The Slippery Slope of Talking About Race in America
A couple of years ago I took on an assignment to write about racial equity and social justice in the food movement I have to admit, that I didn’t know much about the United States Department of Agriculture or its history of inequity. So I started with what I knew to do… research. I typed in race and farming. It made sense to me. I needed a background, a point of reference. To my surprise there was entry after entry on discrimination against black, Native American and Hispanic farmers. The discrimination resulted in a class action suit filed by black farmers, known as the Pigford Case. I went on to interview a few black farmers to get their take on this. For more information on the Pigford Class Action Suit go to http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/RS20430.pdf
Fast forward to July 21, 2010. It is the day that the first person to be fired for racist activity. Shirley Sherrod, a 25-year employee of the USDA was asked to submit her resignation because she told her truth. Back in March she made an honest and open speech in front of the NAACP about her personal journey and evolution around race.
I am sure that Ms. Sherrod never set out to be the next Rosa Parks. And I am sure that she never expected to lose her job, because she told her truth. Instead, the head of the USDA reacted to a snippet of a tape of her speech. The NAACP reacted, as well, throwing her from the bus for a speech that Ms. Sherrod made at one of their meetings months before). Working in rural Georgia, I am sure it couldn’t have been easy for her. I bet she has some stories about being called names and threatened by the white farmers she tried to help. Whatever she saw, and felt, she clearly was able to move past it. It is a lesson that we all need to hear. And we could have heard it, if the tape hadn’t been edited.
The rest of the tape addresses lots of things including Sherrod’s story of the death of her father in a racist act. She talks about having crosses burned on her family’s lawn. And she talks about her commitment to stay in the South to change things. Yet, if you read the Tea Party blogs, or watched only Fox News, you would have heard only a couple of lines of her speech, out of context.
When a spokesperson for the Tea Party admitted that it was their intention to embarrass the NAACP by editing and sending this tape out virally, they set in motion a firestorm that made a whole lot of people look bad. The house may be on fire, but remember there was somebody standing there with a gas can and a match. Will we continue to let the flame throwers set the Shirley Sherrods of the world on fire for sport?
If you think that we live in a post-racial society, now that we have the first African American president, then think again. My heart broke a little when I heard Ms. Sherrod say “I can’t believe I am out of a job.” Shirley, I can’t either. I am not surprised that extreme conservatives work tirelessly to stir up the tensions of race. But I am horrified that the NAACP and the USDA were so reactionary. Right now I am sure that Tea Party members all over the country are having a great laugh at the expense of a woman in her 60s who told a story about how she has come to view race and poverty.
As a child of the 60s, I have seen hate around race. I have seen how far we’ve come. But I see how much healing we need to do. As of this writing, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack has apologized to Ms. Sherrod, and offered her a job. Not her job, but a job. The NAACP also apologized. But when will we stop being a PR machine, reacting to save funding, and chase a few public opinion points? I am sure that the USDA acted to curb any embarrassment to the Administration. How’d that work out USDA? Are you willing to shake the trees and go back to and chase out the hundred or so years of discrimination against black, Native American, Asian and Hispanic farmers?
I also want to thank CNN for doing real journalism. They teach us a lesson. Blogs and twitters are just sources. They are not the story. Real journalists roll up their sleeves and vet stories. They look at real tapes. They give balanced coverage. In fairness to other media outlets, it is true that there is a rush to get the story out there as quickly as you can in the 24-hour news cycle. We feed the beast as fast as we can. Some time we need to slow down and ask some questions, especially when we call for someone to get fired.
The media has a lot of work to do. And so do we, the advocates, the thinkers, the policy makers and the pundits. Race is an uncomfortable conversation. But I am now convinced that we need to have more conversations. We need to address our humanity and our diverse American culture. We need to find our own courage to be Shirley Sherrod in our own right. And then we need to heal. Today I found out how easy it is to be angry in cases like this. It is challenging to take a deep breath and move forward in truth and honesty. Thank you Shirley Sherrod for the lesson.
There’s a Fine Line between Courage and Foolishness
Last week, I decided to forego the mall and take my 11-year old son Santiago to a secondhand store to purchase him some dress clothes for a friend’s wedding. As I was hunting for suits in the boys department, Santi went on his own hunting trip and returned a few minutes later clutching a marble trophy and looking me right in the eyes. “Can I get this?” he asked. I looked more closely at the trophy and saw it had an engraving:
A courageous individual constitutes a majority.
I asked him why he wanted it. He said, “It will remind me to always stand up for what I believe in no matter what other people think.” I paused for a moment. Then, I looked at Santi and realized again how fortunate I was to live with one of my greatest teachers.
The engraving on the trophy inspired me to reflect more on courage, and the courageous individuals it might be referring to. Of course, Rosa Parks came to mind, as well as the young Chinese student who stood against the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. I also thought of Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning, who singlehandedly blocked the vote on a bill which would have extended unemployment benefits to millions of laid-off workers. There was no doubt in my mind that these individuals firmly and passionately believed in what they were doing, and whether one agrees with their opinions and tactics or not, their courage could not be denied.
But there is a fine line between courage and foolishness. I believe that line is defined by timing, context, the message, and the messenger.
In 1863, nearly one hundred years before Mrs. Parks boarded that historic bus, Mrs. Charlotte L. Brown took a seat in the mid-section of a San Francisco railcar and was forcibly removed by the driver. Both Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Parks were African-American women of a similar age living under oppressive conditions. They posed no threat to others, but simply were tired and wanted to take an empty seat. So the context, message and messengers were much the same in both situations. But the timing was not right for Mrs. Brown and she all but disappeared from our history books. But for Mrs. Parks, history and society proved that the timing was right for her action to have a larger impact.
Likewise for Senator Bunning, he stood his ground as his allies continued to withdraw their support. Was he falling victim to timing or context? Perhaps his message was misdirected, or he was simply the wrong person to deliver it. Whatever the reason, his show of courage was quickly slipping into an act of foolishness.
Wise leaders need to have the courage to stand by their convictions no matter what. But they also need to look around and see who is listening. Are their listeners leaning forward with piqued interest or are their arms crossed with impatience and disinterest? Is this the right moment?
Senator Bunning decided that it was not his right moment. Mind you, I can’t really know whether he waffled on his beliefs and convictions; but his change in tactics suggest that he understood the time was not right and no one was standing with him.
As leaders committed to social change, we need to be mindful of our timing, context, messages and messengers.
Thinking, communicating and planning strategically are keys in assuring success. Much of my work involves getting organizations and communities on the same page with their mission, vision, values and strategic direction. And when that happens, the courageous individual can rest assured that her opinion will have a great and lasting impact.
P.S. Santi’s trophy is sitting on his bookcase. We also got him a designer suit, a shirt, tie and a pair of dress shoes - all for twenty-four dollars - and he looked impeccable. So the moral of this story is to check out your local secondhand store. You never know what treasures might await you.
Courage After the Decade of Risk
For some reason, it is easier to recognize 2010 as the last year of the new millennium’s first decade than it was ten years ago to recognize Y2K as the final year of the twentieth century. 2000 felt like something new. That New Year’s Eve ten years ago, people around the world indeed partied “like it was 1999,” feeling that the entrance of that numeral “2″ was the start of something big. I suspect that the celebrations this year will be much more subdued, because, let’s face it folks, we got off on the wrong foot.
Not that the last one hundred years were so wonderful, featuring world wars, global genocides, and a nuclear arms race threatening Armageddon. Still, the achievements of the 80s and 90s, featuring the collapse of the cold war, progress on human rights, and extraordinary developments in a full spectrum of life-enhancing technologies, imbued us with a visceral sense of optimism as we crossed the bridge to a new century. Our confidence was reinforced when the world did not end the morning of January 1, 2000, and traffic lights and air traffic controllers continued to function despite their ancient software. We were even smarter than we thought.
But as we threw away our duck tape, the dot com bubble burst, along with the Twin Towers and the world as we knew it. And what followed were more wars and bursting bubbles, a rough ride downhill almost to another great depression. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wants to call the decade “the Zeros” because nothing good happened, but we know all too well that there is something worse than nothing good. Indeed, the disturbing theme of this first decade of a new time in human affairs has not been the absence of something good, but rather the hidden presence of something very bad, like biting into a shiny, hard apple and finding nasty rot inside.
We saw this motif again and again. That great stock you bought was actually worthless. The average looking guy sitting next to you on the airplane turned out to be a terrorist. The company that posted record profits was actually sinking like the Titanic. The miraculous energy company was actually an energy black hole. The war against terrorism was actually a terrorism factory. The quest for imaginary weapons of mass destruction somehow managed to produce mass destruction itself. Moral crusaders (there were many) turned out to be immoral philanderers in disguise. The insurance company turned out to be a casino. The guardians were thieves, the buttresses were battering rams, and the rock turned out to be quicksand. Donning their bleeding red brackets, assets revealed themselves as liabilities. The world seemed (indeed, seems) to be rife with “Black Swans.” The impossible was not merely possible; it was real and it arrived in the flesh. As a person who grew up in the shadows of Manhattan, what I still cannot process when I look at the New York City skyline is the absence. The empty space visibly towers, serving as a stark reminder that what seems permanent and trustworthy can change in a moment.
The word I will associate with the transition to a new decade this year is “risk.” It’s a good word to contemplate in a blog dedicated to the practice of courageous leadership. I really hate to quote Donald Rumsfeld, but back in 2002, he said it right:
There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
Real risk is not just about the known unknowns, it is about the unknown unknowns. The Zeros have been a decade dedicated to these special risks: that treacherous floor beneath your feet that looks and feels secure but is about to give way. How do you marshal courage against the unknown? It’s a very hard case, because a mature, pragmatic courage calls upon us to carefully weigh the costs and benefits of a particular choice. But when we are actually in the arena, rather than on the sidelines pontificating, we not only lack information, we often labor under lies and deceit, and so the risks we confront are often painfully hidden and unknowable to us in the difficult moment when we must make our way forward.
While humans as a whole are gaining increasing mastery over the world they inhabit, they remain sharply vulnerable to one another and to their own systems. This is the special teaching of the first decade of the new millennium. The greatest global threat to the natural lifespan is no longer nature but humanity, menacing not only itself but every other life form on earth as well. At this moment in human evolution, courage acquires a special meaning. Courage no longer dwells in confronting the risks “out there,” nor even the risks posed by “others.” The special courage called for in the third millennium is the grit needed to stare deeply into the mirror and to know ourselves. That which lies hidden within human nature itself is surely both our greatest asset and our most profound liability. The courage we must call forth now is the capacity for self knowledge and self control.