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Necessary Conversations: Talking Frankly About Race (rwjf.org)

 

By Alonzo l. Plough, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, June 8, 2022

Engaging in honest dialogue about race sometimes means lowering our defenses and acknowledging our feelings so we can walk together toward racial equity.

The opening of the Tops Friendly Market in East Buffalo was a triumph of community activism, a victory for residents who struggled for years against food apartheid. In a neighborhood that had long lacked a full-service supermarket, the store became a symbol of local empowerment in one of the nation’s most segregated cities.

This segregation is a contributing factor in why White people in Buffalo have a longer life expectancy than their Black neighbors living on the East Side. To counter these conditions, residents persevered in efforts to shape a healthier, more equitable neighborhood—residents like 67-year-old Church Deacon Heyward Patterson. Deacon Patterson volunteered at a soup kitchen and even drove his neighbors to Tops Friendly Market to access nutritious food when they didn't have transportation of their own. He was murdered while helping load groceries into someone's car.

The murder of Deacon Patterson and others sparked outrage across the nation. But when the initial shock fades away, we need to look harder at the role of racist systems and structures that endure in the United States and how they contribute to unbridled violence and lives that are cut short.

It is long past time to reckon with this nation’s dark, shameful history of white supremacy.

Until we recognize how present-day inequities—in all their forms—root back to a deeply flawed past, we will see more East Buffalos, more mainstreaming of “replacement theory,” and less willingness to do the hard work of advancing racial justice.

This is the subject of my new book, Necessary Conversations published by Oxford University Press. I suggest that having meaningful conversations about raceis a step towards that reckoning. Dozens of leading thinkers and doers—activists, policymakers, researchers, educators, and journalists—contributed their provocative ideas. As editor of these important chapters about understanding racism as a barrier to health and wellbeing, I am honored to highlight some of their thoughts here.

book race screenshot

[Click here, Necessary Conversations: Talking Frankly about Race,  to read more.]

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How do traumatized and fearful people talk about a topic as frightful as race and ethnicity?

For example, how would we talk about the 'dark metaphor'?  This example of linguistic, and therefore structural, racism is so common...  Here is one quote from above-

"It is long past time to reckon with this nation’s dark, shameful history of white supremacy."

In this metaphor, "dark" implies bad.  Not to be confused or conflated with the other usage where dark is contrasted to illumination (light).  Could this version of a ubiquitous metaphor sustain internalized oppression among dark-skinned people?  Might a child ask, "I am dark...  Am I considered shameful"  Of course, many, many people (especially lighter-skinned people) will say, "I never thought about that."   This is why we need to have these conversations.  Our language is structurally racist because our culture fears the dark.  Perhaps all human cultures fear darkness.  This existential fear is easily projected onto indigenous people and cultures.  It is even good for the economy.

Talking about the 'dark metaphor' may benefit everyone.  Enlighten our deepest fear and evolve past our origins as cave dwellers.  Affirm for ourselves and for other witnesses that, "I am not afraid of the dark!"  Comments?

Last edited by W. Joe Hicks MD
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