On Unlearning the Idea That Racism is a Thing of the Past

Heidi S. Rosbe
Aug 22, 2017 · 5 min read

I was a white kid growing up in the 80s and early 90s and I genuinely thought that racism was a thing of the past. I was 12 when we moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, a Liberal university town that looked to me like the melting pot our social studies books used to describe the United States. I recently looked up the statistics and Ann Arbor is 72% caucasian. Even if it’s changed since the 90s, I doubt it’s changed that much. It’s just that as a white person, people of color comprising just a quarter of the population felt like I was living in that rainbow we were supposed to strive for.

I knew racism wasn’t entirely gone, that there were some people still out there who espoused and acted on racist ideology. My 7th grade school choir performed in a competition in Howell, a town less than an hour away where the KKK was rumored to have a presence*. Everything went smoothly at the competition, but as our bus pulled out of the station, a few people hurled rocks at our departing vehicle. It was terrifying. At 13, to me the experience was an assault on “us all” and something all of us on the bus were in together–us against the scary racists. Looking back, I can now only wonder about the impact that trip had on my friends of color, or my Jewish friends. I didn’t ask. It never occurred to me that their experience might be different than mine. It was scary and proved there really were racists out there, who didn’t just think racist thoughts but actually wanted to hurt people. But at least we were safe returning to our friendly liberal university town.

It wasn’t until my junior year of high school that this perception was questioned. I remember the moment vividly even while details are obscured. A few of us were stretching after track practice and two Black friends were complaining about being followed in a store, the owner stereotyping them as shoplifters. I was shocked. They were gracious as they patiently explained to me that this wasn’t the first time–this sort of thing happened all the time. Yes, even in Ann Arbor.

It took another few years before I was again shaken, this time in my belief that anti-Semitism was largely a thing of the past, at least in the US. I remember questioning something my college boyfriend–who is Jewish–said, doubtful that anti-Semitism was still present today. By this point, I was hip to the concept of White Privilege and was beginning to understand what institutionalized racism meant, and I certainly saw parallels between this kind of institutionalized bias and Nazi Germany, but I was skeptical that anti-Semitism in the US of 2000 extended beyond a few crazies like those in Howell. He was understandably offended and handled my questioning with a kindness I’m not sure I could have mustered. It was later that Jewish friends I’d grown up with told me of their experiences of people asking them in hushed tones about Jewish control of the government or if they had horns or overhearing blatantly anti-Semitic slurs tossed into business meetings.

Years later, while working within the Arab-American community, I regularly heard stories of anti-Arab bias and Islamophobia. Sometimes I experienced them when out with colleagues. By this time, I wasn’t caught off guard. It was two years post-9/11 and a major reason I took the position at the community center serving the Arab immigrant community was because of what I knew was happening to Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. What I heard and saw went deeper than the horrifying reports of people being beaten or mosques set on fire. It was everyday acts of prejudice and discrimination, from offhand comments passing a woman in hijab of “those poor women” while assuming the woman doesn’t speak English or classmates calling their fellow second grader a terrorist, to active job discrimination.

Over the years between and beyond these pivotal encounters that forced me to question and confront my own biases, I started to understand more about how our entire society has and continues to stack the deck in favor of some, against others, and that this often takes a form less easily packaged into a story someone could have shared with me.

My whiteness afforded me the luxury to live for a time in the “racism is over and we’re all the same” bubble… until I didn’t. The thing is that this bubble didn’t make racism or anti-Semitism or Islamophobia not exist. We might like to think we can will away these evils by building the bubble but we can’t. They were present and affected not only my peers but me as well, and my inability to see beyond the bubble made me complicit.

I’m grateful to the friends who shared with me their experiences and helped me see what I’d been blind to. But it wasn’t their job to do so.

Last weekend’s horror in Charlottesville proved to the country that racism and anti-Semitism–the violent kind–are far from dead. Everyone is active, up in verbal arms. But even if things calm down, if our President actually condemns the hate groups–and doesn’t retract it this time, if order is restored and no more blatant incidents happen, it doesn’t mean the problems are solved. They’ve just been tamped down and more white people can continue to pretend.

I am now also a mom and I’m confronted with how to educate my kids. They’re still young, the oldest not yet three, and I feel lucky for them–and for me–that we live in a truly diverse city and a somewhat diverse neighborhood. I want to give them the tools to have these conversations and understand what their peers may be experiencing as they grow up. A lot of us grew up with the “colorblind” approach and were explicitly or implicitly taught “not to see color” in a way that was well intentioned but ultimately left us without the tools to handle the racism in the world, support peers of color, or work to change the system. I want to teach my kids to be “color positive”, where it’s not that they “don’t see color”, along with any other attribute they clearly do see, but that they recognize that color, while it is one of many things that make up a person, is something that has been and continues to be used to separate and discriminate. I want them to know that color is a good thing in all its shades and good people come in all shades. I want them to seek to ensure that everyone is included regardless of color in particular, because it’s so often used to exclude.

I don’t want my daughter to be the kid sitting on that bus in Howell who doesn’t understand that the hate wasn’t directed at her but at her Black friends. I don’t want my son to question whether others really have experienced bias and not understand why this questioning can cause harm. I don’t want either of my kids to be fed a mythology of America as a place that had a turbulent past but made it out the other side. I want them to grow up eyes open. I want them to revere the progress that’s been made and the heroes and heroines who worked hard to make it happen, but also to know there’s much more to do. And I want them to be true allies and accomplices in the work that needs to be done.

*As of 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center does not list any hate groups residing in Howell, Michigan.

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Heidi S. Rosbe

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Heidi is a mediator and conflict resolution professional wit a background in human rights and gender. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two kids.

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