Monadnock Lyceum speaker Debby Irving as spent years recalibrating her views on race, and coming to terms with the impact her upbringing has had on how she relates to the world.
During her talk, which shares the title with her 2014 book “Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race,” Irving described an upbringing she shared with many audience members. She grew up in a suburb in Massachusetts – where she noted, there were no black families – and race was relegated to one of those topics not discussed in polite company.
Her formative thoughts on race weren’t deliberate, Irving said, but were constantly reinforced by the television shows she watched and her environment.
“How convenient for me that what I’m being told is all-American looks like me,” Irving said.
Irving said she really began to confront her biases following the 2009 election of Barack Obama. Irving said the current national conversation around race is a backlash resulting from the election of the first black president – a restructuring of white supremacy comparable to similar upheavals that occurred after the civil rights movement and other advancements for black people.
Irving said the idea of white supremacy is not about “bad individuals” but about “the gargantuan social structure” that is ingrained into our everyday lives. For instance, she said, her family benefited from the G.I. Bill following World War II, where her father used benefits to access housing and education benefits. But by the way the bill was structured, those benefits weren’t available to many black soldiers, she said.
Even today, she said, the practice of segregation through housing loans is prevalent, lingering from the practice of “red lining” neighborhoods for black residents, a practice of denying services such as loans or insurance to residents of specific – usually nonwhite – areas.
Irving said growing up with examples of white adults who were able to tell stories of growing to prosperity from immigrant parents or grandparents who came to the U.S. with nothing made her think the concept of the “American dream” was equally achievable, with no concept of how her whiteness benefitted her and her family.
Irving said her white-centric upbringing had left her a “sitting duck” for the erasure and “mythologizing” of black history.
She learned about Rosa Parks in school, and heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I had a dream speech” she said, but knew nothing about the scope of their larger efforts as activists.
She had never heard of the Tulsa Race Riot – an air and ground attack that destroyed 35 blocks of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. The area was so prosperous it was nicknamed “the Black Wall Street,” but was all but razed during riots in which fires were set on the ground or started by dropping incendiaries from airplanes.
The incident is rarely mentioned in historical texts, and the amount of people killed or wounded is unclear, with papers at the time reporting disparate numbers, but the damage destroyed millions of dollars worth of property, and is considered the worst single incident of racial violence in American history.
Yet, Irving said, she had never heard of it, and neither, when asked, had many members of the audience.
“There is so much history to be unerased,” Irving said.
Next week the Lyceum presents Lauret Savoy, speaking on “Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape.”
The talk will begin at 11 a.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Peterborough.
Lyceum talks are available as podcasts on the Monadnock Lyceum website at www.monadnocklyceum.org.