Living as Equals: How Three White Communities Struggled to Make Interracial Connections During the Civil Rights Era

Conclusion

237 Conclusion Democracy must be learned anew in each generation. —Gordon Allport on Kurt Lewin, 1948 Properly understood, democracy is a set of practices. It requires skills that enable people to engage one another about their experiences, their hopes, their dreams, and what they expect from their government. —Ernesto Cortes Jr., 2006 Inspiration During the civil rights movement African Americans, Mexican Americans , American Indians, various communities of Asian Americans, and other groups racialized as nonwhite held up an image of the United States at odds with the one most white Americans had of themselves and of their nation. These peoples of color used historic U.S. rhetoric to advocate that principles of liberty and equality extend to all citizens, not only to white ones. They elaborated these principles with values from their own minority communities and asserted that a genuinely democratic nation nurtured the well-being of all its citizens and enabled them to argue and make decisions fairly.1 White Americans, who held a near monopoly of the nation’s benefits and its governance, had to decide how to respond. Would they resist the diminution of their power and confidently hold onto their cultural, economic , residential, educational, and political advantage? Would they make a few palliative adjustments and minimize any loss of privilege? Would 238 Living as Equals they parcel out a few more resources, then walk away from any further discussion? Many, historians tell us, did react in only these limited ways. But some white Americans, as these interracial stories illustrate, felt inspired by the civil rights movement to risk living in new relationships that had few precedents. They put themselves into conversations, neighborhoods , and alliances that meant their lives would diverge from those they had expected. Taking these risks in turn added energy to the civil rights movement to confront the dominance and inequalities of gendered/ racialized difference. The white Americans I have followed in this book chose to associate with people who had been off-limits, to live in areas of cities that had been defamed, and to collaborate with fellow citizens who had been patronized and feared. The nonwhite participants were aware of the delusions of some white do-gooders who expected to overcome racism by, as some of the mid-1970s NCCJ campers put it, “being willing to be [the] friend” of a black person. But for the most part these white innovators, in tandem with equally hopeful and skilled African American, Mexican American, and Asian American allies, built new frameworks of camp, neighborhood, and political alliance that authorized and enabled African American and Mexican American, Chinese American and Filipino American to rebut white denials of privilege and to encourage genuine listening and affirmation . These white Americans had no assurance of the outcomes; they were simply unwilling to continue the unjust arrangements the civil rights movement had exposed. That they were able to act on their visions was possible only because they found associates in communities of color who were equally daring and committed to building new relationships. As historian and author, the hardest thing for me to overcome has been my fear that colleagues and critical readers will dismiss these ­ stories as feel-good and naive. “Relationship” is a suspect term that historians and social scientists have ridiculed as an example of the therapeutic turn in U.S. culture that, since the early twentieth century, has replaced social critique and self-examination with a rather painless, if highly emotional, readjustment of individual psyches. The therapeutic implies a self-delusory shift in feeling without any change in the social realities of privilege and disadvantage. The therapeutic “I” doesn’t have to take responsibility for much more than feelings—no need to understand history, politics, income distribution, or the quality of neighborhood schools. In this critique, feeling does not inspire reflection and thought. One purpose of this book has been to retrieve relationship building as Conclusion 239 essential to democratic life and to show that such a goal was not invariably escapist or easy. Making a genuinely new relationship required that people meet as equals and figure out together the terms of their playing, living, and working together. New relationships allowed for speaking and listening , sadness and guilt, anger and comfort, disagreement and questioning . But the test of a new relationship was whether it resulted in changed behavior—not white self-flagellation, but white determination to reduce dominance and convey respect. In building...