Remembering Jim Crow

During my drive home today I heard a rebroadcast of this amazing radio documentary chronicling Black and White Americans' memories of the Jim Crow days in the South. It's a collaboration of American RadioWorks and the Behind the Veil project of the Center for Documentary Studies (yeah Durham/Duke!). And it blew my mind.

The project website is great. According to a History Matters page (written by Jim Crespino of Emory University) on the history of Jim Crow:

"The site is produced in conjunction with a multimedia book project of the same name (2001) edited by William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad. Material for the Web documentary, as well as for a radio documentary that aired on National Public Radio (and which is available through this site), is drawn largely from interviews in the mid-1990s with members of the last living generation of African Americans to reach adulthood in the era of legalized racial segregation."

What I found most stunning about "Remembering Jim Crow" was the section entitled "Whites Remember Jim Crow." Not surprisingly, Whites in the southwestern Lousiana town of New Iberia recalled segregation days in profoundly different terms than African Americans. "Our Negroes were happy," said longtime Iberia Parish resident Mary Levaux, recalling cheerful smiles among plantation workers, seemingly joyous gospel melodies rising from Black churches, and a perception that Blacks adored and looked up to Whites because they "knew where their bread was buttered."

Now, it's not that this kind of thinking is new to me.  It's just that this documentary was so well done -- and such a profound reminder of the depths of White people's cognitive dissonance about racism (the previous link will take you to antiracist educator Tim Wise's 2006 essay, "'Eracing' Katrina: Historical Revisionism and the Denial of the Obvious" -- to close the reflections-on-race-in-Lousiana loop.)

I'm reminded anew of my responsibility as an antiracist educator to interrogate White privilege in my own everyday life and the institutions with which I interact.

"...racial disparities matter, and...they tell us how far removed we are from the equal opportunity society we profess to be, against all evidence to the contrary." - Tim Wise, Eracing' Katrina...

"Diving Into the Wreck"

I first read Adrienne Rich's poem, "Diving Into the Wreck," late one night a few years ago when I was reading poetry on the Internet, a favorite procrastination technique and bedtime winding-down activity. Poetry is an old friend, a quiet wonder, and a spiritual roadmap. It synthesizes and creates meaning, bridges the aesthetic and the scientific, and renews my faith in what is possible when the mind, the heart, and the pen come together.
 
Rich's gorgeous poetic voice has lit my way before, most recently five years ago at my partner's and my commitment celebration when our friend read an excerpt from "21 Love Poems." That poem at once celebrated our union and troubled the grand narrative of heterosexual romantic love that has done us all so much damage. For me, "21 Love Poems" became a symbol of hope for new possibilities in life and love.

When I came across "Diving Into the Wreck," I was seeking hope of a slightly different flavor. I was a new doctoral student, excited almost beyond reason about the prospect of spending most of my time reading, writing, and thinking, but I also felt desperately adrift. Everyone else seemed to know what they were doing. They had all already read the right things and met the right people. They had research ideas or at least faked them well. They seemed ready to make big decisions, write long papers, get things done. They were, in a word, anchored.

Or at least I thought so at the time.

Since then, I've discovered this little secret about academia: we're all making it up as we go along. We come to explore. We come to discover. We come to learn. Sometimes our hearts are broken, our progress is slowed, our hopes are dashed -- yet we keep going, pushing aside debris and detritus, slowly making our way toward something that, eventually, starts to feel like home.

In short, we've come to explore the wreck.

I am one diver.  This is my story.