Chapter8 There Are No Signs Feeling Black in a Post–Jim Crow America

Camille D. Burge

“What’s the difference between the racism and prejudice you experienced in the 1950s and 1960s, and what you see and experience today?” I posed this question to civil rights activist Diane Nash in January of 2018 while having dinner with her along with the Villanova University Martin Luther King Jr. Day Planning Committee. Nash is best known for being the chairperson of the student sit-in movement in 1960 in Nashville, Tennessee, where she organized many protests that ultimately led to the desegregation of Nashville’s lunch counters. It was because of her tireless efforts and negotiations with the local government that on May 10, 1960, Nashville, Tennessee, became the first major southern city to formally desegregate lunch counters. Around that same time, she and other students from the South assembled in Raleigh, North Carolina, and founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. After the sit-ins, Nash played an integral role in coordinating the 1961 Freedom Rides across the Deep South. When responding to the question about the differences between racism during Jim Crow and now, Nash took a deep breath, peered over her wire-rimmed glasses, and said, “There are no signs.” I, along with several others at the dinner table, gasped aloud, but we proceeded to nod our heads in silence and agreement as Nash unpacked her answer about the segregation and discriminatory treatment that Black Americans face daily.

“There are no signs.” These four simple words encapsulated my entire lived experience as a Black person in a post–Jim Crow America—namely, that even though the signs clearly demarcating the spaces that whites and Blacks could occupy are long gone, explicit and implicit racism reigns supreme in every corner of the United States, resulting in an inescapable Othering based on the colour of one’s skin. This chronic skin-deep “Other-ness” that Black Americans feel is not new. It is written into our founding documents, codified in our pieces of legislation, reinforced by the judicial system, and deeply ingrained in the minds of the masses.1 Because of this chronic Othering, Black Americans’ lived experiences have been and continue to be powerfully sculpted by race. From slave codes to Black codes and from Jim Crow to mass incarceration, the United States has created restrictive laws at every level of government to curtail the freedom, political power, and economic and educational opportunities of Black people.2 After all, it was Black veterans who were not afforded the same educational and home ownership opportunities in the GI Bill as their white counterparts.3 It was local, state, and federal housing policies that mandated residential segregation, which has contributed to the differential rates of home ownership between Blacks and whites as well as the demographic and socio-economic makeup of suburban and inner-city areas.4 Black students in schools are three times more likely to be held back as their white peers, and they also suffer harsher penalties for the same offences than their white counterparts in the educational system.5 It is Black people who are incarcerated disproportionate rates when compared to white people who are found guilty of similar offences, to the point that one out of every thirteen Black Americans has lost their voting rights at the hands of felon disenfranchisement laws.6 In addition, Black people are twenty-one times more likely than their white counterparts to be shot by the police.7 From the time of slavery to present day, Black people have been and continue to be treated differently simply because of the colour of their skin.8

Given Blacks’ differential treatment based on race and their negative emotional experiences, it is rather difficult to imagine the conditions under which Black and white people in America might ever attain some semblance of peace. All the same, in keeping with the goal of this volume, I seek here to envision what peace between opposing groups might entail. I adopt the definition of peace proposed by antiracist gender scholar Jennifer C. Nash. Peace, she argues, “is a radical call for freedom from oppressions, and a bold challenge to rethink how we live together in ways that not only honor each other’s dignity but that recognize and redress the violence that has marked—and continues to mark—the everyday. Peace, then, is an ongoing call to imagine living otherwise.”9

If Black and white Americans are to answer that call, they must come to understand what underlies the impulse to violence. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”10 In what follows, I attempt to explain those means toward peace. I begin with the Civil Rights construction of peace, which requires economic and social justice for all. Recognizing that this vision of peace may never be realized, my second goal is to provide concrete steps that I believe we can take as a nation to get us closer to that vision by focusing on the actions of individuals, groups, and institutions: the adoption of an antiracist framework, which involves dismantling racism at the individual, interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels. I then discuss how the adoption and implementation of a truth and reconciliation commission might lead to peace. Since institutional and interpersonal steps toward peace may be adopted by some but not the masses, I then focus on how Black Americans might go about pursuing and finding inner or personal peace in a nation that, regardless of the steps taken toward peace, will more than likely continue to view them as the Other.

Feeling Black

How does it feel to be Othered in the only country one has ever known? How does it feel to be tethered to a country and a majority group of people who will never see you as an individual? Or to encounter people who will balk at the idea that your ancestors ever contributed anything to make America great and whose laws were never meant to protect you but rather intended curtail your access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? This is the reality of Black Americans in a post–Jim Crow America. One of my most prominent strands of research examines the role of emotions in Black politics and how they shape attitudes toward groups, politicians, policy opinions, and various types of political participation (voting, donating money to candidates, signing petitions, wearing/displaying campaign paraphernalia, and so on). Drawing on findings from focus groups and original survey experiments from 2012 through 2017, I reframe my understandings of Blacks’ emotions, especially the experiences of pride, shame, anger, and fear in the context of being Othered in America.

Pride, Shame, and Anger

From historical and contemporary perspectives, pride, shame, and anger often encapsulate the Black experience in America. It was Marcus Garvey who implored Black people to be proud of their African heritage,11 psychologist Claude Steele who wrote about the intense sense of shame and internalized racial oppression among Black Americans,12 and the words of preachers and activists that told Black people it was okay to be angry at legal and societal discrimination.13 Narratives surrounding these three emotions are often found across disciplines like history, sociology, literature, and Africana studies.14

What is pride? Richard Lazarus defines pride as “the enhancement of one’s ego identity by taking credit for a valued object or achievement, either our own or that of someone or group with whom we identify—for example, a compatriot, a member of the family, or a social group.”15 There are several ways that pride can be generated. Alvin Zander, Richard Fuller, and Warwick Armstrong write state that “a member’s sense of pride can be affected by his group’s achievements.”16 Mascolo and Fisher state that pride can be generated “by appraisals that one is responsible for a socially valued outcome or for being a socially valued person.”17 When describing what about being Black made them feel proud, participants in my 2012 focus group studies used the following words and phrases: resiliency, survival, ability to overcome, ability to rally around certain issues, accomplishments, strength, endurance, love for each other, and resourcefulness. For example, Barbara stated,

Our ability to overcome in spite of all the ways that we have been oppressed throughout the years and while folks say y’all need to be happy, discrimination don’t exist anymore we got a black president, they need to wake up and smell the coffee and we are still succeeding despite that . . . against all odds.

Janet, along with several others, cited the importance of the strength of Black people:

Yea, I think our strength and Black people particularly I’m thinking about the fact that we didn’t come here as voluntary immigrants we were forced to come here and yet we succeeded given whatever the circumstances we had to face. . . . We succeeded and I think that’s a tremendous source of pride.

Despite being chronically Othered via tremendous legal, explicit, and implicit racial discrimination, many of my focus group study participants focused on their feelings of pride and the myriad ways in which members of their racial group have been able to overcome oppression.

While finding strength and pride in the ability to overcome oppression is one side of the lived experience of Black Americans, being Othered in America also results in a great deal of shame. Shame is defined as “an all-consuming experience of the self as fundamentally flawed or defective.”18 Shame is also defined as “an affective reaction that follows public exposure (and disapproval) of some impropriety or shortcoming.”19 Upon feeling this emotion, the goal is maintenance of others’ respect and/or affection, preservation, or positive self-regard. Psychology scholars have found that shame emerges among Black children during early childhood development because at a young age, Black children in the United States are taught implicitly and explicitly that white skin is better than darker skin.20 In a study of 250 Black children now known as the infamous “Doll Tests,” Clark and Clark found that Black children do draw distinctions between Black and white dolls and have a strong preference for wanting to play with the white doll, ascribing more positive characteristics to the white doll than the Black doll.21 There are no tangible signs to tell Black children that their skin is less desirable, but they internalize the stereotypes, myths, and misinformation that society communicates to them about the inferiority of their group.22 Extant literature in psychology and sociology suggests that members of groups with negative stigmas, especially Black people in America, are more likely to internalize these feelings of shame and oppression.23 These messages have done true damage to Black people, which is why campaigns like “My Black Is Beautiful” and “Black Girls Rock” are necessary, as they provide a national platform to help correct these widespread, inculcated, and internalized feelings of inferiority.

Being Othered requires and/or implies that Black Americans have been lumped into one large group: stereotyped as violent, lazy, prone to criminality, and different from the seemingly more virtuous characteristics of white Americans. In “On Being Ashamed of Oneself,” W. E. B. Du Bois argues that Black people are “ashamed and embarrassed because of the compulsion of being classed with a mass of people over whom they have no real control and whose action they can influence only with difficulty and compromise and with every risk of defeat.”24 Psychology literature suggests that individuals might feel ashamed when they witness others who share their group identity engaging in behaviours that are seen as revealing a flawed social identity. In other words, just as through my own misdeed I feel ashamed of who I am, when a group member engages in a wrongdoing, I might feel ashamed of who we are.25

Research in psychology finds that feelings of shame are especially pronounced when members of stigmatized groups engage in behaviours that confirm negative stereotypes of the group.26 Indeed, my findings from the focus group study reveal that Black people experience shame when they witness members of their racial group engaging in activities that confirm negative stereotypes of the group; they cited several examples: poor appearance, lack of knowledge of self-worth, lack of belief in self, poor choices, giving up, dependence on welfare, indecency in public, disrespect/ignorance, prizing athletics over academics, Blacks not reaching back to help other Blacks, lack of priorities, excuses, negative portrayal in the media, Black-on-Black crime, and blaming others for their place in society. Robert stated, “with this society, I think their public appearance, the saggy pants . . . the pyjamas.” Catherine stated, “Men and women not taking care of their kids or running to welfare or running to food stamps. They’re like let me pop out a kid . . . who’s going to pop out a kid just cause? That’s crazy . . . no.” Karen stated, “I’m ashamed by the welfare system and how trickling generations are just in that cycle and they don’t want to do anything to get out of it.” Being Othered and tethered to a group with a negative stigma causes an internalized sense of shame and oppression.

Undeniably, anger has also been at the core of being Black and Othered in America. Anger is defined as “a belief that we, or our friends, have been unfairly slighted, which causes in us both painful feelings and a desire or impulse for revenge.”27 Anger is a negative emotion wherein blame for undesirable behaviour and resulting undesirable events is directed at another person or group. Anger produces a desire to regain control, remove the obstruction, and if necessary, attack the source of injury.28 Banks states, “Anger is experienced when a person has been threatened and, more importantly, when an individual is certain about who’s responsible (or blameworthy) for the offense.”29 Lazarus states that if we blame someone for a wrongdoing, it requires that we believe that the individual engaged in the slighting could have acted differently, that they had control over the offending action. The individual or maybe group of people that we are blaming is the appraisal that grows out of the context of threat and frustration.30

What is it about being Othered in America that angers Black people? Black Rage, written by two Black psychiatrists in 1968, was devoted to understanding why Black people in America were angry and why they chose to express that discontent through protests and riots. In this work, Grier and Cobbs state that Black people in America are angry about the “unwillingness of white Americans to accept Negroes as fellow human beings.” In fact, the entire message in Black Rage is “that despite the passage of five Civil Rights bills since 1957, despite the erosion of legal supports for segregated institutions, despite greater acceptance of Negroes into our major institutions, both public and private, it is still no easy thing to be a Black person in America.” These psychiatrists further argue that “the civilization that tolerated slavery dropped its slaveholding cloak but the inner feelings remained . . . [that] the practice of slavery stopped over a hundred years ago, but the minds of our citizens have never been freed.”31 Until Black people have equality with white Americans and are treated like human beings, they will continue to be angry.

Focus group study participants pointed to the following sources of anger as a result of being Othered: being guilty by association, the assumption of ignorance, and being the exception to the rule. The anger about societal treatment described across the focus groups mimic what we find in the literature on Black anger. In regard to stereotypes, Cose devotes an entire chapter to discussing how Blacks are often “guilty by association.”32 This notion of being guilty by association stems from individuals ascribing negative characteristics to members of the Black community simply because of the colour of their skin. The best illustrations of these phenomena were expressed by Janet, when she recalled two separate instances in which she was stereotyped as a criminal in a department store and a single mother of unruly Black children:

There’s a store that used to be here called Cain-Sloan. . . . I could not walk in that store without being followed around. If I’m in here I can buy whatever I want. . . . You need to talk about Ashley Judd about that. It’s just the stereotype. . . . It’s the assumption that I can’t afford it or that I’m going to steal it.
I think that what angers me are stereotypes. I’m trying to think of the time when I was an angry Black woman was several years ago. . . . I was living in California and I was at the Stanford Mall this very upscale hoity-toity mall. I was in some shop and then there’s these two Black kids that came in by themselves. . . . They were being kids . . . not doing anything wrong . . . just being rambunctious kids and the shop keeper was very snooty like, “You need to do something with your kids.” I’m like do you see a rang on my fanger anywhere?! What makes you think that those are my kids?! I mean I went off . . . ALL THE WAY OFF! I was angry and I was like why did I get so angry about that? It’s sort of a natural assumption . . . at the same time . . . did you see the kids come in with me? My kids would have been controlled you know.

Cheryl made an interesting statement to this effect when she said,

I had a white woman tell me that she understood exactly what I went through as an African American because she went through it as a woman every day and when I got through explaining to her that she could never ever understand what it felt like to not be able to take this off . . . to not be able to present in front of somebody else and they not see you coming, you can’t begin to know how I feel; after I was done her nose was bleeding and I didn’t hit her . . . but there is just no way she can feel that.

I fielded a study with fifteen hundred Black Americans in the fall of 2017 to better understand the emotions of Black people during the presidency of Donald Trump. When provided with an open-ended prompt about how they felt as Black Americans in the current political climate, many respondents focused on the unequal treatment by law enforcement being a source of anger. When writing about anger, one respondent stated,

I always expected this country to want to make progress toward living up to its ideals of giving effective equality, liberty and justice to everyone. The rise of Donald Trump and his ilk has led me to question my beliefs in the essential goodness of the American people. The blatant excusing of police brutality against Black people also makes me angry and sad on a regular basis. I’ve come to the conclusion that I might be better off living outside of the United States, a place where I was born and raised—I’ve come to feel the equal treatment that my ancestors fought for over generations might never be realized and I am quite disillusioned.

Another respondent stated,

Police brutality is something that angers me extremely. The people that are supposed to protect us seem to be doing the most harm. I got pulled over a few weeks ago and was genuinely afraid of what would happen. That should never be the case. I’m angered at the fact that they created Blue Lives Matter in a result of the Black Lives Matter campaign. Being Black is not a choice, being an officer is. They can take their uniform off; we can’t change our skin colour. It’s insulting.

Another respondent echoed those sentiments when they stated,

It angers me when I think of police brutality because the police are supposed to protect and serve the people regardless of race but they have forgotten about those terms and have lost all respect because of all the killings of black men, women, even children who would want help or anything to do with them honestly.

The reason why Black people are angry in America is because they have been Othered since their arrival to America in 1619. As Grier and Cobbs note, Black people have never been treated like equal human beings in this society; all Black people in America have been asking for is equality.33 What does that equality look like in practice? Equal funding for schools. Equal opportunities to receive home loans. Equal treatment before the law. Equal treatment in social spaces. It means that if a white person sees a Black man jogging in a neighbourhood, they let him jog, because you would never shoot at or suspect a white man jogging in your neighbourhood of a crime.34 If you see a young Black boy playing with a toy gun in the park, you let him play, because you do not believe he poses a threat.35 If a Black man in a park asks a white woman to leash her dog, she leashes it because the sign tells her to—she does not call the cops to weaponize her whiteness.36 It means that I, as a Black woman, can get pulled over by the police and not have to worry about dying. Until Black people have equality before the law and in practice, Black people will continue to be angry.

Fear

How might fear factor into the experience of being Othered? Fear is a vital response to physical and emotional danger—if we didn’t feel it, we couldn’t protect ourselves from legitimate threats. Lazarus states that fear involves threats that are concrete, sudden, and related to imminent physical harm.37 As it pertains to fear, one third of respondents in the 2017 study focused on police brutality against Black people, the lack of fairness in the criminal justice system, and the rise of racism and prejudice in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. Although this state-on-citizen violence is not new, especially as it pertains to Black Americans, the proliferation of social media outlets has led to the recording, posting, and subsequent reposting of these atrocities to the broader world within a matter of seconds, thus allowing individuals who have only heard about these instances of violence to actually see them in either real time or just moments after their occurrence. Below are two archetypal examples of these fear responses:

Police brutality is affecting the black community. I fear for future black children growing up in this world.
I am afraid and appalled by the blatant racism being fostered as a result of this presidential election. I feel that with the Trump victory in the presidential election many people felt it gave them the right to openly discriminate against minorities. There has been an increase of violent incidences against minorities. The idea that the USA is a white country seems to be the message being sent. I am afraid for myself, my family and all the minorities in this country. Any progress made is being rolled back and eliminated. The worst is to see or hear any minority praising these actions.38

The chronic Othering of Black people in America has led many white people to fear Black people, but it is Black people who truly suffer the consequences. Historically, Black Americans have been portrayed as inferior to white people, and this negative portrayal has had deleterious consequences for how white Americans perceive Black Americans. While acknowledging that human faculties defy empirical study, Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”39

What followed the publication of Jefferson’s opinions in the late 1700s was a well-tuned white elite propaganda machine, consisting of white politicians, religious leaders, artists, scientists, and academics, which substantiated these claims of Black inferiority. Indeed, Burrell states that “one of the greatest propaganda campaigns of all time was the masterful marketing of the myth of Black inferiority to justify slavery within a democracy.”40 From slavery throughout the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, white and Black people were inundated with portrayals of Black people as lazy, shiftless, lawless, violent, and dumb; it was these characterizations and depictions of Blacks that helped to justify their oppression and Othering.41

Black people live in fear for their lives because being Black in America can get you killed. It does not matter how many degrees a Black person has attained, nor what their level of income is. When Black people built thriving, self-sufficient towns during Reconstruction (1865–1877), white people who were afraid of their progress and independence burned them down.42 Historically, a Black person accused of a crime could be jailed and/or lynched without a trial.43 If a Black person is walking down the street with a hoodie on, someone can view them as threatening and put an end to their life.44 As we have seen time and time again, a police officer can arrest and kill a Black person without serving any jail time. Fear is a rational response to constantly being Othered because it is a response to physical or emotional danger. Black people have faced a great deal of both since their arrival to the United States.

No Justice, No Peace

“No Justice, No Peace” is a popular chant at protests, which suggests that, if there is injustice in an institution (for example, the criminal justice system via policing and rulings of the courts, education, health care, etc.), there will be civil unrest. But what will it take to truly know justice and know peace in America? What are the prospects of peace between Black and white people in America? On March 18, 1956, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a sermon titled “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious” at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. During this sermon, King drew distinctions between positive and negative peace. He viewed negative peace as Black people accepting injustice and exploitation for the sake of maintaining good and peaceful race relations with whites:

If peace means accepting second class citizenship, I don’t want it. If peace means keeping my mouth shut in the midst of injustice and evil, I don’t want it. If peace means being complacently adjusted to a deadening status quo, I don’t want peace. If peace means a willingness to be exploited economically, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated, I don’t want peace. In a passive non-violent manner, we must revolt against this peace.45

King argued that we should focus on positive peace, which involved the presence of justice and goodwill. Black and white people in America should seek to live in positive peace with one another. This positive peace is reflected in Nash’s definition of peace as “a radical call for freedom from oppressions, and a bold challenge to re-think how we live together in ways that not only honor each other’s dignity but that recognize and redress the violence that has marked—and continues to mark—the everyday.”46 With this definition in mind, I will explain the all-encompassing vision of peace promoted by activists from the Civil Rights Movement: economic and social justice for all Americans. I will also discuss the ways in which that work is being championed by the Poor People’s Campaign in the present day. Considering that this version of peace may never be realized, I then provide concrete steps surrounding the actions of individuals, groups, and institutions that can get us closer to peace: the adoption of an antiracist framework and the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission. I conclude by providing a few suggestions for how Black Americans can find inner and/or personal peace should all the previous attempts at corporate peace fail.

Activists during the Civil Rights Movement had an ambitious vision for peace in America: economic and social justice for all. Immediately after securing a wide range of civil rights for Black Americans via the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, leaders of this movement pivoted to human rights for all Americans. Fannie Lou Hamer stated it eloquently:

What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don’t want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that’ll raise me and the white man up . . . raise America up . . . a deeply integrated, loving community rather than segregated chaos; hope rather than despair—raising up America and making the world over.47

In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King Jr. echoed those sentiments by stating, “Equality with Whites will not solve the problems of either Whites or Negroes if it means equality in a society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.”48 These leaders called for a revolution of values as they sought to unite poor and marginalized people across the United States.

This idea of human rights for all Americans has the potential to lead to a great deal of peace. Why? If people have equal access to a living wage, health care, equality before the law, and equality in social spaces, oppression is unnecessary, because each person will receive some baseline approximation of justice and equality. This vision of peace is still alive and well through the work of the Poor People’s Campaign, led the Reverend William Barber. This campaign focuses on ending the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and the war economy/militarism.49 While this vision of peace is the most desirable, there are other options that seem more reasonable in the short-term.

One of the first steps to achieving peace is the adoption of an antiracist framework. An antiracist is a person who opposes racism and promotes racial tolerance. In How to be an Antiracist, Ibram Kendi writes,

To be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right—inferior or superior—with any of the racial groups. Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races. To be antiracist is to deracialize behavior, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behavior is something humans do, not races do.50

Being antiracist requires that the individual is fighting against racism at all levels: individual, interpersonal, structural, and institutional. Individual racism refers to the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individuals that perpetuate racism in implicit and explicit ways. Interpersonal racism occurs between individuals, usually in public expressions of racism that often include slurs, biases, and hateful words or actions. Institutional racism occurs in organizations and involves the discriminatory treatment, unfair policies, and biased practices based on race. Structural racism is the overarching system of racial bias across institutions and society that gives privileges to white people and disadvantages to people of colour.51

For Blacks and whites to live in peace, the majority of people have to be willing to adopt an all-encompassing antiracist framework. This is not an impossible feat. Conversations surrounding being antiracist burst onto the national scene in the aftermath of a series of high-profile police murders of Black men and women in May and June of 2020. White Americans are learning about the ways in which racism governs a great deal of their individual and interpersonal actions; they are also learning how to check their motives and actions and are being called out on social media platforms when they engage in racist behaviours. A number of Fortune 500 companies have made powerful statements on the importance of diversity and inclusion. Along with these statements, many organizations are acknowledging the effects of institutional racism and making plans to bring about greater equity within their organizations. The adoption of an antiracist framework is plausible.

In addition to antiracism, peace in America requires a truth and reconciliation commission to officially address America’s racist history. Nash’s definition of peace requires that individuals “recognize and redress the violence that has marked—and continues to mark—the everyday.”52 Several countries have established truth and reconciliation commissions to investigate the role of government and key actors during human rights violations. The most notable Truth and Reconciliation Commission comes from South Africa. The commission was a “courtlike body established by the government in 1995 to help heal the country and bring about reconciliation of its people by uncovering the truth about human rights violations that occurred during the period of apartheid.”53 The United States has never embarked on such a truth-telling journey. We must tell the truth about American history and what has happened to Black people since arriving to these shores. A commission needs to be convened to examine the legacy of government-sanctioned slavery and to make recommendations for changes in criminal justice, education, health care, and economic systems.54 Black and white people overwhelmingly view inequality in different ways. That is, many white people focus on individual attributions (being lazy, unintelligent, untrustworthy, etc.) for Blacks’ inequality with white Americans; the overwhelming majority of Black Americans focus on structural attributions of inequality like racism and discrimination.55 For peace to occur between Black and white Americans, the United States must address the violence of the past and examine how that shapes the current lived experiences of Black Americans.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice created by the Equal Justice Initiative is a thriving example of how truth-telling about past events can foster dialogue about the connections to contemporary issues and place the country on a path to reconciliation. Opened to the public on April 26, 2018, “The National Memorial is the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African-Americans humiliated by segregation and Jim Crow, and people burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.”56 The first step of any recovery program is admitting one has a problem. For far too long, many white people in America have been unwilling to recognize that there is a systemic racism problem in America. A truth and reconciliation commission would help this process and lead to greater levels of peace.

Though I believe that steps can be taken to mitigate discrimination and reduce racism, anti-Black racism will always exist in America. Since anti-Black racism will always exist, it requires that Black Americans take steps to protect themselves from that impending reality by finding a modicum of inner and/or personal peace. As previously mentioned, being Othered in America leads to a great deal of negative emotions like shame, anger, and fear. Speaking to a therapist who allows individuals to freely and openly discuss their emotions and experiences might be helpful. Involving oneself in large Black social networks might also provide spaces for affirmation (for example, attending a Black place of worship, attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or joining organizations devoted to the support and/or liberation of Black people, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the Urban League). Consuming literature, media, and art about Black history might also lead to peace. Reflecting on Black history and the sacrifices individuals made for current generations might also bring about peace because it reminds individuals of the sacrifices and resilience of our ancestors, progress that has been made, and provides hope for a better future.

Conclusion

I am deeply conflicted about the prospects of peace between Black and white Americans. Diane Nash’s statement—“There are no signs”—which she used to describe contemporary racism, provides me with a rather bleak outlook and leads me to believe that there will never be peace between these two racial groups. I am a thirty-four-year-old Black woman and have experienced numerous microaggressions and explicit racism in my lifetime growing up near an active Ku Klux Klan chapter in Georgia and working as a young adult in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When I was a child, a close friend asked me to stop scratching a mosquito bite because I was going to rub my black skin off on her. While growing up in the predominately white suburb of Alpharetta, Georgia, our neighbouring high school had nooses hung in the gym with racial slurs spray-painted in public areas. Several white students in my high school put a hit list together, containing the names of Black students they wanted to kill. After holding the door at the post office for an elderly white woman in the suburbs of Philadelphia, I was asked if I needed work. Upon declining the invitation, the woman stated, “I’m sure I can pay you more than the family you’re working for out here.” I said, “No ma’am. I’m fine. I’m a professor at Villanova,” to which she replied, “You’re a PROFESSOR?” I said, “Yes, ma’am.” Her gaping mouth led me to believe that she may have never interacted with a Black person that was not in a service position. These three examples are an incredibly small sample of my racial encounters in a post–Jim Crow America. Malcolm X once stated, “You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom,”57 Black people in America lack many freedoms. We are now legally allowed to occupy certain spaces (such as schools, neighbourhoods, and restaurants) but we are not free to simply exist and live our lives as individuals. We are constantly and chronically “Othered,” stereotyped, and rarely given the presumption of innocence. With that lack of freedom comes the seeming impossibility of living in and maintaining some semblance of peace with the group that has been and continues to oppress us.

I wrote the first draft of this essay in July 2020, at a time of civil unrest in the United States. Not only was the coronavirus having a disproportionate impact on Black communities, but the February killing of Ahmaud Arbery by white vigilantes, followed by the police murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Rayshard Brooks led to weeks of protests throughout the country, calls for adopting antiracist attitudes, and suggestions to reallocate police funds to other endeavours. I am deeply troubled that I continue to march for the same equal rights that my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents fought for during their lifetimes. It is because of my lived experiences that I fear the peace we strive for might never be realized. When racism has such deep roots in America, we do not need any signs to tell us where we, as Black people, can and cannot go, because we are constantly Othered and reminded every single day.

However, just like my ancestors, I remain hopeful that peace might happen someday. In Where Do We Go from Here? Martin Luther King Jr. states, “It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.”58 The multigenerational and multiethnic coalitions protesting in 2020 give me hope for a different future and, quite possibly, peace. Peace between Blacks and whites will require a great deal of individual, interpersonal, institutional, and structural change. Black people cannot dismantle a system steeped in white supremacy that they did not create. Peace in the United States will require a number of white people to make sacrifices for it; they will have to do the introspective work and give up their racist ideals and actions, they will have to confront the racist history of this country, and most importantly they will have to recognize their privilege and be willing to sacrifice it to live in a more equitable society.

Notes

1 In fact, the first mention of enslaved Africans in the United States Constitution comes in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3, which is also known as the Three-Fifths Clause. The clause, which concerns the allotment of seats in the House of Representatives allowed to each state, provides that, for the purpose of calculating a state’s population, “to the whole Number of free Persons” shall be added “three fifths of all other Persons,” namely, African slaves. In other words, a slave counted as three-fifths of a person.
2 On the history of the institutionalization of anti-Black racism in the United States, see especially Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor, 2012), which traces the complicity of legal and corporate institutions in fostering racism by tracing the history of Green Cottonham, who was convicted of “vagrancy” in 1908 and subsequently sold into leased labour. See also Andrea Flynn, Dorian T. Warren, Felicia J. Wong, and Susan R. Holmberg, The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), esp. chapters 1 and 3; Ibram Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016); and Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006, 3rd ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).
3 Regarding the GI Bill, see Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), esp. chap. 5, “White Veterans Only.”
4 On segregated housing, see Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017). With regard to home ownership and demographics, see Flynn et al., The Hidden Rules of Race, esp. chapters 1 and 2.
5 See Lindsey Cook, “U.S. Education: Still Separate and Unequal,” US News, January 28, 2015; https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal; Decoteau J. Irby, “Trouble at School: Understanding School Discipline Systems as Nets of Social Control,” Equity and Excellence in Education 47, no. 4 (2014): 513–30.
6 For discussions of the history and development of Black incarceration, see Michelle Alexander, The New James Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age ofColorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), 193; James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017); Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: One World, 2015); and Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen, Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. chapter 2, on the racial origins of felon disenfranchisement, and chapter 7, which deals with the impact of disenfranchisement on political participation.
7 Ryan Gabrielson, Eric Sagara, and Ryann Grochowski Jones, “Deadly Force, in Black and White,” ProPublica, October 10, 2014, https://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white.
8 Among the many books that discuss the treatment of Black people in America, see, in particular, James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (New York: Vintage International, 1953); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk, Dusk of Dawn, Essays, edited by Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986); Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2017); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952); Nikki Giovanni, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement (New York: Harper Perennial, 1968); Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion; Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994); and Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper Perennial, 1940).
9 Nash quoted in “What Does Peace Mean?” Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, George Washington University, December 9, 2015, https://columbian.gwu.edu/what-does-peace-mean.
10 Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam,” speech presented at The Nation Institute, Los Angeles, February 25, 1967, https://aavw.org/special_features/speeches_speech_king02.html.
11 Marcus Garvey, “Address to the Second UNIA Convention” (1921), Black Past, September 28, 2011, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1921-marcus-garvey-address-second-unia-convention/.
12 Claude M. Steele, “A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance,” American Psychologist 52 (1997): 613–29.
13 Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States” (1843), Black Past, January 24, 2007, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1843-henry-highland-garnet-address-slaves-united-states/; Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (1964), Black Past, July 10, 2010, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1964-malcolm-x-ballot-or-bullet/.
14 See, for instance, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967); Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Chris Lebron, The Color of Our Shame: Race and Justice in Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2005); Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age Print, 1892).
15 Richard L. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), 271. What is an ego identity? In deepening our understanding of the id, ego, and superego, psychoanalyst Erik Erikson formulated the concept of ego identity in connection with his work on childhood development. As Roger J. R. Levesque writes, Erikson argued that the ego identity is the “sense of identity that provides individuals with the ability to experience their sense of who they are, and also act on that sense in a way that has continuity and sameness. . . . Having a strong ego identity means having the ability to synthesize different ‘selves’ into one coherent identity throughout time, creating an inner coherence”: “Ego Identity,” in Encyclopedia of Adolescence, edited by Roger J. R. Levesque (New York: Springer, 2011), 813–14. As such, to enhance one’s ego identity, in layman’s terms, would mean that individuals are enhancing some aspect of their sense of self.
16 Alvin Zander, Richard Fuller, and Warwick Armstrong, “Attributed Pride or Shame in Group and Self,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 23 (1972): 346–52, at 346.
17 Michael F. Mascolo and Kurt W. Fischer, “Developmental Transformations in Appraisals for Pride, Shame, and Guilt,” in Self-Conscious Emotions: The Psychology of Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, and Pride, edited by June Price Tangney and Kurt W. Fischer (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 64–113, at 66.
18 Tamara J. Ferguson, Daniel Brugman, Jennifer White, and Heidi L. Eyre, “Shame and Guilt as Morally Warranted Experiences,” in The Self-Conscious Emotions: Theory and Research, edited by Jessica L. Tracy, Richard W. Robins, and June Price Tangney (New York: Guilford Press, 2007), 330–48, at 332.
19 June Price Tangney, Rowland S. Miller, Laura Flicker, and Deborah Hill Barlow, “Are Shame, Guilt, and Embarrassment Distinct Emotions?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70 (1996): 1256–69, at 1256.
20 Kenneth B. Clark, Prejudice and Your Child (Middleton, CN: Wesleyan University Press, 1955); Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African-Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5 (1995): 797–811.
21 Kenneth Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “Emotional Factors in Racial Identification and Preference in Negro Children,” The Journal of Negro Education 19, no. 3 (1950): 341–50.
22 Steele and Aronson, “Stereotype Threat”; Steele, “A Threat in the Air.”
23 Jennifer Crocker and Brenda Major, “Social Stigma and Self-Esteem: The Self-Protective Properties of Stigma,” Psychological Review 96 (1989): 608–30; Riia Luhtanen and Jennifer Crocker, “A Collective Self-Esteem Scale: Self-Evaluation of One’s Social Identity,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18 (1992): 302–18; Steele, “A Threat in the Air.”
24 W. E. B. Du Bois, “On Being Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay on Race Pride” (1933), in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, edited by Eric J. Sundquist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 72–76.
25 Brian Lickel, Toni Schmader, and Marija Spanovic, “Group-Conscious Emotions: The Implications of Others’ Wrongdoings for Identity and Relationships,” in The Self-Conscious Emotions, ed. Tracy, Robins, and Tangney, 351–70, at 355.
26 Lickel, Schmader, and Spanovic, “Group-Conscious Emotions,” 355–56.
27 Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, 217.
28 Cottam, Martha, Beth Dietz-Uhler, Elena M. Mastors, and Thomas Preston, Introduction to Political Psychology (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004), 52.
29 Antoine J. Banks, Anger and Racial Politics: The Emotional Foundation of Racial Attitudes in America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 20. See also Banks, “The ‘Public’ Anger: White Racial Attitudes and Opinions Toward Health Care Reform,” Political Behavior 36 (2014): 493–514.
30 Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, 218–23.
31 William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968), vii.
32 See “Crime, Class, and Clichés,” chap. 5 in Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class: Why Are Middle-Aged Blacks So Angry? Why Should America Care? (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993).
33 Grier and Cobbs, Black Rage, xv–xvi.
34 See “Ahmaud Arbery: What Do We Know about the Case?” BBC News, June 5, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52623151.
35 See German Lopez, “Cleveland Just Fired the Cop Who Shot and Killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice More than 2 years Ago,” Vox, May 30, 2017, https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/5/30/15713254/cleveland-police-tamir-rice-timothy-loehmann.
36 See Amir Vera and Laura Ly, “White Woman Who Called Police on Black Man Bird-Watching in Central Park Has Been Fired,” CNN, May 26, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-video-african-american-trnd/index.html.
37 Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, 235.
38 The survey respondent wrote their experience with fear in all caps. However, for ease of reading, I have chosen not to preserve the caps.
39 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1788), Documenting the American South, https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html, 153.
40 Tom Burrell, Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority (Carlsbad, CA: Smiley Books, 2010), xiii.
41 For examples of such depictions, and further discussion or these stereotypes, see Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power; Marion T. Riggs, Ethnic Notions (Berkeley: California Newsreel, 1987); Mellissa Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
42 For examples, see David F. Krugler, 1919, the Year of Racial Violence: How Americans Fought Back (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003).
43 See, for instance, Patrick Phillips, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017); or Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2011).
44 For examples of the utter disregard for due process, see Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017). For an in-depth study, see Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed. (Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2017).
45 Martin Luther King, Jr. “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious,” sermon delivered on March 18, 1956, at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, https://kinginstitute.sites.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/when-peace-becomes-obnoxious-sermon-delivered-18-march-1956-dexter-avenue.
46 Jennifer C. Nash, “What Does Peace Mean?” December 9, 2015, https://columbian.gwu.edu/what-does-peace-mean.
47 Nash, “What Does Peace Mean?”
48 King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 177.
49 More information about the goals of the Poor People’s Campaign is available on their website: https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/about/.
50 Ibram Kendi, How to be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 105.
51 For more information, see “Talking about Race—Being Antiracist,” National Museum of History and Culture, Smithsonian, https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/being-antiracist.
52 Nash, “What Does Peace Mean?”
53 Desmond Tutu, “Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Africa,” 2010, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Truth-and-Reconciliation-Commission-South-Africa.
54 Alan Khazei and Cornell William Brooks, “This Historic Moment Calls for a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission,” CNN, June 20, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Truth-and-Reconciliation-Commission-South-Africa.
55 Matthew O. Hunt, “African American, Hispanic, and White Beliefs about Black/White Inequality, 1977–2004,” American Sociological Review 73 (2007): 390–415; Shayla Nunnally and Niambi Carter, “Moving from Victims to Victors: African-American Attitudes on the ‘Culture of Poverty’ and Black Blame,” Journal of African-American Studies 16 (2012): 423–55.
56 Equal Justice Initiative, “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice,” https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial.
57 Malcolm X and George Breitman, Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Merit Publishers), 148.
58 King, Where Do We Go from Here? 196.

9. Building Bridges Between Queer and Normative Muslims