Eleven
Taking It With Us
Our discussions about this book always began with conversations about every other part of our lives besides the memoir—our children, our spouses, our parents, friends, politics, work, play, all of it. This is a memoir about race, but we also reflect upon our personal lives, our lives today, because as we wrote about our school experience, it was impossible not to think—together and individually—about what has happened since our school days and continues to happen. We found ourselves thinking about what all of this calls us to do and how to act on our concerns.
Cindy
When we first realized that we had both gone to Hillside and started talking about our experiences there—before we even thought about writing this book—I think I said something to the effect that being at Hillside had had a big influence on my life. I might have even stated that I was grateful for this experience because I had learned so much that I might not have learned any other way. When I heard from LaHoma that she had not exactly been a big fan of integration at Hillside, I was fascinated. And these stories that we told each other became our book. Having gone through the process of writing this book—really going back in my mind to remember specific people and incidents I had not thought of in years, remembering them in the context of all of my life that followed—I still agree with my initial, if somewhat (at the time) blithe answer, but I now am grateful for reasons that are more concrete and nuanced.
I carried a story about Hillside in my head for many years, bringing it out only occasionally when it seemed relevant or when I needed some race “cred.” The events that led to writing this book, and even more the writing of this book itself, however, have given me the opportunity to revisit the story I was holding on to, to re-remember, question some assumptions, and see how I may have reconstructed some of it to fit with a simpler life narrative. It is in understanding these inconsistencies that I have gained the most useful knowledge about myself as a white person who wants a better way for America when it comes to racial equity and justice. Stripping back some of the varnish—owning up to my past and present biases—has helped me see myself as a “work in progress.”
Going to high school at Hillside physically situated me in a black space for most of my day for most of the week for most of the year for three years. What I learned there that I carried with me into further schooling, my career, political involvement, volunteer work, marriage, and childrearing was what it was like to be a minority (though not an oppressed one) in another culture (albeit not a completely foreign one). I was more inside another kind of life than I would have been otherwise, and it was not harmful to me, and in fact, there was much to celebrate about it and to feel affection for. I learned a certain kind of ease in being with others who, outside of Hillside, would have been a minority in my usual space. I learned to feel comfortable across “difference.”
I have no illusions that I had the “inside out” version of black students sent to predominantly white schools. I was never expected to assimilate, and black students would have thought it odd if I had tried. We white folks were visiting and were expected to be as polite as our hosts were being to us. Southern rules of etiquette apply to all races. Even if there had been a continuing white presence at Hillside beyond the few years it occurred, no one would have expected assimilation ever, just a greater understanding between us and greater acceptance and tolerance for the differences in our lives.
I have no doubt that being at Hillside meant I had greater exposure to issues of concern and interest to black people than if I had been at the predominantly white Durham High School. I studied black literature and art at Hillside, and this was consciousness-raising for me. I heard more black music and liked it more than I would have otherwise. I sometimes saw how Hillside was treated differently (with less respect) because it was a predominantly black school, despite our relatively small white presence. All of these things stayed with me, inside of me somewhere as I went on with my life.
An “ah-ha!” moment for me in writing this memoir was realizing how much my world, while I was in high school, was still a very white world outside of Hillside. Though I shared physical space with black people during the school day, so many barriers still existed between us. During high school, most of my life was still in a very white world. LaHoma and I walked the same halls for a whole school year—and I might have recognized her then as a fellow student—but our lives were lived very separately. Then, when I left Hillside for college, I was solidly back in a white world.
And though I had concern and sympathies and perhaps I even thought I understood something about racial prejudice, I did not rush headlong into trying to fix it because of my experience at Hillside. Awareness of racial prejudice was tangential to many of my academic and career interests, but never front and center—at least not initially. I was all about righting wrongs, but I was more focused on sexism and the rights of women and girls (of all races).
That interest in women’s causes led me to do volunteer work with more than one organization as a reproductive health counselor. After I did coursework for my master’s degree, that interest led me to apply for a job as a research assistant in international family-planning research. After six years, I returned to graduate school so I could refocus my interests on the social and behavioral aspects of reproductive health. I specifically focused on adolescents, remembering both the amazing (in retrospect) information I got in 10th grade biology class and the girls at my library table from my world history class who already were mothers. I could not put those two things together. Now I can—but that lack of understanding on my part led me down a career path that had me thinking a lot about the role of race and poverty in women’s lives. After my coursework for my doctoral degree, I took a job at a public-interest organization whose mission was the reduction of teenage pregnancies. Most of its work was domestic, and the research I did there opened up my consciousness in many ways, but I think I had been primed for these insights by my experiences in high school.
One way having been at Hillside influenced my personal life—which for me was very intertwined with my work life—was that I had a level of comfort with being in black spaces and with black people, and I developed an interest in black culture. I believe it made me more receptive to listening to what my adult friends who were black were telling me about the way racism operates in their lives. For example, a black colleague told me that during a work meeting where we both were present and talking, another white person in the room looked only at me when she was talking. I had missed this non-verbal transgression, but the observation sensitized me to see it in many subsequent cross-racial work interactions and to be mindful about not doing it myself.
My first husband and I consciously tried to raise our children to value everyone and be inclusive in their relationships. It was hard for them to understand what had gone on before; when we watched Eyes on the Prize on PBS with our daughter, then in elementary school, at one point she turned around to us and said, “This didn’t really happen, did it?” She could not believe that policemen would turn hoses on peaceful protestors, black or white. We neither encouraged nor discouraged friendships on the basis of race or wealth (we were firmly in the middle of the economic spectrum in our highly resourced community). We spoke out about big and small injustices when we saw them and encouraged our children to do the same. But the main thing we did was teach them that the Golden Rule applies to everyone. Neither of them ever questioned this belief or behaved in a way that made us doubt their commitment to equity.
Another part of the answer to how being at Hillside influenced my life is revealed by more recent events. Fast-forward to about eight years ago. I had begun thinking about what else I might want to do with my life, things that I had not been able to do in my job. Throughout my life, I had been interested in writing. My job required very academic writing, restricting some of the more soulful and passionate ideas I wanted to share. I started taking creative nonfiction writing classes and workshops. At the same time, I saw how racism was still afflicting people around me. Perhaps I had just reached a tipping point after an accumulation of experiences and years of thinking about the issue. I felt a calling to do something, anything.
I became aware of a theology that provided a framework for community and action around the issue of racism, under the broader banner of “peacework,” a concept central to what my spiritual faith meant to my life. If faith was not about compassion for everyone, what was I missing? I was inspired by a talk by author Tim Tyson to join the NAACP. Rev. William Barber II, a North Carolina and national NAACP leader, inspired me to join in Moral Monday marches at the General Assembly building in Raleigh to protest the dismantling by Republican-led state legislators of every kind of political protection and social safety net for North Carolina’s most vulnerable citizens. My participation in a two-day anti-racism workshop conducted by the Racial Equity Institute of Greensboro, N.C., turned my thinking upside down as I saw the truth of America as a white supremacist country. I grew more aware of unconscious racial bias and began to see my white privilege in action. I thought I had known something about the effects of prejudice, but I came to understand through this multiracial workshop the greater power in understanding structural racism and the need to dismantle systemic racism, so that black lives truly matter.
As I was preparing to leave a career of nearly 30 years as a reproductive health researcher, I was also preparing myself for a fuller commitment to activism for racial justice. I joined our town’s Justice in Action Committee and learned about the school-to-prison pipeline, the difficulties in transitioning from incarceration to “normal” life, and the many challenges of finding affordable housing in my town. There are many avenues for working toward racial justice, because the effects of policies to maintain the advantages of being white seep into every aspect of life one can imagine.
My experiences at Hillside planted a seed and prepared the soil. Schools cannot, in one year or 12 years, upend centuries of institutionalized racism and unconscious racial bias. But what being at Hillside did was open my consciousness to the possibility that the world is different for different people, and that race most certainly creates different opportunities and barriers for people who might have the same set of abilities. My time there gave me a certain comfort level with people who were different from me. It allowed me to be in those spaces, to hear the conversations and, most of all, to believe what people tell me about how their experience is different from mine. There is probably no straight line between my having been at Hillside and a particular thing I say or do now, but that experience has led me through a series of other experiences that have made me feel the urgency for anti-racism activism at this moment. There was not an instantaneous moment in which my (conscious or unconscious) racial bias was eradicated, a moment when I became a perfect conduit for dismantling racism. I am still not without this bias. But my consciousness did change, even if it changed in some ways that might not have been translated into action until later in my life. My experiences at Hillside led to or connected to other experiences. Change of consciousness is a slow-building process—an iterative process—with each new idea or action building on previous new ideas and experiences.
Writing this book with LaHoma is part of this journey for me. It is important that we have written it together. Hearing each other’s stories opened us up to remembering stories we had forgotten, or to see our own stories in a new light. Bringing together our separate narratives illustrated the need for our differing perspectives to be told side by side, as a way of generating discussion to heal the harms inflicted by racism.
LaHoma
Years ago, if you had asked me whether “the letter” and grade school integration had been a positive influence in my life, I would have responded with a resounding “Yes!” Over the course of writing this book and as memories surfaced, I started to have my doubts. Now that we have come to the end of our project together, the doubts have largely subsided, but my initial enthusiasm is far more circumspect, my answer less confident and more likely to be qualified by “Well, it depends.”
I have mused incessantly over whether there are indeed benefits to forced school integration of black and white communities. I found blogs of white students who hated Hillside and cursed their days at the school. Of course I am sympathetic, because when I was going through that social experiment myself, I resented it as well, but not because I hated the white students; I just didn’t see the point of making us go to school together. My attitudes have softened, and now I find myself somewhere in the middle of this discourse. I can easily champion a defense of either side. Let me explain.
For the affirmative, I embrace the notion that attending junior high and high schools with students from different racial groups gave those of us coming from segregated communities the chance to interact with white students on a level playing field. Yes we could go into a store and see a white person, we could go to the movies and we saw white people all over television, but in school we were equal, we were classmates and we were friends who interacted with each other based on similar interests, from the band to the French club.
But one could ask, “Beyond sitting beside someone of a different race, was anything of substance gained from those interactions?” Many of those relationships were superficial and limited in scope and intensity. We greeted one another with a casual “Hey, how’re you doing?”, but beyond that, it was rare to see close connections between black students and white students. Yes, a few boys, mostly the black male athletes, developed more intimate relationships with the white female students, usually also athletes. But any interaction outside of school hours would have been unusual for most of us. I certainly never brought anybody home with me. I do remember occasionally visiting the home of one of my white classmates, Helen, who had also been a contestant in the Junior Miss pageant. She was also one of the smartest students at Hillside, and we had a lot of similar interests. Our relationship was warm and cordial, but more important, it allowed me to see her as a human being, as just another girl, even though she was white.
Was that relationship, or similar ones, unworthy of obtaining simply because it did not result in lifelong friendships? Is the mere interaction too superficial an outcome? As a first step for people who have very little contact with each other outside of school, why wasn’t just bringing people together for the betterment of our society a good enough goal?
As I promote this argument, I can see other benefits. Integration permitted us to satisfy our curiosities about the other group, develop new attitudes, and challenge stereotypes about people within the context of a safe environment. I was surprised, for example, to learn that not all white people were high academic achievers. Up to that point, I had been convinced that all white people in the world were really smart, all the beautiful people were white, and all the best things in life belonged to white people. To me, that belief was more a fact than a complaint.
When we got to Hillside, I saw another side: that not all white people were in the Honor Society, and that black students could excel in activities even when white students were involved. White students also saw black people and realized that their perceptions and stereotypes about blacks were flawed. Not all black people are poor or can dance and sing.
Recently, I scanned my high school yearbook and noticed a picture of one of my black classmates braiding the long, blond hair of one of my white classmates. Little did they know that they were well ahead of Bo Derek’s trendsetting cornrows in the late 1970s. These benign interactions, on the surface harmless and pointless, permitted unspoken questions, each about the other, to be answered: “What does your hair feel like? Why does it stay so straight? My hair is curly.” Innocent curiosity led to interactions and explorations in a safe space. Cindy’s annoyance at the formality and social traditions at Hillside helped her achieve proficiency in cross-cultural settings and more easily adjust as a working professional in settings with people unlike herself.
A prevailing sentiment among black students was that, even though we recognized our differences from the white students, we acknowledged that the white students who attended Hillside were the “good guys” because they had chosen to be with black students, while the white students who did not want to be there did not come. We believed that our white classmates had parents who weren’t scared of their children mixing with us. Cindy’s high school stories reveal that those impressions were not entirely accurate.
That is not to say that white students always felt welcomed or well assimilated into Hillside’s predominantly black culture, but neither were they shunned. There weren’t riots or racial fights. The black students tried to display their understanding that the white students had good intentions. So, for the most part, there was no need to intimidate or create a hostile environment, because these white kids were the ones who decided to stay. They were harmless and benign, and they were there because they and their families had decided for whatever reason that it would be OK to be at Hillside. As for the people who were not at Hillside, those who were being transferred off to Durham Academy or wherever? We did not encounter those people. It was the people who made the decision to be there who were there. So there was a friendly atmosphere, and we got along, and for the most part we did not go beyond that. At least I did not.
When I realized that Cindy had attended Hillside, I gained renewed respect for her. We had a shared past, if not a shared perspective about our experience. Of course, now I realize that there might have been white kids who didn’t want to be at Hillside but who had no other options or resources. Not all the white students’ parents were liberal professors at Duke. At the time, we did not make those distinctions among the white kids, assuming that everyone was there by choice.
While we generally accepted our white classmates, we were not deaf to the strong opposition to integration we heard from outside our walls. We heard about it from our parents, read about it in the newspapers, and listened to discussions on the radio and television. We mainly felt insulated from those discussions. Besides, in Mr. Lucas’ high school, we were not going to be permitted to participate in any funny business.
Mr. Lucas’ leadership through this period in Durham cannot be overstated. While working as our principal, he was also a leader in discussions to achieve racial integration at all levels of the educational system in North Carolina. Hillside was seen as a model of what was possible, and Mr. Lucas was a frequent spokesperson for the merits of bringing black and white children together. His interest, he said, “is to seek a strong voice for education with equal opportunity. My concept was that in order to merge, you should bring two groups together on an equal footing.” (9) Since his retirement, Dr. Lucas has continued to lend his voice to advocacy for educational issues in a number of capacities at the local, state, national and international levels.
To counter these arguments, I could also defend the narrative that people should be allowed to attend whatever school they want to attend—even if that choice means that they want to be among the majority race in that school. My attitude is a reflection of where I currently sit. After attending Hillside and then two predominantly white universities, I am now a professor at a historically black university, North Carolina Central University in Durham. NCCU is composed of a predominantly black student population, oriented toward traditions, culture, and a legacy of social justice and service to the black community. NCCU is also one of 16 campuses that make up the University of North Carolina system. Of the 16 campuses, six are HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities). The demographic trends of the university are changing, and I suspect that the increase of enrollments from white, Latino and Asian students will provide for even greater diversity on campus. But the culture of the campus is likely to remain strongly rooted in its commitment to educating the black community.
The reason there are six HBCUs had nothing to do with choice, but rather that other state-funded schools did not allow for the admission of black students until about 50 years ago. To quell discontent, the state legislators began to provide some financial support to these black schools and eventually brought them into the UNC system.
I continue to be annoyed by the obvious differences in resources between the HBCUs compared to the larger institutions—all supposedly equal members within the UNC system. What is the rationale for the disparities between the campuses and the differences in perceptions in the quality of the academic experience? Being a Durham girl, I knew that there were differences in perceptions, but it was only after I started working at NCCU, after many years of working in international development, that I learned that those differences in perception were a result of actual differences in how resources were allocated, how decisions were made and how faculty and staff were affected in terms of research, teaching and service activities. As the years have progressed, I have grown increasingly resentful, and now I’m pretty defensive about the whole situation.
Today, black students are not limited at all by their choices or their ability to attend majority institutions. Many choose HBCUs even when they have many, many options and would be successful regardless of their university setting. I have come to realize that some students benefit from the nurturing environment that campuses like ours offer to black students. Perhaps the nurturing environment of Hillside paved the way for my success. So who cannot argue that the selections of schools should really be the choice of the students and their families? What is so magical about this experience at a predominantly black college that parents might not also make this choice if it were allowed at elementary, middle, and high schools? Certainly there are those currently pushing this agenda as a viable path for black children.
Some data suggest that black children who attend integrated schools are more likely to succeed, score significantly higher on standardized math tests and enjoy higher earnings and rates of employment later in life. Studies report that black students who attend schools with whites are less likely to bear children as teenagers, or to be incarcerated as adults (10). Other studies cite the positive influences of same-race role models in the classroom, particularly for black males, and the importance of learning in an environment that is not perceived as racist and hostile (11). Who is right?
The truth, I believe, lies somewhere in between. I believe that school integration is an important component of living in a multiracial society. We cannot claim to value equality while holding on to policies that make it easy to maintain separate instructional facilities based on skin color. Court-ordered desegregation efforts that compelled children like Cindy and me, comfortable in our own respective worlds, to move out of our safe cocoons to explore the worlds of others were important. We developed flexibility and skills to move easily in and out of different cultural settings. We learned how to negotiate and survive challenging situations and bring up difficult topics about race in nonthreatening environments. While some would argue that meaningful dialogue at Hillside was limited, learning to live and work alongside one another served an invaluable purpose. It led me to want more for myself, to do more for my community and to accept that there were white people just like me, with similar interests and values. I am sure that it did the same for Cindy. Some of those lessons were learned at Hillside; others I learned at Duke and beyond.
Creative and innovative approaches that offer dignity, respect, equality, and recognize the value of each and every student, regardless of race, are still needed. However, we should not pretend that current efforts to return to neighborhood schools and give parents the choice of taxpayer-funded charter schools are anything more than a desire to move away from school integration. As a nation, we are slowly pulling away the foundation from a hard-fought legacy worthy of holding on to. We seem willing to toss aside the bricks of time, effort and understanding that were so carefully crafted by Dr. Lucas and the pioneers of the desegregation movement. We are returning to silos of convenience and comfort, and though we pretend to respect integration, we are moving rapidly ahead to support school board members and policymakers who will ensure that integration is never fully achieved. The experiences that Cindy and I contemplate provide greater context and justification for fighting for school desegregation, even as our nation charges full steam ahead to destroy it.