Confronting Prejudice and Bias

November 15th was the "Not In Our Schools" event - a collaboration of three high schools - for which I was the project coordinator. Over 300 students, teachers, and parents came to the Los Altos High School Theater to see a screening of the documentary, "Not In Our Town..." and participate in a community conversation facilitated by Milton Reynolds of "Facing History and Ourselves." The documentary, produced by my old friend, Patrice O'Neill, portrays communities in Northern California where a hate crime occurred and where the community found a creative, empowering way to respond. It provided a springboard for a conversation about the kinds of prejudices we encounter every day at school and even inside ourselves.

There were numerous poignant comments made during the community conversation that I will not forget. One young woman stood and in a voice wavering with pained emotion, told us of her friend, a bisexual, Muslim boy, who endured endless teasing and some bullying at school. One day, he jumped in front of the CalTrain and killed himself. Though she was his friend, she blamed herself for not having intervened and stood up to those who belittled him.

I think that in standing up and sharing her painful experience, this brave young woman motivated many to do something we haven't dared to before. How many of us have witnessed slurs and prejudice that injure people we know, but said nothing? It's not easy, or comfortable to be an "upstander." But that small act of courage can make a world of difference.

(The event included a great burrito dinner catered by students from Los Altos High and a mountain of desserts baked by students at Saint Francis high.....also a student art exhibit from students at Mountain View High and a short performance by "Camp Everytown" kids.)

Pekin "Chinks"

I was pleased and surprised that the "Not In Our Town" conference (community responses to hate crimes) was held in Bloomington, Illinois. I grew up 40 miles away in Peoria, Illinois. I don't think of that area as a leader in the realm of diversity awareness. The town next to Peoria is Pekin, named originally after Peking, China. The high school moniker was the "Pekin Chinks!" I remember one year in the late 60's when Pekin High went all the way to the state basketball finals. I imagine newspapers all over the state carried a headline about the "Chinks Victory" without thinking anything about it. At least as a kid, I never thought about it. There was also an ice skating rink in Pekin. You guessed it..... "Chink Rink." They had a local TV commercial that portrayed a simple line drawing of an old Chinese man on ice skates, mixed with their voiceover and maybe some music. "Institutional racism" is the boring term for when racism is so pervasive it is invisible or like wallpaper. I'm sure it wasn't like wallpaper to any Chinese folks who lived around there, but I didn't know any.

I went to Wikipedia and found that there was an attempt to change the high school moniker around 1974, but it didn't actually get changed until 1980. (My family moved around 1969.) Now they are called the Pekin Dragons.

Link to a blog with more detail.

Liz Halbert, Hero

Another post about the Not In Our Town gathering in Bloomington, October 2006: Nobody knew how emotional it would be to hear the stories in a room together over two early Autumn days. The stories had already been told in the "Not In Our Town" documentary series, but many were dabbing their eyes and standing to applaud spontaneously as they met in the flesh, exchanged hugs, and listened to the re-tellings. Though it took place in a rather institutional, unadorned hotel meeting room, it breathed with the quality of a tribal campfire where great stories are repeated and passed down and beyond to the next tellers.

These were ordinary folks from several dozen communities who had done extraordinary things to confront acts of hate and intolerance. Unfortunately, the biggest local hero of all could only be seen on a videotape. She died in December 2005 from a rapid viral attack at age 26. As a 15 year old, Liz Halbert had been one of the founders of the Not In Our Town chapter in Bloomington. She exuded the passion and clarity that are often more clearly expressed by a teen-ager. She’d been a panelist at the President’s Conference on Hate Crimes. When she got to college at Eastern Illinois University, she experienced an ugly, all-too-common incident. A group of white men yelled out “Nigger” at her from a passing car. She called her parents to invite them to a forum she’d organized after the incident. They said they expected to see about 25 people there and wanted to support their daughter. They should have known there would be hundreds including the mayor and the chief of police. An African-American senior stood up at the forum and declared that Liz’s incident wasn’t all that uncommon, but it was shocking that it took a freshman to show the community that it needed to deal with it.

We watched Elizabeth, a beautiful, Miss Illinois contestant, explain on tape that, “we’re all ignorant. There’s just so many cultures we can’t fully know. But we can control our ignorance rather than let it control us.”

MLK Jr. Day in Greenville

Lottie Gibson, James Hennigen, and Sandy Lechner came from Greenville, South Carolina to the "Not In Our Town" gathering in Bloomington. This year was the very first time that their county officially celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. day with a day off for county workers. It took a bitter NINETEEN year struggle to win that recognition for MLK Jr. It was so much more than a battle for a day off. Even the largest march ever held in the county – 10,000 mostly black citizens in 2003 – had no effect on the 8 right wing commissioners who did not want to recognize the man they publicly labeled a Communist and a womanizer. The MLK Jr. Day activists needed three more votes on the commission. Greenville is an extremely Republican county and the activists decided they should focus their efforts on a Republican primary to elect moderates. The hard-fought Republican primary produced three victories against right wing commissioners, but the right wingers did not give up easily. They contested the closest race and a recount confirmed the victory. The right wingers then appealed to the party leaders and a new election was ordered for that district. A warning went out that arrests would be made if any Democrats (read Blacks) voted in the primary. That warning backfired on the right wingers. Many African Americans who risked their lives a generation earlier to gain the right to vote, saw the warning as a mean-spirited (illegal) challenge. When they found out that only Democrats who had voted in the Democratic primary were forbidden to vote in the Republican primary, they came out in force. (When a county is so overwhelmingly Republican, not many vote in a Democratic primary.) The right wing commissioner was beaten more soundly than in the previous election and recount. The new commission voted for a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and Greenville County has joined the rest of the U.S. in honoring the civil rights leader.

“It was a racist war, Lottie delared. “We had a war!”