How Did Your Neighbors Vote? White Racism in Your Backyard

The Distance Between (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

I live in New Jersey, a supposedly Blue state.  But here's the more refined truth.  I live in a town where my neighbors cast votes--the majority in each of the nine polling sites-- for Donald Trump. On every measure possible, in each polling area (there are nine), the majority of my neighbors voted for Trump and with it--white ideological hatred.

I live in Ringwood, NJ, a largely white suburb of New York City--a town that is a mix of blue-collar and professionals. And here's an important truth: well before this election, I had firsthand knowledge that this community reeks of racism and equally appalling: the lemming factor. Lemmings are little rodents that blindly follow each other off cliffs. Being polite by saying nothing in the face of racist and misogynistic speech and actions, allows for such ideology to be seen as normal and to become normal. It teaches our children very, very early that it is permissible to hurt and hate others because of perceived differences. It shows our children who, other, is. That's what the lemming factor creates. It is not only white nationalists we might fear. More so, it is the white majority's silence on matters of equality and decency that is far deadlier. By following along, lemming-like, the appalling behaviors become normalized and grave harm is done.


II.

In the suburbs, many of us don't talk about race or racism especially if you are white and I am. More than a decade ago my son, a beautiful Korean child, started first grade here. He would learn about racism those early days of school in Ringwood, at the tender age of six. We all would.

It was early September and warm when he came home from school and asked, Mommy, where is my red coat?  He had been to school for just a few days. The red coat was a snow parka and as it was well past 80 degrees, I naturally wondered why he wanted to wear it. My son had never been to school in our town.  He went to a progressive preschool and kindergarten and this was our first encounter with the local public school.

My son told his dad and me, "I'm going to pull the zipper all the way up and disappear." He said this as only a six-year-old can. He said this as if such a thing would be a solution, rather than a horror. My beautiful boy was going to hide his face and disappear.


III.

It seemed that some of the older, white boys on the school bus, those ignorant, mean white children, had already learned how to spew racist crap. They made my son's trip each day to first grade a misery until we put a stop by removing our son from the public schools in town. These children called him racist slurs, thinking he was Chinese. They let him know how different he was from them and how that difference--what he fundamentally was--was wrong. Their hatred was a viable, living thing that pulsed and grew with the silence of others. These sad boys didn't give up as they were committed to harming. The bus driver kept driving and the other children on the bus did what white children are taught to do: they kept quiet and bore witness to a six year old being abused and learned how to blame the victim. That's a main lesson taught in white suburbia.

And what about my neighbors?  You know them. Those moms who walk their kids to the bus stop each morning, a cup of coffee in hand. You see them waving as the bus departs. Their faces full of bright smiles and hope. Well, I spoke up immediately to the moms at the end of my street after the bus had left and they mostly dismissed what I told them. They dismissed what I said as if it such actions were nothing more than a nuisance. One neighbor told me that she was surprised the boys would act like that as my son was almost white. Another quickly said it wasn't about race. She explained how her white son had been made fun of because he was shorter than the others, and that's how some people just were.  The rest of the white women? They just stayed quiet as white people do. That day marked a defining moment for me. I would be quiet no more.


IV.

Rob and I thought we had made a tragic error moving to this town and now I know differently. This morning the election results in our county show that this misery my son learned at the hands of a group of white boys and the silence of other whites, could have been found in any of the towns where there exists a majority of white people. The voting results make concrete numerically the hatred that simmers here. If we are brave enough to look closely at the demographic evidence from this election, I suspect we will see similar voting patterns wherever large clusters of white people reside.

This is a hard truth to say out loud. But how else might we interpret this election? White people voted yesterday overwhelmingly for both a bigot and a misogynist who was endorsed by the KKK.

Yes, the KKK.


V.

This is the breakdown in my town (from here):


                         Turnout Percentage      Clinton            Trump          LaRiva            Stein        Johnson
Ringwood 1       70.84%                         301                 389                  1                    5               23
Ringwood 2       71.13%                         296                 349                  0                   15              14
Ringwood 3       71.05%                         253                 296                  0                   11              22
Ringwood 4       66.98%                         311                 577                  2                   15              14
Ringwood 5       67.36%                         331                 392                  1                   10              18
Ringwood 6       70.09%                         303                 312                  0                    9               16
Ringwood 7       63.96%                         275                 323                  0                    8                7
Ringwood 8       70.19%                         254                 359                  1                    6               10
Ringwood 9       68.9%                           252                 336                  0                    6               20


I live in the 9th polling area where nearly 70 percent of registered voters turned out to vote. 336 of my neighbors voted for the Trump-Pence ticket and 278 did not.  If we alone were deciding this election, the Trump-Pence ticket would have won. That's sobering.

I imagine some of my neighbors who voted for Trump-Pence might offer different reasons for why they cast their vote as they did. Perhaps some were fervent anti-abortionists. Perhaps others couldn't vote for Hillary Clinton. But underneath those reasons, my neighbors had to be able to hold in their hands the KKK endorsement Trump and Pence received. They had to have been okay with that. Their vote shows they condoned Trump's wall-building, race-baiting, derogatory comments about women, and banning Muslims due to their faith. No matter what they told themselves as they cast that vote, they had to have made peace with all of that. For it is impossible to dismiss the hate-rhetoric that has been a signature of the Trump-Pence ticket.

Whereas their vote makes them complicit to the ugly ideology that is Trump, I know that my silence makes me equally so. To remain silent in the presence of racist ideology in whatever form it takes, is to condone that hatred. To be silent when the guy next store spews some ugly misogynist jokes is to condone the hatred of women. To listen silently to a neighbor down the street spew racist gossip that isolates one from the group is to approve of that hatred. To listen and not denounce the lies being told about Muslims, being told about Jews, being told about whomever is other is to condone and agree with the falsehoods being stated.

Our silence gives permission for hate to grow.


VI.

Early this morning as we listened to the announcement that Trump had won, I confessed to my son that the results scared me. During the election, each time Trump railed about the Chinese or South Koreans, I worried for my son's safe-being. Having lost Rob earlier this year, I know how quickly a life can end. I know how quickly and decidedly harm can occur.  The thought that some of my neighbors might embrace the violence as they have embraced this racist ticket alarms me.

But what worries me more is that there is a part of me that wants to be silent, that wants to not trouble the waters.

I want to believe that my silence might protect my son. Just writing this here makes me feel vulnerable especially in light of the crazy Trump followers we have all seen displayed. But I know better. The issues of race, gender, and economic inequality will not be settled by the voices of minority groups alone no matter how bravely they speak out. They cannot and should not shoulder this misery. White people must rise up and be vocal in our local neighborhoods with our neighbors. We must say that hating others, whomever other is, is wrong all the time without exception.  

There are no exceptions. 

We must fight for integration everywhere: on our blocks, at our schools, in our houses of worship. It is in joining other, that other can become neighbor, friend. I urge you to be vocal and take action. The cost of our silence is far too much for others to bear.

I am starting where I live.  How about you?

  

White Privilege, Classroom Discourse, and Being Other

Where No One Speaks English (April 2011 by M.A. Reilly)

As a small child living in Ireland, my grandmother practiced speaking Irish, a Gaelic language, with other children secreted behind the tall hedgerow that skirted the lane where she and her family lived.  Such were the times in the decades preceding the Republic’s freedom from Britain--a time when British rule still prohibited the Irish from speaking their language of home. From the Anglo-Norman Invasion of Ireland in 1169 through the subsequent centuries of conquest, colonization, and genocide--speaking Irish remained a punishable matter.  Irish culture, language, and music were banned by the British through the Penal Laws and through institutions, such as the national schools. Irish Catholics were considered subhuman. Consider Cambridge historian Charles Kingsley (1860) who in a letter to his wife wrote:

I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country...to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as out own.

Or Oxford historian James Anthony Froude who in describing the Irish wrote: "...more like squalid apes than human beings...unstable as water...only efficient military despotism...the wild Irish understand only force."

Prior to the Easter, 1916 uprising, Michael Collins, a republican leader said:

We only succeeded after we had begun to get back our Irish ways; after we had made a serious effort to speak our own language; after we had striven again to govern ourselves. We can only keep out the enemy and all other enemies by completing that task. The biggest task will be the restoration of the Irish language (quoted in Ó Fiaich 1969: 111).

More than one-hundred years after my grandmother learned to speak her language of home behind a hedgerow, I sit here in the United States, thinking of this woman I never met, of a country, I too left, and wonder about the intersections among occupation, language, and stories. What does it mean to have to leave your language, religion, and rituals behind in order to survive? What does it mean generations later, when one’s native tongue is strange sounding to the ear? 

Although these matters have historical importance, they are also relevant and contemporary as situating some as Other remains with us, (in)forms our actions, and demonstrates our values and core understandings. One only needs to pop into 10-minutes of the current Republican ‘debates’ to see other being displayed.  I want to suggest here though that we can (and I hope do) also look more closely at the work we do at schools and perhaps become brave enough to see our own hand at work in othering, especially for those of us who are White and middle class.

Years ago at York University, Edward Said delivered a speech in which he defined imperialism, colonialism, and empire.  Said said:

As I shall be using the term--and I'm not really too interested in terminological adjustments--"imperialism" means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center that rules a distant territory. "Colonialism," which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory. As the historian Michael Doyle puts it, "Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.”

My grandmother lived under colonial rule. At the close of the 19^th century as a child in Ireland, she was subject to British rule, an empire surely in decline, but nonetheless still a permanent force operating in her daily life. Although Empires collapse, the groups who have been privileged via the Empire often remain privileged well after the collapse, as the belief system that has set them apart and above from others is institutionalized and becomes the bearer of what ‘normal’ and ‘right’ is. I want to suggest here that much of what has informed what is ‘normal and right’ via past (and current) Empires filters into our classrooms and schools, is reflected in our definition of literacy as a singular, decontextualized matter.  We see it in the text choices that fill our classrooms, the way we limit essay and narrative to ‘correct’ forms, and the belief and practice that literacies can be represented as a finalized list of skills. We operate as if there was one 'correct' discourse and those who do not have this discourse are inferior. We have not come that far from the thinking that informed Kingsley and Froude. Such thinking permeates our daily work and may be less than visible to us, depending on who we are and how we live. 

As a white woman, middle class, and the mother of a child of color—white privilege is oddly noticeable, foregrounded.  In this post I want to take a few minutes to situate it, reveal it in its subtle and not so subtle forms as it operates in our schools.  W.E.B. Du Bois warned in 1903: “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”  In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote:

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

In the opening chapter, Du Bois asks the critical question of the last and I want to suggest this century as well: How does it feel to be a problem? He deftly surrounds this question with the discourse we speak:

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

It is this ‘real’ question that we need to attend to, say aloud so that we can get beneath it and wrestle with how we situate those we consider ‘other’. Situating another as a problem represents imperialistic discourse--a belief, still with us today that informs pedagogical and content decisions, language and special education policies and practices, as well as how we situate ‘potential’ – a pernicious term if ever there was--on some learners and not others.

I had occasion a few years ago to speak with an elementary principal, Dr. Fallon (pseudonym). She explained that she did not think of the children at her school as children of color—of any color.  She did not see color, nor did anyone at the school, she told me. She insisted that the faculty and staff simply saw children; not their race.  Dr. Fallon is white. As I listened to her, I realized that she deeply believed she and the faculty were race neutral.  Such thinking is White myth-making—stories we tell and retell ourselves that allow us to remain polite, non-confrontational, removed.  If we claim to not see race, then we need not attend the underbelly of racial discrimination—the ways children get situated as problems.

As I listen to Dr. Fallon, I was equally aware of the function of memory and recalled a story I had been recently told about a child, a teacher, and the failure to see race at the school where she had indicated all were race neutral.

“When you can act like a third grader you will be allowed to sit with the other children,” Mrs. Carls, a teacher tells Jae. It is early October.

Jae, who is shy, easily embarrassed and desirous to not stand out in social settings gets up from the table where he normally sits and moves across the classroom and sits by himself at the one desk located away from the other children.  He has been caught talking loudly to a friend seated across the room, again.

This “event” is the last one in a long series of challenges that have happened only a few scant weeks into a new school year where Jae has been seen by his teacher as being a problem. One might wonder if other children in this classroom call out?  Or fidget?  Is it truly possible that only this one child does both? Is it so unexpected that an 8-year-old will do such things?

Earlier that day, Jae had yelled, “Yes!” out loud apparently disrupting his class after hearing an announcement calling for the boys and girls to try out for the school patrol.

“Aaron didn’t hear the announcement,” Jae would later tell his mother.  “He had to know. We were waiting for this. I didn’t mean to yell. I just got excited and wanted him to know we could try out. I didn’t want him to miss it.”

Being able to be part of the school patrol is a privilege reserved for third graders. Jae and his friends had been waiting until they were in the requisite grade. It would be an opportunity Jae would not come to know at this public school; a school situated in a largely white suburb. Because he blurted out, “Yes” and called across the classroom to a friend to tell him the announcement, he was left behind when his teacher and all of the other children went to the tryouts.  This was his punishment for talking out of turn.

Jae’s mother didn’t hear this story until later that night well after she had picked her son up from school, but said that she had noticed that he was extremely quiet and withdrawn throughout dinner. Hours later, in tears, he finally told her the story. She would learn that it was not only being left behind that injured Jae, but also his belief that his teacher did not like him as he is ‘different’ from the other children. The other boys, Jae would explain, can call out.  

“What did you do in the classroom by yourself?” Jae’s mother asked him.

“I wasn’t allowed to do anything. I just had to sit there with Mrs. Nomba (an aide) and wait until my class came back.”

It would be an hour later when the white teacher and the 18 white children came back to the classroom—their voices raised in the excitement that marks such occasions. Here they would find Jae, embarrassed by his misdeed, sitting alone.

It is in these small, perhaps even to some--inconsequential moments--that we need to pause and look critically for “White privilege” is an institutional matter. Peggy McIntosh explains: “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious."  She continues by saying that her schooling “followed the pattern my colleague Elizabeth Minnich has pointed out: whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal, so that when we work to benefit others, this is seen as work that will allow ‘them’ to be more like ‘us’."

I think again of Jae’s primary grade experience and wonder what did he learn about his self-worth that day?  What did being left behind echo?  How might it have reinforced racially charged encounters he had already experienced? What is the weight of memory a child of color carries and how might teachers better understand such weight? What has Jae been learning each day in the classroom since?  What undercurrents of white privilege that is reserved for boys and girls whose skin is light and whose eyes are round has Jae internalized?  What did his white classmates learn that day about children who are located as “other’ by their teacher?

These are not small matters; ones we can tuck away with pleasantries and polite conversations alongside promises to do better next time. We need to talk openly and at length about the ways that white privilege permeates our schools and communities—even if it means feeling discomfort. We need to look inwardly at our own actions and assumptions and critically and honestly interrogate ourselves. How do our actions reinforce privilege for some? How does such history inform how we see and fail to see children?

I am not writing about the gross racial injustices that become front-page news. The ones read about from the comfort of one’s home and later talked about across expanses of lawn with all the requisite outrage truly intact. It seems almost, easy, to gather these stories and wear them as symbols of our sense of justice—as if such practice might absolve us from the seemingly smaller instances when we fail to stand up for what we know to be right. Yet overt hate crimes such as the heinous killing of African-American James Byrd, Jr., chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death by three white men in Jasper, Texas in 1998 or the murder of Asian Mohammad Parvaiz, beaten to death by six white teens in West Yorkshire, England in 2006 have potential reiteration each time we fail to stand up and acknowledge the smaller, less obvious moments of racial injustice.