Roots of This Project

Roots of this Project: An Inaugural Blog

by Tara Brown

My Moment of Change

For most of my life, I cared about racial inequality, but I didn’t think there was much I could do about it, or that it was my issue to address. A few years ago, however, I began to understand how the advantages I’ve had in my life are deeply entwined with the advantage of being white. I had a call to consciousness after which I couldn’t sit comfortably as a white person without working to dismantle the system that lifted me up while pushing others down.

This personal and emotional shift began in the summer of 2016. At that time, violence against black people reached a fever pitch when video after video of brutal shootings had made their viral spread through screens across america. When Philando Castille was killed in his car, moments after being pulled over, with his girlfriend and her toddler daughter there to witness the crime, and a Facebook live video showed us the horror of it all, I sat with a sickening and restless heartache I couldn’t bear. While all the tragic deaths of innocent people of color had unnerved me, this loss had me particularly despondent.

At the same time, research into the racial wealth divide was having a resurgence and a few weeks after Mr. Castille was murdered, I attended Prosperity Now’s conference that focused on the issue of wealth inequality for three days. The racial wealth gap demonstrates how our nation’s assets and opportunities are not realized evenly across racial groups. Despite eight years of an Obama presidency and the supposed progress we’d made, the racial wealth divide continues to grow. At the conference, I learned that the average white household in the U.S. has a net worth of $116,000 while the average black household has $1,700. In other words, white people on average have nearly 70 times the wealth of black folks. This lack of assets has real implications for the daily lives of people of color. They are less likely to have savings for a downpayment to buy a home or invest in education. They are more likely to have very little leeway in their household budget to cover emergency expenses like medical bills and car repairs. Experts at the conference presented analysis of the roots of the divide and why it persists. Others revealed policy solutions that could help ameliorate the gap.

Though I’d been engaged in anti-racist work previously, the culmination of these events made me feel like the solution to the unrest I was feeling laid in working to fully understand my role in systemic white supremacy and how I can work to dismantle it.

Studying My Past

I began to study my own experience with racial privilege as a white woman. I started researching, analyzing, and documenting how my ancestors and I have benefited from structural racism across generations and obtained assets such as jobs, education, and land that people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds were less able to access.

Through my research so far, my own racial justice lens has deepened and I have gotten honest about the benefits of racial privilege for the first time.

Studying my ancestors in Ohio, I learned that my family obtained property through a land grant signed by President Monroe in 1817, just 5 years after Native Americans in that area were forcibly displaced. I knew that Ohio had a deep native history, but did not know how directly my family benefited from the displacement of native people.  Twelve years prior to my ancestors’ settlement, I also learned that the state of Ohio passed Black Codes to discourage freed slaves from settling there and reaping the same benefits as white settlers.

After conversations with my family in West Virginia, I learned that the rural, white county where my family lives was a “sundown town” in the Jim Crow era, meaning black people were threatened with violence for merely crossing the county line and remaining there after nightfall. While I’d thought that it was mere happenstance that black people do not live in that part of West Virginia, I learned that they had actually been kept out by force.

Most importantly, I admitted for the first time that my ancestors from Georgia were both slave owners and sharecrop operators, a fact that I had been willfully ignorant of.

Launching this Project

Reckoning with Whiteness is a place for me to present my personal research, while also helping others through their own process of understanding the benefits of whiteness in their own lives and through generations past. Many activists call on institutions, governments, and corporations to acknowledge and make reparations for harms done. Yet, individuals have also benefited from structural inequality. I believe if we take initiative to explore and acknowledge this as people with social privilege, we can make great strides in structural changes. In studying the ways in which the social and political history surrounding my family helped them survive and thrive in the United States, I am deepening my understanding of who was provided opportunities, who was left out, and why. As I do this work, it motivates and informs my ongoing commitment to racial equity. I hope that others will share a similar experience if they humbly look at their own families’ histories and that the sentiment in favor of policies, as well as effective action to increase wealth and opportunity in communities of color, will grow. I will also use this space to share examples of what others are doing to make amends for these harms as inspiration to others.