"No Nigga Babes"

While reading an article about a Black Mississippi man who was reversed over in a parking lot by a group of White teens (for sport) in 2011, I noticed a line from the judge in the case that really stuck with me. The judge, while attending the University of Virginia law school in 1993, recalled that he saw a fraternity party flier that said, "No Jews, No Wops, and No Nigga Babes".

Fast forward: a Yale fraternity indicates that no Black women will be allowed in a Halloween party some 22 years later. It seems as if our history is really just being microwaved, although some people think these "individual" phenomena are not related to each other.

And then there's the timeline of resistance to these events.

Yale: 2015. Missouri: 2015. Harvard: 2014. Michigan: 2013. And 2003. And 1970...I could go on to illustrate the point, but resistance from Black students at schools has been evident since their admission over the past several decades and will continue unless we, well, go back to school.

We are initially enrolled into schools because we don’t know things. Surely, if you’re not exposed to multiplication before kindergarten, no one would expect you to know how to calculate 2x2 upon entering school.

But - if you had a pop quiz on timestables during your first day, what would you do?

Therein lies the problem with our competence in "racial literacy". Many of us may have heard that people are upset from racist experiences (knowledge), some of us may even know it when we see it (awareness), but very few of us know what to do when we confront it - or perpetuate it for that matter (skills).

We may have been taught how to read books in school, but reading racialized situations is an entirely different skill set. Indeed, a common approach to “dealing” with race is to avoid talking about it. I’m sure you’ve seen your own version of a child in the grocery store who points at the Black girl and [loudly] exclaims, “Mommy! She’s made of chocolate milk!”

What does the mother do?

“Shhhh!”

And that’s the last the family will talk about the event.

What could the mother do?

It is my hope to equip her and other mothers with racial literacy tools, or the facility of reading, recasting, and resolving racial conflicts in peer and authority relationships (Stevenson, 2014). If you were expecting a quick fix, I hate to be the one to break it to you: it doesn’t quite work that way. Remember how you had to first learn numbers, then addition, then multiplication, then …?

There are no shortcuts with regard to becoming more competent in understanding race. It requires time, commitment, and a set of tools that are not currently instilled in our educational settings, whether in the classroom or home.

Here’s the kicker: you may have even been rewarded in the past for avoiding the racial encounter. Whew, no more teachers calling saying Jimmy has made (another) questionable comment, no more hand getting slapped for touching your friend’s hair. But is your complacency really just another form of compliance with the racial status quo?

It is important to be developmentally sensitive about racial literacy. You may believe that you are a student, but if you can’t actually discern the text, your ideology does not match your competency. Thus, we must sequentially traverse the elements of knowledge, awareness, and skills together in order to ensure we have the foundations of the lesson.

As an example, Tim Wolfe, the former Missouri president, did not have the knowledge to define “systematic oppression”. Is it any surprise that the educational track he may have been on would not offer exposure, explicit teaching, and experience with this term? Furthermore, if he was rewarded in a system where questions of this type were shied away from, is it not understandable that he would pull a poor educated guess out of nowhere?

To be clear, I am NOT excusing Wolfe. However, in a society that is quick to oust and flag a tweet and get a pitiful excuse in return, it is time to start finding long-term answers to this LONGstanding problem. Internal assessment, consistent dialogue, and group-level interventions are some of the tools we will lay out in the coming months to address these individual, societal, and institutional problems.

And if I were you, I wouldn’t skip this class…or your school might just be the next added to the growing list.