Peering Through White-Rimmed Glasses: A Letter to My Fellow White Americans

The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guidebook for African Americans, published in the United States from 1936 to 1966.
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Black travelers faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences, such as white-owned businesses refusing to serve them or repair their vehicles, being refused accommodation or food by white-owned hotels, and threats of physical violence and forcible expulsion from whites-only "sundown towns".
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New York mailman and travel agent Victor H. Green published The Green Book "to give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable."

What’s Worse: A Bad Word or a Bad System?

When we do choose to examine racial problems, white Americans tend to focus most on the personal prejudice and actions of bigots (like calling someone the “N-word” or refusing care from a black nurse). It’s easier to blame an individual than to acknowledge the profound unfairness and pervasive racial inequities built into our country’s institutions. A few examples of such institutional inequities are:

• banks offering African American homebuyers only high-interest subprime mortgages, resulting in many of them losing their homes during a recession;

• lower per pupil funding for schools serving black children, resulting in poorer educational and enrichment opportunities than in schools attended by white children; and,

• employers rejecting job applicants with great resumes but “black-sounding” names like LaKeisha or Jamal in favor of applicants with less stellar resumes but names like “Maryanne” and “Peter” — or “better” zip codes.

Think about how racial slurs and racist systems would impact your life. In the end, what’s more damaging: being called insulting names or being repeatedly denied the things you need in order to provide a decent life to your family (like a job, a home, or an education)? African Americans have shown incredible resilience and forbearance in the face of all this. Still, would you choose to wake up black in America?

Personal prejudice is psychologically painful to its victims — but pervasive systemic racial inequities are absolutely devastating, life-threatening, to individuals, families, and communities.

These systemic racial inequities are inhumane and unfair to African Americans and other people of color. That would be terrible enough, but that’s not the end of it. These unfair systems poison our country’s economy and social system from within. They destroy our democracy and deform our humanity.

What Can We Do to Change Our Racial Hierarchy?

This ad campaign by the Us Centers for Disease Control proved very effective in showing Americans how life-altering smoking could be.

Cultures and their practices – even deeply embedded ones – are constantly changing, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. Take cigarette smoking, for example. Humans have enjoyed inhaling smoke for thousands of years. In the USA, cigarettes became very popular right after the Civil War, when they started to be mass-produced. In WWI the army considered providing cigarettes to soldiers as critical for winning the war. Smoking came to be considered healthy, sophisticated, even sexy.

Then, in the 1950s, medical research began linking smoking to cancer. Cigarette sales immediately began declining, but in 1964 the Surgeon General’s Report on smoking and health marked a turning point. Companies began worrying about the impact of employees’ smoking on the cost of their health insurance. Local governments began passing laws to protect nonsmokers by restricting smoking in public places. The federal Center for Disease Control created dramatic ads showing smoking’s dangers. New taxes on cigarettes made it more expensive to smoke. Today smoking lacks social acceptance, and the number of smokers has been very greatly reduced.

There are many white Americans who reject the dehumanizing stereotypes of black Americans and acknowledge the widespread discrimination in our institutions. Some of us have come to realize that we benefit each day from a racial hierarchy based on skin color. It is very uncomfortable for otherwise decent people to see ourselves –- and our country — in this light. But it is also very uncomfortable to live a lie.

So how can those of us who question the White Racial Frame live differently and change the racial hierarchy we inherited? I respectfully offer a few suggestions here. Others will have more to add:

Milwaukeeans of all backgrounds use ABHM as a safe place to discuss race

• Let’s be willing to live with the discomfort of learning – and talking about – inconvenient truths. We’ll make mistakes along the way. That is how we learn and grow.

• Let’s keep educating ourselves by looking through the frames of others. How? By reading autobiographies and novels, watching films and tv shows, and tuning into media outlets by and for people of color. By really listening.
• Let’s prioritize fairness to and inclusion of others over our privilege when we make choices about where to live, work, send our children to school. When we make hiring decisions, donate money, fight to improve our schools and communities. When we vote.

Whew! does all that sound uncomfortable, scary even? Changing our minds, hearts, and — especially — behaviors may be hard work, but — consider the alternative and…

Let’s work together to make America a place where our children — all America’s children — will thrive and live in peace.

Some other steps you can take, right here and right now:

• Find out more about the White Frame and Counter-Frames by looking through our extensive annotated bibliography here.
• Learn more about the African American experience as part of American history and culture.  Click on many other of the 3300+ exhibits in this online museum. Visit the Galleries to chart your course through the centuries, or check out current events as reported in the black media and others.
• Take a pledge to stand against hatred and injustice and put your name on our Freedom-Lovers' Roll Call Wall.

Finally, have a little fun and shake up your tv screening algorithm tonight by choosing a movie by an African American filmmaker.