Opinion | Learning about racism is the first step in overcoming it | Guest Columns

After police killed George Floyd, many sought ways to make a difference while feeling powerless and confused. A group of 25 formed a reading and discussion group via Zoom. Our first books included titles “Tears We Cannot Stop,” “White Rage, White Fragility,” “Me and White Supremacy” and “Begin Again.” Midway, we completed a Zoom course, Black History for a New Day by Nehemiah of Madison.

We report here some learning, the strongest of which was how much American history we’d never learned and how much the details powered our caring, validating the axiom, “What I don’t know about, I don’t care about.”

Seventeenth century colonial America had land, enterprising owners, labor shortages, European markets and European racial attitudes. European migrant workers received free Atlantic passage for seven years of wageless labor followed by grants of freedom, land and farm materials — but more labor was needed.

The first kidnaped Africans arrived at Jamestown Colony in 1619 as indentured servants until colonial law committed them and their children to a lifetime of wageless labor.

Captive Africans were legally imported until 1807 and illegally until the Civil War.

Captivity was brutal; 15-25% died en route. Women were raped and survivors were sold at auction like animals. 

Wage-free labor in the production and export of rice, sugar, tobacco and cotton resulted in vast U.S. wealth that fueled the industrial age, the military and allowed a European-American ruling class to take ever more Native American land.

By Emancipation (1863), there were 4 million African slaves, mostly in the south but distributed widely, including in Wisconsin.

A slave sold for an average $25,000 (2020 U.S. dollars), summing to a $100 billion workforce. 

The historical details of the years following the Civil War and the 13th Amendment (which outlawed slavery in 1865) were especially provocative for us. Plantations lost slave labor. Former slaves were free to determine their personal and community welfare.

Some returned to plantation work for wages. Few were granted 40 acres and a mule. Others sought education, political office and start-ups for businesses, churches, schools and colleges. A free voting Black society emerged for 12 years of legal “Reconstruction,” reinforced by the U.S. military.

This progress was ended quickly by U.S. government action, including military withdrawal. White ruling classes established a de facto slavery, including share cropping, loan sharking, discriminative law enforcement, convict leasing, racial terrorism, lynching and local Black laws that severely restricted Black progress.

We could only begin to imagine how demoralizing this was for newly free Americans; what we could was deeply disturbing.

How could European Americans treat African immigrants like farm animals? European colonists arrived with racist beliefs — politicians, industrialists, scientists, clergy and physicians helped perpetuate a pseudo-scientific mythology that Blacks were a subhuman species, intellectually, culturally and spiritually inferior, but superiorly fit for hard labor, strong and tolerant of heat and pain. 

We troubled over evidence that a Black inferiority mythology lives on in America, and how it constrains Black opportunity in education, housing, jobs, income, wealth, criminal justice, health, longevity and related cultural and intergenerational trauma. This is called structural or systemic racism, little noticed by majority Americans.

Skin color and gender continue to be stigmatized. Older men recall boys insulting another, “You run like a girl.”

No longer. Through threats of defunding, federal law and Title IX (1972), The U.S. mandated education and athletic opportunity for girls — check out UW women’s volleyball for results.

Human achievement results from opportunity — note the number of Black rocket scientists in the space program. It’s time for America to permanently and fully reject the big lie of Black inferiority and all its consequences.

White people can be sensitive to feeling judged as racist — e.g., “I’m not a racist.” “I’ve never hurt a Black person and wouldn’t want to.” “Maybe my ancestors, not me.” This results from understanding racist acts as exclusively conscious and intentional; unconscious racist acts are more common — subtle, often unnoticed by white people and usually due to unrecognized racial biases. Both cause injury. Both corrode society.

We learned about social systemic racism, the legal discrimination against Black people following Reconstruction — segregation, share cropping, convict renting, loan sharking, voter suppression and lynching. This social discrimination continues in ways invisible to white people because of extreme segregation, yet experienced daily by Black people. We began to understand our complicity in an historically racist American culture that has systematically limited the prosperity of Black people. This is structural/systemic bias.

White people have so segregated ourselves from people of color that we know little about others’ lived experience. This prevents us from being friends, neighbors and allies enabling unconscious beliefs that affect our behavior, including avoidance, fear, distrust and disrespect. This is unconscious or implicit bias. It corrodes American culture and keeps us from a more perfect union.

We are grateful to our hosts, First United Methodist Church and Nehemiah Society, both of Madison.