An Open Letter to Lawrence and Topeka School Board Members:
You’ve heard of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.
However, it is unlikely that you have heard of Nkosi
Thandiwe, Brittany Watts, Tiffany Ferenczy, or Lauren Garcia.
Just eight months before Zimmerman shot and killed Martin,
Thandiwe, a 21-year-old black man, shot and killed Watts,
stole her car, and ran over her body. He later shot Ferenczy and Garcia, who
was left paralyzed. Why did Thandiwe shoot three white women?
"In terms of slavery and race, it was something that
needed to be answered for,” Thandiwe said during his trial. “I saw it as
something that the black community hasn't recovered from so my initial way to
handle that was to spread information to help combat some of the ignorance that
was in the black community about our history.”
Thandiwe, a recent graduate of the University of West Georgia
with a degree in anthropology and a minor in history, also said his history
studies changed his thoughts about how some white people treated black people.
Of course, Watts, Ferenczy,
and Garcia had never owned slaves, and Thandiwe had never been a slave. In
fact, given that his mother is an attorney, it appears that he came from a
relatively well-to-do background.
The Thandiwe case never made the national headlines, Jesse
Jackson and Al Sharpton never held rallies for Brittany Watts, and President
Obama never said that if he had a son he would look like Nkosi Thandiwe. The
case came and went with very little notice. However, I would urge school board
members and administrators of USD 497 and USD 501 to give the case some
consideration.
Thandiwe said that he was motivated to shoot three white
women because he learned about how some white people treated black people in
his history studies. "In terms of slavery and race, it was something that
needed to be answered for,” he said in an attempt to justify the shootings.
Given that you have spent hundreds of thousands of
taxpayers’ dollars on no-bid contracts with Pacific Educational Group (PEG) to
promote “critical race theory” in your schools, I hope that you have taken the
time to read Courageous Conversations
About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools by PEG founder
Glenn E. Singleton and Curtis Linton. The contents of this book appear to be
little different from Thandiwe’s history studies. Here is Julian Weissplass
explaining one of the reasons why racism persists in the United States:
“White people lack information about the history and nature of the oppression
that people of color have endured. They learn little, for example, about the
genocide of indigenous people, the kidnappings and slavery of Africans and the
oppression of their descendants, the military seizure of the Southwestern U.S.
territory from Mexico,
or the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The media promote
stereotypes and neglect peoples’ real lives. Given the lack of information and
the spread of misinformation, it is not surprising that white people do not
always understand the feelings of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican
Americans, or Asian Americans.”
What Weissplass wrote in true. However, he and other
multiculturalists fail to tell the other side of history. “Whatever the
particular crimes of Europe, that continent is also the source—the unique source—of those liberating ideas
of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and
cultural freedom that constitute our previous legacy and to which most of the
world today aspires,” liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a
Multicultural Society (1991). “These are European ideas, not Asian, nor
African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.” Further, “The West
needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those ‘sun people’ who sustained
slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and, it is reported, sustain it
to this day in Mauritania
and the Sudan)....”
While Weissplass decries the promotion of stereotypes in the
media, Courageous Conversations
doesn’t shy away from stereotypes, although they claim they are “patterns”
instead of “stereotypes.” “From the work of Elise Trumbull, Carrie
Rothstein-Fisch, Patricia M. Greenfield, and Blanca Quiroz (2000), we have
learned that White culture is
characterized by individualism whereas cultures
of color are more often characterized by collectivism,” Singleton and
Linton write. “White Individualism” supposedly fosters independence and
individual achievement, promotes self-expression, individual thinking, and
personal choice, understands the physical world as knowable apart from its
meaning for human life, is associated with egalitarian relationships and
flexibility in roles (e.g., upward mobility), and is associated with private
property, individual ownership.
Meanwhile, “Color Group Collectivism” fosters
interdependence and group success, promotes adherence to norms, respect for
authority/elders, and group consensus, understands the physical world in the
context of its meaning for human life, is associated with stable, hierarchical
roles, and is associated with shared property, group ownership.
As you can see, in Singleton and Linton’s world, White culture and cultures of color are very, very different. They reject Martin
Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society, and instead promote “color-vision,”
i.e., which emphasizes our racial differences.
“To
make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family,” wrote psychologist
Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind:
Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012). “So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them
less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared
values and common identity.” According to Haidt, “Emphasizing
differences makes many people more racist, not less.”
I
experienced a “human hive” while serving in the Marines. While in boot camp, Staff
Sergeant L. K. White, a black man, was the senior drill instructor of our
platoon. He, along with Sergeant J. Black (ironically, a white man) and
Sergeant F. J. Childs, III, was responsible for taking 75 recruits (which had
dwindled down to 41 at the time of graduation) and molding us into Marines. Like every other platoon,
ours was racially mixed, with whites, blacks, Hispanics, an Asian, and a Native
American. However, White instructed us to put aside our racial differences. “There
are no white Marines,” he said. “There are no black Marines. There are only
green Marines.” By “green,” he was referring to the color of our uniforms. For
three months, we ate together, marched together, did PT (physical training) together,
and slept together in a large squad bay. We also had to use the “head”
(bathroom) and shower together. There were no doors on the toilet stalls and no
shower curtains, so privacy was out of the question. After three months of
living like that, you learn to trust and rely on others regardless of their
race. You also become a close-knit family with shared values and a common
identity.
I
believe the Marines’ approach concerning race is far superior to Singleton and
Linton’s. It’s also far less likely to produce another Nkosi Thandiwe.
