Story by Matthew Giffin / Contributing Writer
The last couple of years has not been a special time of heightened racial division, contrary to what most media outlets will say.
Men and women are killed in the streets. American citizens, divided only by the color of their skin, demonize one another. Authorities rewrite history for their own convenience, and the ideals of our nation are forgotten. Then a movement arises that aims at reformation and the struggle comes to a climax. This all sounds dramatic, but if anyone has been paying attention, they’ll know these kinds of things have been happening in the United States for a long time, especially between different ethnic groups.
However, the slander and vitriol spewed by both sides of the ideological aisle have intensified in recent years. In a world where evolving media has made political unity more possible than ever, Americans have, instead, used these advancements to isolate themselves from each other in unprecedented ways.
Emotionalism and censorship replace discussion and debate. Legislative chambers and newsrooms alike stink with corruption. Furthermore, comment sections stand in the place of conversations.
Last Friday, four students at Middle Tennessee State University sat down together for lunch in the John Bragg Media and Entertainment Building to tell their stories about living with racism in the United States.
Their conversation did not immediately solve our nation’s problems. However, it was a start. Many in America could benefit by turning off the talking heads and engaging in the honest, face-to-face style of discussion that these students did.
One of those students was Dominque Smith, 21, a young Black woman studying public relations at MTSU in her junior year. Burned in her memory is bystander footage of police officers kicking and beating with batons a defenseless Rodney King for several minutes. Smith said she saw the footage on television as a young girl. “Unfortunately for them, they have instilled a fear in me,” she said. “It’s not, ‘Oh, you’re here to protect me.’ It’s, ‘Me and you are enemies now.’ Not because I want you to be, but because I see what you do to people that look like me.”
Dominque Smith, 21, junior public relations student.
As a high schooler, she attended Young Americans Christian School, where she was one of only two Black girls in her class. Her classmates in the predominantly white institution were taught that certain passages in the Bible forbid interracial marriage, Smith said. The Bible doesn’t teach that interracial marriage is sinful, she said, and her teachers and peers would “defend their ignorance” by retreating to the authority of their holy book.
Also, most of Smith’s peers and teachers were unaware of the existence of Black History Month and even vital periods of history for African American culture like the Harlem Renaissance. “February came around, and we didn’t celebrate Black History Month,” she said. “Students around me didn’t know what Black History Month meant…It’s really another form of trying to erase history, I feel like.”
Another student at that table was Alyssa Williams, a Murfreesboro native and a first-year journalism student straight out of Central Magnet School. Growing up in a white, conservative Christian household, she wasn’t exposed to the LGBTQ community until she was a teenager. Not only that, but her household didn’t have internet access until 2020 when pandemic restrictions were in full swing. She wasn’t aware of the racial tension in the United States until then, either.
“In the Bible, one of the greatest commandments is ‘love thy neighbor,'” Williams said. “But a lot of Christians really take it as ‘love thy neighbor unless they’re different than me.'” She says her family raised her in a racist environment. She has a baby cousin who was named after the infamous Confederate generals Nathan Bedford Forest and Robert E. Lee. Not only that, but her mother once called her the N-word, Williams said. She also detailed how her uncle once bragged at a kid’s birthday party about owning a police baton that was used to beat protesters during the Civil Rights Movement. “I did get kicked out of that party; I started a scene,” Williams said.
“I’ve become a bit embarrassed of the Christian label,” she said. “I’m ashamed of being associated with those people now.”
Alexander Laudeman, another journalism student and a sophomore out of Chattanooga was the odd one out. He grew up in a white family that skewed more liberal and more secular. “I would not describe my parents as racists,” he said. “But I think that it’s impossible to be a member of…any society without having some grain of racism in you, no matter who you are.” Laudeman recognized that he and his family would never be able to relate to the struggles of Black people, but he knew he could stand with them and try to understand.
“I went to a majority-white school,” he said, “and we did learn about racism. But we were taught about it definitely as a thing of the past.” When he was a young boy, Laudeman said that he would watch “white-washed” cartoons in school about Martin Luther King Jr. The way the events were framed made it seem like racism ceased to exist once America was desegregated, he said.
However, exposure to different perspectives through the internet changed him, Laudeman said. “I was on the internet from an extremely, extremely young age,” he said. “Probably younger than, frankly, I should’ve been. It had its pros and its cons, but I got a pretty broadened perspective.”
The final member of the roundtable was Johari Hamilton, 49. Hamilton is a Black woman from Memphis studying public relations in her junior year of undergraduate coursework.
She opened the discussion by saying she liked thinking about things in terms of words, like “emancipation,” “desegregation,” and “integration.” Nevertheless, the word she wants to see, both from ordinary citizens and from lawmakers, is “collaboration.”
She spoke about living as a young Black girl in the 70s and 80s, transitioning from living in the Chicago area to Memphis, Tennessee, and the culture shock she experienced. At one time in her life, when she lived in Madison, Wisconsin, she would have sleepovers with young Asian and white girls. Yet, at another time, she had to be bussed in and out of her all-Black neighborhood to go to and from school.
She recounted living as a mother to two Black boys, one of them named Traevon, back in 2012 when Trayvon Martin was shot and killed while wearing a hoodie. She remembers making sure her sons weren’t wearing their own hoodies in public, fearing that they could suffer the same fate.
“I just need you to understand,” Smith said. “I’m not saying relate, but understand what I go through, and how it’s literally just me wanting to be accepted.”
Hamilton said, “It’s at this level, people interacting every day, that make the difference.”
Photos by Matthew Giffin / Contributing Writer
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