mayonnaise, your first exposure to black folks wasn’t until your twenties, and you’ve basically had no real reason or motive to know or understand a culture different than yours. Why and how did you learn about folks of color, and how did this change your interaction with and for them?

Lisa

Jesus! I sound like an asshole. LOL.

Jackie

No, you don’t.

Lisa

Just an American.

Jackie

That’s kinda the whole point. Your life wasn’t better or worse by not knowing about black folks. You had the choice of just being you and enjoying your freedoms without ever needing to change. So why change? Why learn? Why grow?

Lisa

No — it’s a beautiful question. And I’m happy to answer it.

My life and the answer to this question absolutely comes from the context of my parents. The America they knew was the aspirational America right? My grandfather literally came over on a boat because this was a “better place”. And I didn’t know my Irish forefathers, but they certainly came with the same idea.

So they taught me the religion of the aspirational America. They lived it. And in those stories were stories of striving and overcoming prejudice — not the prejudice Dr King fought, but bias all the same. My grandmother beating kids up because they called her a WOP, “without papers”. My father struggling through poverty, my proud Irish grandmother not wanting to accept any welfare — she wouldn’t take the cheese that they were giving out — she got a job at the Brighton Laundry, then Bell Atlantic, as a phone operator.

So so I was taught to prize overcoming bias, triumph over adversity. They set me up for a life of compassion and a love for the underdog.

That’s why I’m a Mets fan. 🙂

So as I began to meet people who were living very differently from me in the same city and seeing the forces that worked against them and the forces that worked for me — I wanted to understand what this American history was that had been kept from me my whole life.

My ex-husband, Frank, teased me. He called it my “black period”.

I started reading everything I could by black Americans. Malcolm’s biography, Manchild in the Promised Land, and others. I asked my father-in-law, who taught social work at York College in Jamaica Queens for 20 years, to help me understand. He told me to read about the great migration of southern blacks to Chicago & the NorthEast. When I met Frank I moved to Brooklyn. First Brooklyn Heights. Then Park Slope.

What made me curious? Seeing the divide. And then living in Brooklyn. Living with people of color! And coming to understand it is, and it isn’t, a separate culture. It’s American culture. It’s mine too.

It’s like learning you were adopted. And had a whole family they didn’t tell you about. And that family was still suffering. And you lived out in the country, with central air, and no cops shooting at you.

But it really, really really came home for me after becoming Alice’s mother. We live in Maplewood/South Orange, New Jersey, where the African-American population with the highest median income in the country lives — it’s an average of $95,000 a year, dual-degree families of color — or it was in 2006 when I researched the demos to start my magazine here. We live in a special bubble. But one that Frank and I intentionally chose. We wanted a a suburban community that wasn’t a bigoted, homogenous, white environment.

And then Alice went to first grade. And Justin became her best friend. And she learned about Martin Luther King in Kindergarten. And I had to explain to her that she wouldn’t have been allowed to play with Justin, only one generation ago, and worse, that his family might have been injured or killed for being black….

I’ll never send a son or daughter out into the world with “the talk” black parents must have. But I do send my daughter out with a version of it. So she can help protect her friends. Like Justin. I’m here for love and for justice’s sake.

Are those good enough reasons?

Jackie

Do they have to be good enough? Reasons are reasons.

Lisa

The injustice, the hatred. The naked hatred; the invisible hatred. It’s destroying us. I want to stop it.

Jackie

While that may be true, it rarely motivates anyone. Most are happy to see the world burn so long as it doesn’t affect them directly.

Lisa

They kid themselves that it doesn’t affect them, Jackie. We’re all in this together.

Jackie

I’m not disagreeing, but most avoid unpleasantness until they can’t.

Lisa

Look at this — I can’t ask you the same question can I?

Jackie

Of course you can.

Lisa

You couldn’t opt-out of white culture.

Jackie

Go on, ask.

Lisa

Why and how did you first learn about white folks, and how did this change your interaction with them?

Jackie

It was an unusual coming to awareness for myself. Like everyone else, I learned the history I was taught, which was in retrospect, incredibly flawed. I grew up thinking that natives were bad, cowboys were good, Tarzan was king of the jungle in Africa, the Egyptians from The Ten Commandments were white, nappy hair and big lips were bad, dark skin meant I was perceived as a threat by default, and the only way to succeed in America as a person of color was as an entertainer or an athlete.

I had the good fortune of having parents of different faiths; my mother was Christian and my dad was Muslim. As early as five years old, I thought to myself: if mom and dad don’t agree on who god is, maybe neither of them have the right answer? This was the start of my path of critical thinking.

As a teenager I read the Bible, the Qu’Ran, the Pentatuch, the To’Rah, the Five Rings, the Tao Te Ching, and the Bhagavad Gita. As a young adult, I read Ntozake Shange, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X. I also read books like Lies My Teacher Told Me, and A People’s History of The United States. What I discovered was: everything I (thought) I knew was a very carefully woven deception, and truth was out there, sitting, waiting for anyone who was willing to dig for it.

This didn’t make me angry or resentful but it did make me aware. I remember as a kid being told two things that didn’t make sense to me until I became an adult.

I was told: twice as hard for half as much. There wasn’t an explanation given to this, as that didn’t appeal to my nascent sense of justice: how was that possibly fair?

Lisa

I can relate to that as a woman, for me, it’s “backwards and in high heels” (Ginger Rogers did everything Astaire did but backwards and in high heels and he was the bigger star).

Jackie

The other thing I was told was: you can forget you’re black; don’t forget they won’t forget. It took me a long time to understand that, being smart enough, hard working enough, talented enough, wasn’t and would never be enough for some people. It didn’t matter how I saw myself: there would always be some people who would sum me up at a moment’s glance and base their entire opinion of me based on the color of my skin.

Today there’s more information available than ever. There are films on the history of America, scholarly papers on our slow but steady progress towards an egalitarian society, we’ve got more cross-culture than ever before. We have proof positive of the advantages a privileged society provided to whites over blacks, that helped build wealth over generations. And still somehow, we are still literally fighting for survival: economically, culturally, and physically.

Lisa

I have a question for you—that may seem tangential, but bear with me. Do you recognize sex, being the female sex, as a disadvantage? I ask because I could say the same thing you said above but insert “based [their entire opinion of me] on my gender”.

Jackie

We definitely still live in a society that experiences gender bias. It’s irrefutable, but that doesn’t keep certain factions from denying it. As has become inescapably clear: strong feelings can overshadow facts, and the men who feel they are being marginalized by having women enjoy the same rights they’ve always had, feel threatened.

♦◊♦

Lisa

Do you think my whiteness trumps my femaleness? Meaning, can being white erase the affects of sexism in my life?

Jackie

Intersectionality is tricky. White women benefited the most from affirmative action; that doesn’t mean they were (or still are) treated any better in the workplace. And the truth is: all of this is pretty frickin’ new. We went thousands of years without women being able to own property, hold jobs, keep their own last names. Then suddenly in the past 50-100 years, we’ve come to the realization that (gasp!) women are people! And deserve everything men get. So we changed (some) of the laws. The culture of misogyny remains largely intact.

Lisa

Here’s where my thoughts go on this:

I would say being black is worse than being female in terms of disadvantages.

But then…this country elected a man before a woman. A black man. And being white didn’t help me advance in my career — being female was a greater liability.

And I would still say that being black is way worse than being female..I was about to say it. But then I realized what else we have in common: we both could be killed for simply being who we are. And I don’t mean metaphorically for me…even at my socio-economic level, women are killed everyday by their partners. It’s not videotaped. Yet.

What you wrote about — we know so much now, why is it still dangerous to be black in America? I’d say that we’re still in the Discovery portion of the case against America . . . .That although black folk have known this for centuries we’re — the rest of us — just now gathering irrefutable proof.

Jackie

And the proof results in cognitive dissonance. Because believing the lies you were raised with is easier than changing your worldview, and yourself.

Lisa

Yes, that is what we have to overcome — white people, but black and latino people too, coming to understand that, holy shit! — it’s as bad as we thought it was. What was the difference, is the difference, between the Jewish holocaust and black America’s holocaust?  (Using that comparison because that was a hard pill to swallow…lots of cognitive disbelief abounded there.)

Jackie

The difference is: they say ‘Never Forget’ about the Holocaust. When it comes to the Native/African American holocaust, they say: get over it, that was then, this is now.

Lisa

EXACTLY. They had their portion of discovery, trial and prosecution. They did not allow it to be swept away. Not that any American of color “allowed” it to be swept. It was white folk that did that. Those horrible snuff films of police murdering citizens? We have to stick America’s nose in it……

You CANNOT look away.

You CANNOT deny this.

Jackie

I think we’ve figured out — that approach doesn’t work.

We saw Eric Garner killed. No one killed Freddy Grey. We saw Tamir Rice killed. The list goes on.

Lisa

So what are we saying? There is no answer?

♦◊♦

Jackie

So here’s my question to you: we put civil rights laws on the books 50 years ago. It seems we’re still struggling to enforce them in a meaningful way. In your opinion and based on your experiences, what’s the pathway towards a more culturally aware society?

Lisa

I want to mention my good friend and teacher Michael Lally here. He’s an Irish-American poet and writer born in 1942, here in South Orange, NJ, whose first love was a black girl. Both families disowned them and although they remained in touch and in love with one another their whole lives, they didn’t marry or spend their lives together, as they both wished, because of the deep racial divide in their community, and this country. When I complain to Mike about the inequities and injustices of today, he shares my outrage, and he joins with me in fighting it, but he also reminds me how much has changed. How so much has gotten better.

I don’t think there is one answer to this question, of course. But I think there are many things we can do and I can do as an individual.

For me, as a white parent, my responsibility is to teach Alice the real American history, what happened and how it continues to play out now. In high incarceration rates, sub-prime mortgage schemes, more detention for kids of color in our school district. Trump’s entire campaign — a whole lesson right there, in white privilege, supremacy, hatred. “This is what that is, Alice (racism). It’s wrong. This is how it came about.” First job, call it out wherever you see it. Call it what it is. Make racism visible.

Seek to prosecute it, in the court of public opinion, and in the courts. Use whatever platforms you have at your disposal, including all your social media channels.

Think about running for BOE or public office. Be the change. Don’t just elect the change. Write a letter to law enforcement leaders in your country challenging them to stop the killing of brown and black boys and girls and men and women. TODAY.

Okay. Your turn.

In your opinion and based on your experiences, what’s the pathway towards a more culturally aware society?

 

Jackie

My approach is different, more subversive.

It’s clear that legally we can change things, but laws don’t change hearts. I believe that unless we change the culture, the climate remains the same.

The great thing about this is: White people already love black culture. From jazz to hip-hop, from Jimi Hendrix to Bob Marley, from Prince to Stevie Wonder, from Maya Angelou to Spike Lee, from Michael Jordan to Ken Griffey Jr: you love all of our contributions.

And those are the ones you know about. You love super-soakers in the summer and video games all year long. You love fried chicken and waffles and you love BBQ.

And we’ve seen your porn searches; we KNOW you love (or at least fetishize) black bodies.

All we want is for white people to love black people the way they love our culture.

Lisa

I don’t disagree with you but we can’t underestimate the power of the Law to change things.

They are powerful, but yes, limited as to what is done with them by whom. Laws create Doorways — they make things POSSIBLE but not EASY.

The truth is, without the civil rights act neither Obama nor Hillary could even CONTEMPLATE running for President.

The law made it possible, it certainly didn’t make it easy — it didn’t eliminate the angry, bigoted, fucktards.

And the law makes prosecution possible. Again, possible. Not easy.

One more point: Obama did more to erase bias in the hearts and minds of kids than all of literature and art combined. My daughter LITERALLY will never know what it’s like to NOT have a Black man as Commander in Chief. And soon, hopefully, a woman. And marriage equality. She will grow up expecting marriage and kids as a possibility, no matter whom her partner is. IF she wants it.

Jackie

My approach will be to put more art into the world.

More books, more music, more food, more movies, more exposure to things that have universal appeal that happen to be made by folks of color, with a view to enjoying these things in cross-cultural venues. Let folks see we love the same foods, the same music, want the same things for our kids. Dance with us. Sing with us. Go to musicals like Hamilton with us. Then you won’t just be doing things because it’s the law, you’ll be motivated because it actually impacts you, and you care because you’re personally vested.

Lisa

I’ll be right over to do those things with you.

The ReEducation of Miss Duggan. (The Further ReEducation.)

Jackie

So we need both. We need laws that make racism essentially unprofitable, but that’s simply negative reinforcement. For those laws to really stick, we need for people to feel personally vested.

I think of it this way:

The laws are the structure of a house. The foundation, the beams, the basics.

That isn’t what makes anyone want to live there.

For it to be a home, it needs comfort.

It needs paintings on the wall, and food in the fridge, and a big ass TV with your favorite shows playing, and a backyard where we can play music and dance.

Laws are the house. Culture makes it a home.

Lisa

I hear you Jackie, I really do.

Jackie

I think this was a pretty successful experiment.

Lisa

I think so too. It was wonderful regardless. If we examine the origins, in ourselves, of bias, we can change it.

I love you Jackie Summers 🙂

Jackie

<3 we have a beautiful friendship. I’m grateful for you

Lisa

Kumbayah, motherfucker 🙂

 

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