Witnessing

The lunch room of the old Lincoln had a crowd of over a hundred people when I arrived late because I thought the meeting was being held at the new Lincoln Middle School. I’d judge that at least a quarter of the folks in attendance were from the minority community. We were exhorted to behave in a civil way with a list of dos and don’ts that emphasized sympathetic listening rather than the Civility Project’s Minnesota Nice approach to discussions. Then the one hundred were broken up into quartiles and my group headed to a noisy corner of the cafe.

We introduced ourselves first and I kept notes trying to remember names. One of the ground rules that I winced at was an insistence that we could only make public comments we heard with the permission of the speaker at least concerning their own personal stories. I’ll try to honor that here now although my readers would benefit from the telling of what I heard.

After that we were directed to speak to someone new to us and answer for the other several questions the first of which was: “What has been your experience with the education system in Duluth?” They next asked if there was anything that advanced racism in our schools. The third and fourth questions asked if there was support in the schools to address raced based bullying. A final series of questions began with one asking if in our own lives we had witnessed anything that demonstrated the value of standing up to racism.

I came to the meeting prepared to listen. I do my own talking about these issues here in the blog and in emails with my buddy who reads my civil rights stuff as though I were a race hustler. I’ve kept a lot of those email conversations and they are a big reason why my email system which only grants be a gig of material has been half frozen.

Without telling the stories of others I put my listening to use to think about how something could follow this incident that would lead to ongoing permanent improvement. That was a serious issue with me because I’m used to seeing big meetings with lots of angst resulting in returning home from the angst with nothing to show for it. One of my first thoughts along these lines involved a regular complaint of African Americans that we only teach issues of race on MLK’s birthday. That’s the kind of education that leads some folks to think that Obama’s presidency is the end of the Civil Rights Era.

During the wrap-up I spoke up and offered in my allotted two minutes some thoughts about how we could change this. BTW – Art Johnston was there. He’d called to encourage me to come a few days beforehand. Not surprising since he’s the only School Board member on the local NAACP. At the end of the meeting he described how two of our fellow board members took my brief discourse. Mike Miernicki stuck his nose up in the air while I spoke. I choose to thing that this reflected his giving my thoughts deep attention. Rosie Loeffler-Kemp who had leaned in to listen intently to every other speaker pointedly turned her face in the opposite direction when I spoke. Not a good sign that any rapprochement is possible on our school board.
I wonder if the paid close attention to the speaker who drew the only round of applause I recall at the meeting. This speaker said they were disgusted with the School Board fighting that set such a bad example for people trying to get our city in a better state. Being one of the asses on the Board I couldn’t agree more and to my great discredit hearing this truth just fills me up with more piss and vinegar.
Although my two minutes was not enough to express my full thinking I have the luxury here of outlining my thoughts.

Witnessing:

The specter of a one night stand or MLK extravaganza followed by silence haunts me as much as the possibility of our being the next Fergusson, Missouri. What I thought as I listened to the folks in my quartile was that we needed witnesses to be available to speak at our schools. I figured that the one hundred at this meeting were all ripe for witnessing having taken the time to show up. I thought about the email addresses that had been collected and thought how nice it would be to start collecting stories to put together (both written and oral) to share with our kids in every classroom several times a year. Duluth’s sordid lynching history almost demands something like this.

Supporting Parents:

Two fathers’ stories of what they did to keep their minority children on track by dogging their every move in school prompted my next thought: We should help build an organizational scaffolding whereby minority parents and other parents with heavy burdens can find it easy to monitor their children week by week if not daily. For the well to do there is now computer record keeping but for parents too busy to come to school and without the Internet at home this won’t do. I even imagined training classes for needy parents held during our Community Education classes at night at our schools that would give them step by step advice on how to make sure their kids did not fall behind.

Welcoming and integrating new students:

Finally, another father’s story of moving his black family to an all-white community gave me another idea. His child had been an avid basketball player and his twelve white teammates became his immediate friends. We should encourage a system to let new kids get surrounded quickly by other students and begin building relationships and friendships with them. A lot of folks of all colors have been the new kid in a school and know how hard it is to make friends. I was white when I moved from Kansas with my accent to and all white Minnesota school in seventh grade. I had one close friend for the next three years……another newcomer. What I’m suggesting is already done in most schools at the beginning of the year to help sixth graders moving up to middle school and ninth graders moving up to senior high. It should be a year-round thing considering how transient so many families are now.

These are not expensive fixes. They won’t prevent a kid from getting shot but they might well help a community respond with humanity in such a circumstance. They would go a long way to end racial tensions that are building as our school minority population finally begins to soar in Duluth decades after the infamous lynching drove most black Duluthians out of town.

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