Morgan Freeman "Solves Race Issue"

I've been thinking a lot about Morgan Freeman lately, not because he's one of my favorite actors (he is), but because his name has come up on a few occasions as I discussed the issue of racism with a group of people. A few times now someone in the group brought to my attention that Morgan (is it okay if I call him that? I feel like I've known him forever) commented in an interview that he's against the celebration of Black History Month, and that the way to solve America's race problem is to ignore it. Here the interview clip if you're interested: Morgan Freeman Interview.

Now I know that Morgan Freeman cares deeply about race relations in America. The film, "Prom Night in Mississippi" leaves no doubt that Morgan is aware of and concerned about racial tension in America. The documentary shows what happens in the actor's home town, Charleston, Mississippi, when he offers to pay for the high school prom if students, parents, and school officials will allow the event to be racially integrated. Yes, that's right. In 2008, Charleston held it's first racially integrated prom and Morgan Freeman paid for it. It's a fascinating story and I recommend viewing the film.

So why would a person who is obviously concerned about the persistence of racism within the fabric of American culture make such a statement about Black History Month, and why would he propose ignoring race as a way to move past racism? While it's not my job to explain other people's ideas (actually it kind of is, because I'm a teacher, but you know what I mean) it seems obvious to me that Morgan is not advocating for a colorblind approach as it has existed in the U.S. for decades. White people have been ignoring race for a long time now, with unfortunate results for people of color. I believe the actor's point is that Black history is part of American history and should be fully integrated into school curriculum, not pulled out once a year as a tokenistic celebration that most people (read: white people) ignore. When that happens, perhaps it will signal that we CAN stop talking about race the way Morgan suggests. Personally, I hope and pray for the day when all individuals are granted equal access in education, employment, housing, and are treated equally in our criminal justice system. But that day has not yet arrived.

But what I find most interesting is not what Morgan Freeman said about race. Whether I agree or disagree, he's only one person and he's entitled to his opinion. What fascinates me is not the what, but the why -- why do white people quote this one African American voice during discussions of racism, while ignoring the multitude of other statements, essays, books, articles, films, etc., that relate a different point of view? (BTW, a few years ago white people were quoting Bill Cosby in much the same way.) Why do they embrace one person's advice while ignoring the voices of so many others? What do they have to gain?

Derrick Bell, a famous critical race scholar, coined the term "interest convergence" for the phenomena we're witnessing here. Bell said that white people will support equal rights only when it suits their own interests. So, as a white person I can happily ignore any opinions about racism that don't support my view of myself as a non-racist person, but jump on those voices that I agree with, that make me feel better about myself. After all, if a prominent African American actor like Morgan Freeman says I should ignore race, who am I to argue? I can use Morgan's statements, even if he doesn't exactly mean what I want him to mean, to prop up my own distaste of facing racism on individual and institutional levels. And I can feel good about doing so, all the time allowing my own motivations to remain unexamined.

Morgan Freeman

Writing While White

One doesn’t have to look far to find evidence that racism is alive and well in the U.S., where schools and the population in general are becoming increasingly diverse. Equally apparent is that some folks just aren’t having it. When, recently, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and members of the Ku Klux Klan took to the streets of Charlottesville with their message, “white lives matter,” I have to say I was shocked but not surprised. I felt a visceral sense of shock and disgust at the news photo of torch-carrying whites, gathered en masse, shouting their message of exclusion. But I was not surprised at the message itself, because while the current political climate may have emboldened these individuals, their argument is nothing new. I’ve heard the reverse-racism discourse, the argument that whites are the new victims of racism and somehow need protection, many times from white friends, family, and students – people who would never take up a torch and march in defense of their perceived white supremacy. In fact, when I bring up the topic of racism in my classes I’m more surprised if students (usually white but not always) don’t launch into the reverse-racism discourse in the form of anti-affirmative action arguments than if they do. Most of these students have heard these arguments all their lives and have come to internalize the idea that if a person of color (excluding Asians – there’s a whole separate discourse for that) has advanced to an important or prominent position, he or she probably got there at the expense of a white person who worked harder and was more qualified.

In my ethnography of high school students called Race Among Friends,[i] I found that the reverse-racism discourse was prominent during class discussions of multicultural literature. Even among students who were deeply invested in their cross-racial friendships at this small, racially diverse school, the idea that racism is over and that African Americans use the “race card” to gain unfair advantage persisted.  When I started to think more deeply about the fiction these students had read in previous grades, the “classics” of the multicultural literature “canon,” it wasn’t hard to see, at least partly, why these attitudes endure. Many students are still reading the texts on race that you and I read when we were in school: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,[ii] by Mark Twain, and To Kill a Mockingbird,[iii] by Harper Lee. Both of these works still form the foundation of the multicultural canon in many school districts. Both were written by whites, and both depict the internalized racist attitudes that I (as a writer and as a person) and many whites struggle to recognize and overcome.

Much has been written about the racial language and images of Huck and Mockingbird, and I won’t take the time for an in depth analysis here, other than to say that both represent a complicated mix of brilliantly written narrative and hidden racialized meanings played out by the stories’ characters. For example, while some teachers and school districts still struggle over Twain’s use of racial epithets, Jane Smiley[iv] and Toni Morrison[v] point out that it was Twain’s depiction of Jim, the full-grown African American slave companion of Tom and Huck, as a child-like pawn in the hands of two white adolescents, with no voice and no say in his own future, that is truly problematic. Likewise, in the case of the much loved novel (and movie) To Kill a Mockingbird, the very title suggests an unexamined racism far more subtle than whether or not the characters use “the N word” (as my students say) in the story.  The title comes from Atticus’ admonition to his son, “Shoot all the bluejays you want…but remember, it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” (Lee 90). Miss Maudie, a neighbor, clarifies: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” (90). So, who are the mockingbirds in the story? Lee creates a cast of “respectable Negros” who, like the proverbial mockingbird, know their place and don’t bother anyone. I had to smile a little last year at the distress of some readers over the depiction of Atticus in the Mockingbird sequel, Go Set a Watchman.[vi] How could this book depict the beloved Atticus, pillar of racial justice, as racist? Unfortunately, Atticus’ passively racist proclivities were always there; perhaps we weren’t looking carefully enough to spot them. While it's true that he did his best to defend Tom Robinson in court (putting himself and his children at risk), Atticus never completely disassociated himself from the racism of his time. He told his daughter that racists "are still our friends" (76) and are "entitled to full respect for their opinions" (105). He made light of the role of the Ku Klux Klan (147) and excused the head of a would-be lynch mob as "a good man" who "just has his blind spots along with the rest of us" (157).

My point is that even when white fiction writers are attempting to be anti-racist, it can be difficult for us to fully understand how deep and hidden our attitudes about race are, and we may inadvertently perpetuate racial stereotypes through our work. Lately I’ve been reading a young adult fantasy novel. I’m about 100 pages in, and so far there is one dark skinned character, a man, in the story. He’s described as dark, muscular, and altogether gorgeous; his sensual masculinity jumps off the page and, of course, the white female protagonist is immediately attracted to him. Okay, I know there needs to be some kind of romantic attraction to satisfy readers, but the way this character fulfils the trope of the powerful black male who protects and dominates the white woman is so obvious that it’s startling. Am I saying the author is racist? No more than I am, because I’m guilty, too. A few years ago I published a young adult novel[vii] that explores the awakening of a white teen who comes to understand racism as she forms new relationships with teens of color. I tried my best to vary my characters in appearance and personality and to make them rich and complex. At the beginning of the story, Rachel, my protagonist, meets a group of five students from other school districts who will become her close friends. As I was writing, I decided that I had too many characters to suit my purposes, so I had to make one go away. Guess who left the group? The one Asian-American character in the story. Without realizing it I fulfilled the stereotype of the silent Asian, the “model minority,” who fades quietly into the background. How frustrating that even when I was trying to explore and expose racism, my own internalized dispositions about race popped out and got the best of me.

I don’t think that white people should stop including characters of color in their works, nor should we stop exploring racism in our writing. On the contrary, now, more than ever, whites need to name and expose racism in all its forms. We are at a wretched, horrifying place in our country where racist views are being accepted and promulgated by mainstream authority.  But, as I concluded in Race Among Friends, we whites must think, write, and perhaps most importantly, teach with deeper introspection, examining our own hidden attitudes about race first, lest we perpetuate the very attitudes we seek to expose.

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[i] Modica, Marianne. Race Among Friends. Rutgers University Press, 2015.

[ii] Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Brandywine Studio Press, 2008.

[iii] Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Warner Books, 1960.

[iv] Jane Smiley, "Say It Ain't So, Huck: Second Thoughts on Mark Twain's 'Masterpiece'" Harper's Magazine 292.1748 (Jan. 1996): 61-67.

[v] Morrison, Toni.  Playing in the Dark. New York: Random House, 1993.

[vi] Lee, Harper. Go Set a Watchman.  Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2016.

[vii] Modica, Marianne. The R Word. Endless Press, 2015.

Immigrant Anxiety is Nothing New

I recently had the pleasure of sharing my talk about "Living in More than One World" at Calvary Church in Wyncote, PA. (I feel a little like the Sigourney Weaver character in one of my favorite movies, Galaxy Quest -- I have one sermon, and I'm gonna preach it!) Anyway, I'm thankful for the opportunity to share with such a responsive group of people.

Just a quick synopsis of my message for context's sake -- during the talk I explore three stories of people who had to learn to live in more than one world. Story #1 looks at the early life of Moses from the first few chapters of the book of Exodus. Story #2 takes a peek at Ryan King, the protagonist of my middle grade novel, King Me! Finally, story #3 describes my own journey as a white person who needed to learn that my experience is not universal. During this part of the talk I explore the unearned, invisible privileges my whiteness affords me.

As I was reviewing my notes in preparation, the story of Moses jumped out at me for its relevance to our current world situation. Written thousands of years ago, this second book of the Pentateuch begins with the story of an immigrant population, the Hebrews, who suffered great oppression at the hands of their host country. Maybe you know the story -- Joseph and his family migrated to Egypt because of a famine (in other words, they were refugees). The Hebrew population flourished there, and after several centuries a king came to power who wasn't too happy about the presence of the Hebrews. Why? There might have been lots of reasons, but the text tells us that the king was worried because, in his mind, there were just too many Israelites around. "Come," he said, "we must deal shrewdly with them, or they will become even more numerous and if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country" (1:10). Sound familiar? This very rationalization was used to place over 100,000 Japanese people, the majority of whom were U.S. citizens, in camps during WWII. As our government has since admitted, many Japanese children, women, and men suffered because of anxiety and fear fueled by racism. 

Tragically, some haven't seemed to learn from either the ancient or recent past. It's becoming common in some circles to conflate the categories "immigrant," "refugee," and "terrorist" as if the words are interchangeable. Of course, they are not. The world is a scary place, I get it. We need to be careful, okay, I think we can all agree on that. But when we let fear take the place of rational thought, when apprehension outweighs logic, when anxiety overpowers compassion, we may find ourselves in an endless loop, repeating variations of the same sad, terrifying story. I know, the U.S. is not forcing anyone into slavery or relocating them to internment camps. But the recent so-called travel ban was so swiftly and poorly executed that, to me, it seemed more an expression of anger and anxiety than an attempt at national safety. Other more horrifying recent suggestions take us closer to the loop, such as watches on Muslim neighborhoods and a required Muslim registry.

Since I started with a sci-fi quote, I guess it's fitting I end with one. From Battlestar Galactica (also found in Ecclesiastes 1:9 and apparently in Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie) -- "All of this has happened before and will happen again." But does it have to? Maybe I'm hopeful, or maybe I'm just stubborn, but I don't believe we're destined to repeat our mistakes. We can stop the loop if we insist our leaders take actions based on logical, reasonable analysis of facts tempered with compassion, and not on rhetoric peppered with conflation and deflection (honestly, some of the arguments I'm hearing lately wouldn't pass muster in a freshman college writing course). Regardless of our political persuasion or who we voted for, we can agree that the role of government is to keep citizens safe. But we can do better than instituting sweeping orders based on fear and devoid of nuance. We must.