The common good

Racial equity and social justice were what I wanted to write about when I started thinking about switching from academic social science research to creative non-fiction--not so many years ago. So much inequity still existed. I thought I knew something, even as a white person, about being on the right side of justice. Because of court-ordered desegregation in the 1970s, I had been a minority white student in a predominantly black high school. I had continued to live in the South, I worked in racially diverse settings. And then, less than a decade ago, I went to a Racial Equity Institute workshop. What I learned there made me wonder how much I had ever really known or understood about any of it. I finally saw white supremacy as the central organizing principle in our country and how white privilege worked in my own life.

The confluence of this paradigm shift in my thinking with participating in several writing workshops and joining a writing group with two other women put me on a path to actualize my desire to write in a heartfelt way about racial justice. It surprised me that it would be through personal memoir that I was to find my new writing voice, but then, how else to write from one’s heart? It was a revelation to find out that a member of my writing group and former colleague, LaHoma, had also gone to the same newly integrated high school in the 1970s. She grew up expecting to go to Hillside; I would have gone to the much whiter Durham High School had there been no court order. We had not known each other in high school--and as we found out, we each had a different experience at Hillside. We were intrigued to hear the other’s story. And eventually we wrote a book together, Going to School in Black and White: A Dual Memoir of Desegregation, published in 2017 by Torchflame Books (Going to School in Black and White).

Several important things happened during the writing of this book. First, LaHoma and I became close friends. We had known each other casually as colleagues at Family Health International where we had both been involved in global AIDS research. When we began the writing group with our mutual friend and former professor, Jane Brown, LaHoma was working to finish several scholarly papers to ensure she got tenure as a public health professor at North Carolina Central University in Durham. Jane, newly retired, was starting to write family stories informed by boxes of archives from her father’s house. I had taken a few creative non-fiction workshops and was trying to find my social justice voice. I was revising some of essays I had started in my workshops. It was an assignment to describe the town I lived in when I was in junior high school read at a writing group meeting that started our conversation about Hillside and led to Going to School in Black and White.

Until LaHoma and I started writing this book together, I had not thought much about how difficult it is for people to talk about race--at least for white people to talk about race--with black people or even other white people. As LaHoma and I started writing about our black and white lives and sharing what we were writing with each other, we were committed to being as respectfully open and honest about our feelings as we could be. As we practiced this, our friendship deepened, and out of care for our friendship, I sought to dig as deeply as I could to find the truth of what I was thinking and doing as a 15-year-old. It didn’t take long into the writing process to realize that how I had felt about being in a mostly black high school was more complicated than I initially remembered it. I was embarrassed to admit some of it, but it was important to work through the hard stuff.

Sharing our school memories opened up a conversation about race that was illuminating for both of us. We came to think of the book as a starting place for community conversations about racial equity and unconscious racial biases. After the book was published in September of 2017, we began speaking with parent groups, book clubs, social justice interest groups, bookstores, the International Civil Rights Museum, churches, and libraries. Everywhere we went, people had stories to tell about the role of race in their own school experiences. Reading our book had made them think about their beliefs, actions, biases that they might now understand differently in a different world. More book clubs have chosen our book for discussion, and it has been taught in classes in at least two colleges in different parts of the country. It has taken on an energy of its own, even without our presence or facilitation.

We are often asked about how to fix the glaring racial inequities that exist public schools. We don’t know. So much had changed since we were in school, and now even more has changed since schooling relocated to home for many students, laying bare race and class inequalities. So much has fallen apart that the only way forward is to create something new. I would argue that racial justice must be the starting point from which new systems are born.

In the last chapter of our book, we talk about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s notion of the beloved community being our model for creating equity. To my way of thinking, the existence of the beloved community relies on a belief in the common good that includes everyone. Sadly, this belief does not seem to be a popular notion these days, but there can never be racial equity if we don’t believe we are all in this together. The following quote by Anand Giriharadas, author of Winner Take All (Source) is one that I started reading aloud at book events when we got to the topic of how to fix things. It so explicitly describes how we need to think and act as a country to make anything ok again, how we need to feel compassion across difference.

“I think one way to think about where we are in America now is that our love for our own children is far outstripping our concern for other people’s children. And whether it is my own child or you and yours, no one is ever going to take that from you. But I think the question of a healthy society is, where do you draw that line so there is a place in your heart not only for your own children, but for everyone’s.”

This seems so basic, but systems of white supremacy continue unchecked when people do not extend their caring beyond themselves, their families, or people like themselves. The events of the summer of 2020 seem finally to have opened the eyes of many people to the myriad tragic racial inequities in our country. Mutual aid became a practice for groups in crisis because of government indifference or harm. Perhaps this is a good place to start. We need to think more about what is common in the common good, and talking to each other about it, especially in our own communities. We need to expand our notion of our common life as far as we can so that people see themselves as beneficiaries in others’ well-being.

-- o --

If you are interested in the current state of racial segregation in our public schools, check out the informative and thoughtful podcast: Integrated Schools--Families Choosing Integration (Integrated Schools Podcasts)