What the History of White People Can Teach Us About Race in America Today

Date: May 9, 2012
Where: Newark Public Library
Speaker: Nell Irvin Painter

This was an event hosted by the group, Friends of the Newark Public Library. I decided to attend this event this week over others because of the title of the lecture. Because of the title, I thought that I was be hearing a Zinn-like, truly enlightening lecture. While the lecture did have great points, it struggled to bring any deep insight from my point of view. The lecture was more about awareness than it was about action. With the title that powerful, maybe I expected too much. But as I learned, this was the topic and title of her book. I am sure she left a lot out from her book, but still felt like more could have been said in the lecture.

The speaker was a historian who spoke mostly about the concept of race and its emergence. She made it very clear that race and racism are relatively new concept and ideas put into popularity in the very early days of America. But racism did not begin with the black people. Racism is the product of the strive for political and economical power. Racism first began actually with the poor English and Irish immigrants who came over to America as indentured servants. Eventually, people found it much cheaper to send Africans instead of Europeans. But still at this point racism was not as know it of white vs. black. Because they were still many white people, specifically Irish and other poor individuals, still being massively oppressed.

A big shift in racism started during FDR's New Deal. As a way for Democrats to get a new pool of voters, all white people were being address particularly as "Americans". During the 1950's, racism as we know it began to further expand as white people shifted away from the cities and towards the suburbs. Furthermore, many laws were put into place for white people to receive loans with good interested rates necessary to purchase a suburban house. Like today, home ownership is a major sign of wealth. This shift was mainly due to Southern Democrats desiring to keep the dichotomy between white people and black people.

The lecture ended with a lot of numbers comparing wealth, poverty, income, and home ownership.
While I felt that the lecture was informative in many ways, especially how she brought to light the effects of decisions by the Democratic party. Because this event was seemed to be mainly attended by bourgeois-esque people, I question whether the speaker was Republic trying to excite the crowd against Democratic actions or was she truly unbiased.

More importantly, I wondered, especially after she gave all those numbers, what now? Another person from the audience asked, in more word or less, "So what can we do to stop inequality?" She replied with the generic response of "take it to the streets". She repeated that statement a few times, but she never expanded on "how" to take it to the streets. Because she had such excellent points, I was hoping that there was more that can be said about how to change it.