Ending racism is an act, not a hope
Monica Rhor says our history’s deliberate oversights have fostered an institutionalized system that must be eradicated like a disease.
On an overcast day this past spring, I gazed at the steely water of the Chesapeake Bay. At the waves thrashing on rocks below. At the horizon stretching toward the Atlantic.
And, at an historic marker commemorating the moment that gave birth to this country’s original sin.
“The first documented Africans in Virginia arrived here in Aug. 1619 on the White Lion, an English privateer based in the Netherlands,” reads the black-lettered plaque at Fort Monroe National Monument in Hampton, Va. “Colonial officials traded food for these ‘20 and odd’ Africans, who had been captured from a Portuguese slave ship.”
I tried to imagine the panic the kidnapped men and women must have felt as they were ripped from their homeland of Ndongo, present-day Angola, and clasped into chains. The fear that must have gripped them as they suffered the horrors of the Middle Passage — claustrophobic confinement, dysentery and starvation — and arrived at the landing place once known as Point Comfort, only to be bartered for supplies.
The chill that ran through me that day was not from the cool wind. It was from the history I never learned in social studies class, from the human stories omitted from the American mythology, from the names of a famiy recorded on a 1625 muster: “Antoney Negro: Isabell Negro: and William theire Child Baptised.”
All these years after elementary school, I still remember the name of the first English child born in the “New World”: Virginia Dare. My lessons never mentioned William, believed to be the first African child born and baptized in the Virginia colony, or his parents, two of the passengers brought by force aboard the White Lion.
Today, my fifth-grade daughters, who are black, still learn the bare minimum about slavery and Jim Crow. Their texts are filled with heroic stories of the Alamo, but don’t bring up Jim Bowie’s time as a slave trader. They refer to Jane Long’s “servant” Kian, but don’t explain that she was enslaved.
Perhaps the deliberately skewed rendition of history — which elevates European contributions while erasing the experiences of black and brown Americans — is what leaves us, 400 years later, still grappling with a deeply ingrained racism that persists like a weed threatening to choke everything else in the garden.
“This whole idea that black people are somehow ‘other’ and that somehow they are non-American doesn’t work well within our historical context,” said Vida Robertson, director of the Center for Critical Race Studies at the University of Houston Downtown. “The truth is, if anything, they are at the very heart of the American experience itself.”
But the truth can be uncomfortable — hard to digest and reconcile with the glossy picture of American exceptionalism. So it has been buried — and like the roots of the weed, the poison grows in the darkness. Racism thrives through fallacy, through oppressive policies, through stereotypes that feed on ignorance.
If we don’t know our full history, we lack the tools to actively fight against racism. If we don’t actively fight against racism, we are complicit in its spread.
“There is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist’,” writes historian Ibram X. Kendi, in his new book, “How to be an Antiracist.” “One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.”
In Kendi’s view, racism is not a fixed personality trait — not pejorative, but descriptive. Something we do or think at the moment. A person, he believes, can be racist about one policy, and antiracist about another. We can also change from being racist to being antiracist — but it requires blunt self-awareness and self-criticism.
“This accounts for how deeply complex we are about race and it does account for the fact that people change,” Kendi told me.
Optimistic, especially at a time when racism seems to be roaring back with a renewed fervor. At a time when a 21-yearold, apparently possessed with anti-immigrant hate, guns down innocents at Walmart. At a time when the president espouses racist tropes about rat-infested, violent black neighborhoods.
As a mother, a former teacher, a human being, I want to cling to the notion that racism can be eradicated, as Kendi — a colon cancer survivor — puts it, like a lifethreatening disease. I want to believe that education can be chemo.
If our children learn in school that Africans were in the colonies before the Mayflower — that a black man was the first to die fighting for the American Revolution; that slavery girded the economic foundation of the nascent United States; that people of color have been artists and inventors, authors and heroes — then maybe they will learn to reject racist beliefs.
The day I stood by the Chesapeake Bay, staring out at the water that delivered the first slave ship to the Virginia shore, I could hear an American flag at my back, cracking furiously in the wind against a steel pole.
The ideal of America behind me, I thought. The reality in front.
It’s the story of our imperfect union, the truth that should be taught. For the sake of ourselves and our posterity. For our present and their future.