Letter to Westchester
First, I want to extend empathy to all who are grieving right now. This letter may not be for you at this time.
Larchmont is where I call home. I write this letter to our community — I write this letter to you.
Amidst my feelings of fear and anxiety, I can say that this crisis has made me feel incredibly lucky. I believe many of you can relate to that sense of gratitude. Self-isolation allows us to be more present, and also to reflect. Upon doing that reflection, I have been unable to ignore just how profound my privilege is. My white privilege. My class privilege. Our privilege. It’s glaring at me with every grocery shopping trip to the fully stocked DeCicco’s and during my daily strolls to Manor Park. I forget that people are dying, every day, in record numbers, from a pandemic. These privileges are not something we should judge or punish ourselves for, but rather to simply acknowledge as fact. We read The New York Times, we see the news — we know how especially deadly and disastrous this virus is to Black and Latinx communities, Native American communities, poor communities, essential workers, those incarcerated and those in ICE detention. Alongside these injustices, we are witnessing a growing anti-Asian sentiment. Right now, we clearly recognize how racialized the U.S. truly is, and that whiteness and wealth factor into who survives and who dies from Covid-19.
The coronavirus is not an anomaly in its racial injustice, and will not be the last crisis of our lifetime. With the climate crisis looming overhead, we need to quickly realize that these unjust and deadly racist patterns are destined to play out again. We are being called upon as white folks to urgently speak out and take action against these systemic racist structures. To undo racial injustice, we must first uncover the structures of white dominance that lie beneath everything we know, including the place we call home. It’s time we really look at the history of Westchester and reconcile with the miseducation about our community somehow being outside of the racist structures of America, or that we were on the “right” side of history.
What I was taught in school was a lie. We were taught that slavery and racism were the South’s problem; we were taught that we in the North weren’t historically the racist ones. The irony is that we were taught this in a deeply segregated community, with its own history of slavery. The reality is that our community embraced, collaborated with, and was home to the director of Birth of a Nation, a movie that promoted the utmost racist hatred in the history of American film. At the time, Mamaroneck was considered the “East Coast Hollywood,” and D.W. Griffith was at its center. I hope that you read this and feel the gravity of our legacy, and I want you to have the strength to sit with any discomfort that arises. My hope is that we can all recognize this time in quarantine as an extraordinary opportunity to engage in meaningful, ongoing anti-racist work.
It is difficult for me to write just how impactful the legacy of Birth of a Nation has been. Birth of a Nation inspired pure hatred. The film was directly responsible for the rebirth of the KKK and the lynching of thousands of black bodies thereafter. The movie was single handedly responsible for every KKK burning of the cross — an image that was originally D.W. Griffith’s cinematic idea. It’s budget of over $100,000 was unprecedented ($2,420,000 when adjusted to inflation) and it became the first major blockbuster film. Its debut showing was in the White House to President Woodrow Wilson, and the national response was rapturous. “It became a national cultural phenomenon: merchandisers made Ku Klux hats and kitchen aprons, and ushers dressed in white Klan robes for openings. In New York there were Klan-themed balls, and in Chicago that Halloween, thousands of college students dressed in robes for a massive Klan-themed party.” I want us to understand that even for the time (1915) Birth of a Nation was considered racist and the NAACP campaigned vigorously to ban the film.
It’s impossible to understand modern day systemic racism without understanding how Birth of a Nation used blackface to promote the narrative of the black body as violent, criminal, sexually aggressive and subhuman. This narrative is inseparable from the prison industrial complex today, and right now people of color are currently being exploited for penny-wage labor in New York State prisons, producing “NYS Clean” hand sanitizers, while being at the highest risk of coronavirus because one cannot self-isolate in prison. Right next to us, the Bronx has become New York’s coronavirus capitol. This is not a question of susceptibility, but the result of decades of segregation, systemic inequality, neglect, and pollution. Meanwhile, we have the space and financial security to self isolate, fully stocked grocery stores, jobs where we can work from home, running water and soap to wash our hands, and we don’t have to worry about making rent. We are healthier, wealthier, safer, and more likely to survive. We still benefit from that structure of white dominance promoted in Birth of a Nation — that essential message that black people in America could never be integrated into white society as equals and that white folks inherently deserve better. If we don’t speak up and act, we should fully expect the same racial injustices of the coronavirus pandemic to play out again and again with every future crisis.
I wanted our connection to this movie to be a regrettable, terrible happenstance. But then I discovered the Kilmer Road Association and their rioting response when famous jazz musician Adelaide Hall bought a house in Larchmont in 1932. They blocked her driveway upon her arrival, stormed her property with torches with the intent to set her house aflame, and broke through her home’s windows. Residents of Larchmont pejoratively called her “Lark” on the streets. When I uncovered these historical realities, I was in an interracial relationship. Showing your partner where you grew up should be a joy, but instead I felt a deep sense of shame and discomfort around subjecting someone I love to a place where he has historically been unwelcome and reviled.
As someone who has always been proud of my hometown, it has been painful for me to come to terms with this history, as I’m sure it is for you, too. I felt like one of the ‘good’ white people, not understanding that structural racism doesn’t concern whether you’re a ‘good’ person or a ‘bad person,’ but rather a person who lives in a racist society that you and I benefit from. A historical fact does not make you a bad person, but it does re-contextualize our identity and place in the world.
We didn’t build this house, but we live in it.
Yes, that was some time ago (1915; 1933), and Westchester is so different now. I want to celebrate how far we’ve come in so little time, and I know everyone reading this finds such behavior unthinkable today. Legacies, however, do not occur in a vacuum, instead they reverberate through the present. I invite you to make the connection between that legacy and now. The best example of racism in Westchester today is segregation. Many of our county’s towns and villages have an African American population of less than 3%. Meanwhile, the majority of Westchester’s Black and Latinx population are packed into specific areas, like Mount Vernon which has a Black population of over 60% and Port Chester which has a Hispanic/Latinx population of 62.6%. This is not a coincidence; it is the result of strict zoning enforcement barring affordable housing in Westchester’s whitest communities. A drive along Boston Post Road clearly reveals just how segregated Westchester remains. A brief look into the racial demographics of Larchmont versus Mamaroneck elementary schools reveals the same. Our failure to desegregate has been so bad that the Anti-Discrimination Center filed a lawsuit against Westchester County which we settled in 2006 for $62.5 million.
If reading this has made you feel uncomfortable, that is good. When we truly engage with anti-racist work, it is messy. Feelings of discomfort, shame, guilt, disillusionment, defensiveness, betrayal, fear, and rage all arise. We must have compassion for ourselves. You may be angry at me for writing this to you. I want you to know that I didn’t write this to point fingers at our community during a pandemic, but because I feel the education about our history is a disservice to us and it is untruthful, and I believe we deserve to know the truth. The truth allows us to engage in anti-racist work and to create more meaningful connections with people of color. I write this letter with a vision of our community playing an indispensable role in the dismantling of systemic racism. I want us to sit with our history and cultivate a deeper sense of responsibility and urgency to dismantle systemic racism, to liberate not only others, but also ourselves.
One way we can show up in this moment is financially: to give away our stimulus checks (or equivalent amount, $1,200 — or any amount you can spare) to bail folks out of jail to save their lives. Many of us don’t really need the money right now, but for them, the coronavirus is an immediate matter of life or death. If this idea seems radical or farfetched to you, for what it’s worth, it was recently suggested in The New York Times:
I encourage you to discuss our history with your family and talk about how it makes you feel, and to talk about white privilege at the dinner table. If you have any desire to get involved in anti-racist organizing in some sort of ongoing way, I want to affirm that. I have attached guides, books, and videos that have been tremendously helpful for me in undoing my own internalized racism. If you do choose to engage in this work, know that I am right there with you, making mistakes along the way and struggling with my own relationship to white supremacy, which is a lifelong process.
If you read this far, I send you nothing but love and gratitude for taking the time. I know it wasn’t an easy read.
Helpful education tools:
What people of color are asking us to do:
Guidelines for Being Strong White Allies
On racism not being a matter of ‘good’ or ‘bad’:
Deconstructing White Privilege with Robin DiAngelo
List of white privileges that easily go unnoticed:
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Workbook to understand our relationship to white supremacy:
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
Meetings:
