The Champaign County Community Coalition's (quick Cheat Sheet overview post) April meeting focused on race relations. Donna Tanner-Harold from Parkland presented information from the Youth Race Talks project, an extension of the Racial Taboo film screening and discussion work. Kelly Ann Hurst of the Springfield Coalition on Dismantling Racism and Crossroads asked the audience to decolonize their mind and face systems of white supremacy head on and honestly. Later this month there will be an event looking at local African-American history in coordination with the Decatur African-American Cultural & Genealogical Society of Illinois Museum. Local coverage is available from the News-Gazette here, an article and nice video segment from WCCU here, and short video segment from WAND here.
Today's meeting was a special meeting focused on the race relations subcommittee. Tracy Parsons facilitating the meeting through the introductions and explaining the special format of today's meeting. He also explained the history of the collaborative group, from community meetings in the wake of the Kiwane Carrington shooting ten years ago to outgrowing the Champaign Public Library's spaces today. More here.
Donna Tanner-Harold of Parkland explained the Youth Race Talks project. She described 9 groups of 80-85 students between November 2018 and March 2019 at Central, Centennial, Urbana, Mahomet-Seymour, and Novak Academy. Every school was welcoming and invited her to come back and the students thanked her and were excited to be able to talk about the subject. Kids generally seemed optimistic about the future of race relations, believing they would be the generation to finally get it right. They still struggled to process police shootings and dealing with racism they experience in their lives. Black students often had a quiet resignation to being feared and future bad outcomes. Latinx students concerns went beyond immigration issues, but wanting to know that they matter when so much focus is on the binary of black and white race relations.
She highlighted the local Human Library project and listed ideas going forward:
- We need to empower students to deal with the subject of race.
- We need to work with staff and parents to talk about race.
- We need to help kids process the trauma after shocking events e.g. the Laquan McDonald incident.
She emphasized that young people are willing to have hard discussions, more so than adults.
During the Q & A, Minnie Pearson of the Champaign County NAACP emphasized the need to follow up and figure out what's next with these young people so they don't feel let down again. Tanner-Harold agreed and reiterated the need to follow up on the ideas she listed. She also pointed out that she had already been invited back to two schools, having visited one again already.
Kelly Ann Hurst took us through her journey as a biracial woman in America. From people accusing her black father of taking her when riding his shoulders to get ice cream at the age of four through her career as an educator where she realized she had been co-opted into support a white supremacist system. She asked the audience to face the fact that white supremacy isn't some fringe group in hoods, but the fabric of our American system. To many in the audience it was a strong applause line, but for many others this may have been offensive or possibly even nonsensical. Our community certainly has people who truly believe that our system rewards hard work and merit. Issues of racism are often blamed on individual failures where intent is critical to any accusation, while systemic racial issues are considered long ago resolved.
In Hurst's speech, she argued that impact matters over intent. She challenged perspectives on American history and encouraged people to look at how the definition of whiteness came to be and who was allowed in it, and why.
Whether you appreciate that perspective or think it's backwards, it never hurts to learn where others are coming from. In Champaign County, regardless of what you believe are the reasons, race correlates to where we live, how we're educated, what jobs we get, how much we're paid, how we're treated by school disciplinary systems, and the criminal justice system. We're not alone in having these continuing racial disparities.
That's some impact.
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