Sunday Funday
I want to take a step back and appreciate all my blessings thus far. I am a paid intern at one of the best places I have worked, so far. My family is alive and well, being an amazing support system even from two states away. After a year in Atlanta, I think I have found my groove, made new friends and am doing my best to be happy and healthy in this great city. In terms of working towards my dream of being a producer, I am a production assistant at a start-up production company called Blossom. Being amongst wonderful, hard-working Black women in the film industry is what I want to do in the future, so to be a part of this project means the world to me. As a start-up, I’m still an unpaid production assistant, which is okay since I’m gaining incredible experience and have a lot of freedom to explore beyond my role. All of this has made me think about what it means to be a volunteer. Technically, anyone who gives up their time and energy to a project with no commission in return is a volunteer, right? Taking that idea, I want to reach out and say (probably more for myself than for you all) that it is okay to be a volunteer for any project you believe in, when it is positive and does not hurt anyone, including yourself. Being a production assistant with Blossom is not just about reaching out and helping myself network; it is about creating a company that speaks as the voice for Black women and other women of color. Just as volunteering my time at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights was so that I could help them achieve their mission for everyone to take human rights personally, I believe film production helps more than people realize.
What is Race?
During one of my shifts at the Center for Civil and Human Rights, I met a guest from Uruguay. After experiencing the lunch counter sit-in simulator, she was shocked. She couldn’t believe that White and Black people couldn’t eat together in recent American history or that people of different races eating together resulted in violence and/or imprisonment. She told me that in her home country, they never had this legacy of segregation. One statement stuck with me during this conversation: “You know, I didn’t know I was White until I came to the United States.” Americans would tell her that she was White because of her light skin and blonde hair. For her, she was Uruguayan and her nationality was her identity. “Most importantly, why should it matter?” she asked. According to the CIA World Factbook, about 88% of the population of Uruguay is of European descent, 5% of African descent and 3% of Indigenous or Amerindian descent. The remaining 4% consists of various ethnicities from around the world but Uruguayans do not equate their nationality with ethnicity, but with citizenship. This is what makes our countries different. We all identify as Americans but the legacy of chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, racial segregation and “separate but equal” institutions have made many Americans feel that some citizens are more American than others. Historically, racial categories have been used to keep certain ethnic groups dispossessed while upholding white supremacy. Once you travel the world, you learn that racial dynamics are interpreted differently within various cultures. In my travels to the Middle East, it was somewhat hard explaining my identity as African-American woman. In their eyes, I didn’t look African because I don’t have deep brown skin or typical African facial features. These conversations make it easier to see how race is a social construct. The malleability of race proves that it doesn’t have its own objective reality. So many prejudicial laws and institutions were created all in the service of a concept based on pseudoscience. Scientists of the past created fields dedicated to the supposed inferiority of non-European peoples. This pseudoscience led to the ghastly horrors of eugenics and genocide in the United States. Now Modern-day scientists say, “Racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out.” Or differences – from our hair textures to our facial features to skin colors – are literally skin deep. There are no Black genes or White genes. At our biological core, we are the same. The United States, like Uruguay, has a blending of cultures and races. Despite the social unrest, there are many Americans who take pride in that. It will take a lot of work towards social justice and education to create a future where everyone celebrates racial and ethnic diversity. At least, we can dream of a future where race really doesn’t matter.
Master of My Fate
I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about for the 3rd installment of Standing Room Only: hunger and homelessness. The topic made me hesitate because of my lack of volunteerism in the area. Moving to Atlanta a year ago, I noticed the large number of people living in homelessness. According to the Atlanta Mission, a nonprofit formed to help and rehabilitate homeless men and women, there are about 7,000 homeless people in Atlanta. 1,300 of these people without homes are families. These men, women, and children can be found sitting or sleeping on the streets at any time of day. I find it maddening that there is constant construction of luxury apartments in Atlanta while people line the sidewalks just hoping they can find some sort of shelter. I began accepting their presence as a background to my daily walk to The Center, that’s not right. I recently saw a man dig through the trash to find food as I was passing by. I offered him my pack of crackers and when he asked for a quarter, I gave him a dollar. The reality of having to go through a trash can to find a meal is so far removed from my own. The experience had me contemplating the rest of my walk to my car: what am I going to do? I signed up to volunteer at Habitat for Humanity and Meals on Wheels Atlanta. I know this won’t change that man’s reality or the 7,000 other homeless people’s but hopefully it can give me a more comprehensible look at the problem. I am excited to learn and to be a helping hand. I decided to sign up for orientation on my birthday as I can’t imagine a better gift to myself than to help my community.
Otherness
“Do you know who this is?” Kelli Edwards, the Center for Civil and Human Rights’s Program Manager, asked a group of young children circled around three tables. Kelli held up a coloring page of Malala Yousafzai. The kids squinted, trying to get a closer look to see if they recognized the face printed on the page. A few eager “no”s were shouted in reply as the children waited to hear more. “This is Malala Yousafzai, and she’s a very brave girl,” Kelli said. “She’s also a Muslim.” As I sat among the children attending Interfaith Youth Day at The Center, I watched the ease with which their receptive minds accepted the story of a girl who was different than them. That’s the thing about kids, they often don’t notice a difference until one is pointed out to them. And if they do notice a dissimilarity, they rarely perceive it in a negative light. More each day, I find myself noticing the ways I have been taught to fear “otherness.” I’ve started realizing my tendency to view people based on who they are in relation to me, instead of regarding them simply for who they are. In the midst of beginning the work of undoing these ingrained behaviors within myself, I’ve learned that the most difficult part is not the effort required, it’s the unnerving feeling of being unable to trace the origin of my learned biases. Just because the fear of “otherness” isn’t always taught intentionally, doesn’t make its impact less potent. Imagine if we kept having simple, affirmative conversations with kids about people like Malala Yousafzai. Imagine if we taught them the intrinsic value of every human being independent of another. Imagine the effect those conversations could have on our own deep-set discrimination. Imagine the healing to come.
Powerful People in Progress: Doug Shipman and Derreck Kayongo
Rights Not Reserved is a podcast from the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. We discuss activism, history and today’s pressing human rights concerns with local, national and international leaders in civil and human rights. Episode 11 of Rights Not Reserved features founding CEO of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Doug Shipman and current CEO, Derreck Kayongo. They have an inspirational conversation about the history of the Center for Civil and Human Rights and how it resonates with the public in 2017. Doug and Derreck also demonstrate how to take every human’s rights personally with a roleplaying game. Topics covered in this episode Taking Civil and Human Rights personally Museums Education Creating a legacy
How to be Black
Being a Black woman comes with many different perspectives and hardships, but I never knew I would understand the feeling of pride. This disconnect with issues within the Black community came from my lack of association with Black people. In my teen years, I avoided Black spaces because I decided that I did not fit in. Often, when I was in those spaces, I was made fun of for my voice or my lack of knowledge of Black culture. Recently, my dad told me that they often kept me out of those spaces so that I would not have to grow up like my parents did. This is an understanding decision on my parents’ part, but I also ended up creating quite the antipathy for the Black community. Ideas such as “Why can’t they just uplift themselves?” or “Black people are tearing themselves apart, not the government,” were often in my head. The lack of acceptance in one space allowed me to create a toxic reality downplaying the actuality that many grievances from the Black community towards the “System” were, in fact, real. I was caught in the middle of a battle with my own identity when the Black Lives Matter movement arrived on the University of Virginia (UVa) Grounds in the Winter of my Third Year. In the moment, I was the token Black friend of a rather large, White friend group. When the movement came, I didn’t know who I was. I knew I was Black but not that Black. I was privileged to not experience many hardships, but I felt connected to the pain in a way my friends never could nor would understand. This later created a chasm in our friendship and sadly those people are no longer in my life. Yet, I’m glad they were because they helped me recognize the problematic aspects of my attendance at UVa. I walked into college trying to get an Electrical Engineering degree for the money and left with an African American and African Studies degree to enrich my mind with my history. Now, as someone who is trying to be a more active participant in the fiber of change in America, I constantly remember the words of W.E.B. DuBois and understand that to be Black in America is to be a Problem. Being Black feels like this often, but I know I can do more and hope that it ripples out and touches more than just the Black community, but all of America.
What’s in a Name?
Author of this blog post, Kelly Crosby, is a Gallery Assistant at the Center for Civil and Human Rights. What’s in a name? Apparently, everything. I’ve had many interesting conversations with visitors as a gallery assistant. One day, I was in the Morehouse Martin Luther King Jr. Collection with a group of grade school students. We currently have on display original documents detailing the correspondence between Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and various African leaders and activists. Inside one of the display cases is a party invitation from Ghana. One of the students, a young girl, approached me with a very thought-provoking question. “Why does the party invitation say, “Mr. Martin Luther King and Mrs. Martin Luther King?” I explained to her that in those days, when a woman married, she was often referred to by her husband’s full name. I also explained that it was a common practice. I could only describe the look on her face as incredulous. For a grade school girl, she couldn’t understand why a woman would be obligated to change her name. She also didn’t understand why she would be referred to by her husband’s full name. But that short conversation made me think about women’s identity and how it has been shaped and molded in American culture. For most of human history, at least in most Western societies, women were expected to take their husband’s last name; signaling the abandonment of her “maiden” status for her new marital identity and allegiance to her husband’s family. For us, in our modern-day society, where feminism and women’s rights are common topics, these documents are stark reminders of a not-too-distant past. In the 1970s, the trend of hyphenated names appeared and gave women more options in choosing how to express their identities. Our culture still reflects these trends. While most American women still change their names upon marriage, joined surnames of the wife and husband, are a popular option. It is no longer an assumption that a woman will take her husband’s last name but a choice. Such choices reflect the woman’s choice to shape her own individual identity. And in some states, like California and Georgia, men can legally change their last names on the basis of marriage. Because of these changes, we know Mr. King’s wife as Coretta Scott King. In her book, “My Life, My Love, My Legacy,” she says, “Most people who have followed my career from afar, or even given me a second thought, know me as Mrs. King: the wife of, the widow of, the mother of, the leader of. Makes me sound like the attachments of a vacuum cleaner. In one sense, I don’t mind at all. I’m proud to have been a wife, a single parent, and a leader. But I am more than a label. I am also Coretta.” Because of her husband’s famous legacy, many forget that she was a great civil rights activist in her own right. Our center is a beneficiary of her effort to preserve her husband’s important documents. She continued her efforts to fight for racial equality and was active in the women’s rights movement. She was also a major critic of South African apartheid and an advocate for LGBT civil rights. The efforts of women and men to struggle for women’s rights has made it possible for us to see women as autonomous individuals in their own right—not simply as someone’s mother or wife. Prior to this, the efforts of women like Coretta Scott King, Diane Nash, Claudette Colvin and Dorothy Height were often overshadowed by the men they worked along side with. We have been able to look back and reexamine history to see these women as crucial to the American Civil Rights struggle rather than women on the periphery of that movement. We’ve come a long way but still have a long way to go before all woman can be respected and valued as individual human beings.
The Detour and My Foundation
Torrie Shepard is the Marketing and Communications intern at The National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Standing Room Only is a weekly blog series that follows Torrie’s journey from bystander to upstander. I was an engineering major at the University of Virginia before I decided that breaking my spirit, over and over, for a non-existent passion was not for me. I set out to change majors the summer before my third year, only finding a more complicated journey ahead of me. In order to switch into the major I wanted (Media Studies) I had to have a “fill-in” major because I was a Third Year student. My only choice became my salvation—African American and African Studies (AAS). Don’t get me wrong, I was planning to drop the major once I was able to get into the Media Studies department and start pursuing my dreams of becoming a film producer. Yet, the difficulty of getting into the Media Studies major caused me to stick with AAS and thus began my appreciation for my Blackness and my need to understand how history has etched the ongoing record of the Black experience in America. My close mind soon became opened. Yet, I still think I projected the same idea that my history was stuck in the past and it was time for reconciliation and rejuvenation. My history taught me otherwise; I learned so much about redlining and other institutional methods to keep people of color outside of the American dream. It hurt my head and my heart. It explained why somehow my roommates (all White Women) had wealth and I did not, even though our parents made the same amount of income. How modern slavery ties to incarceration and why I should care. It would be hard to tell you that I have never wished to live beyond the Veil, but after getting my degree, I am glad to live within so many intersections of social identity.
Lessons from the Lunch Counter
Sometimes the reality of history can feel unbelievable, not in a way that makes you question if past events truly happened, but how actual people lived and fought through them. This past semester, I took an African American History class. What we read in a textbook or watch in a documentary often failed to capture the intensity of firsthand experience, so to deepen our understanding of the struggle for civil rights, my professor, Dr. Walker, led our class in a debate game called Reacting to the Past. Each student took on a character based on different Civil Rights activists at the 1963 Dorchester Retreat in Dorchester, Georgia. I was assigned the role of a staffer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who had taken part in freedom rides and other nonviolent protests like swim-ins and sit-ins. But it wasn’t until the beginning of this summer, during my first trip to the Center for Civil and Human Rights, that I was able to grasp the sheer fortitude that nonviolent protesting requires. I sat down at the lunch counter simulation. Following the directions, I put on the headphones, placed my hands on the counter, and closed my eyes. As the voices swelled from behind, my hands began to sweat, my back stiffening against the recorded sneers. Instinctively, I began assuring myself, “This is not real, you’re in a museum.” Then, at a certain point, I broke. I couldn’t keep my eyes shut anymore. I had stopped breathing when the violence around me increased. I kept the headphones on and my hands plastered on the counter, but I stared into the mirror in front of me to sustain a level of detachment from the simulation. They, the resilient warriors of the Civil Rights Era, couldn’t tell themselves, “This is not real.” They sat down, braced themselves, and fought a powerful war without an ounce of force. Getting up from the lunch counter, I felt unworthy to have taken on the role of a SNCC staffer in Dr. Walker’s class without having willingly survived the same brutality. But I also felt a deep sense of solidarity and reverence, a culmination of sorts. Something was instilled into my spirit that day: a measure of strength before unknown.
The Mustard Seed
Torrie Shepard is the Marketing and Communications intern at The National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Standing Room Only is a weekly blog series that follows Torrie’s journey from bystander to upstander. STANDING ROOM ONLY: The Mustard Seed (Part 1) THERE WERE TOO MANY VOICE TO COUNT and not enough happening in the amphitheater at the University of Virginia on a chilly, spring night. It was a spattering of students, teachers, and part of the Charlottesville community convening in a town hall to discuss the brutal arrest of Martese Johnson by Virginia Department of Alcohol and Beverage Control officers on March 18th, 2015. All I could remember was that, if I showed up maybe someone would give me direction on what to do and from that I would make a change. Instead I stood on the sidelines and observed what soon became a confusing protest that, at the time, I believed had done nothing to help anyone. This was the first time I felt that I could have done more but instead decided to be stationary. Two years later, I graduated and started volunteering. I’ve become more interested in service and intend to start doing better for my environment. Yet, to be honest, I still have a long road ahead of trying to live a service-oriented lifestyle. This is Standing Room Only; a girl seeking a seat with the activists but instead has found herself on the sidelines.