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Following is the text of the speech, “A Journey Toward Unlearning Racism” delivered by Susan Ladd at the recent Diversity Forum Breakfast sponsored by The HR Group Inc. and the News & Record. It is based on her master’s thesis, Unlearning Racism. It may not be reprinted without her written permission.

We are driving down a country road, and I see one of the black lawn jockeys in front of a modest brick ranch house. I glance in the rear view mirror to see if the kids notice, and think about how I’ll explain it if they ask. Heads together, braids touching, they are laughing conspiratorially about some shared secret. They aren’t even looking out the windows, but as I flash by the grinning clown face, my heart seizes up with anger. I want to smash them all, tear down the flagpoles that still fly the Confederate flag, and set fire to anything that looks like Tara. Erase it from my homeland, my past, my heart. I take a deep breath and remember: it was not force or violence that woke me from my own Southern slumber. It was love.

There was a time when I was in love with all things Southern. When I really believed that “Gone With the Wind” was a wistful epic of a more fine and genteel era swept away by the dirty Yankees. I think I may actually have believed the unstated premise of “Gone With Wind” — that the end of slavery actually made things worse for black people, severing them from what had been a benevolent patriarchy.

There was nothing romantic or genteel about the racial landscape of my childhood. Blacks and whites lived in two separate worlds, and the worst thing you could call somebody was a nigger-lover.

These were fighting words, an insult of character that surpassed all other character flaws. It was often spat in anger, like a hard slap. Or it was said in a sneer of loathing by people who considered themselves self-respecting Southerners. Of course, it wasn’t really about love. Just showing kindness to a black person was enough to earn that designation in those days. Actually loving one was unthinkable.

Nobody ever sat me down in a chair and instructed me on the inherent superiority of white people. My instruction in racism was all the more powerful and insidious because every facet of life was shot through with it.

How I came to be married to a black man, with two biracial children, is my personal story, but it is also the story of a generation.

It is the story of unlearning racism.

I spent the first 10 years of my life learning racism. And like many things ingrained in those early years, you can spend the rest of your life unlearning it. I believe what stops us from trying harder is the deep canal that was historically carved between the races, and the fact that both blacks and whites spend more time keeping it open, albeit sometimes unwittingly, than trying to fill it in.

We don’t cross because we don’t have a good enough reason and we don’t have the will to try. I had a good reason. It turned out the man I’d been looking for all my life was black. The power of that love gave me the will to try.

I’ve spent the last year exploring my life experiences to examine how racism is ingrained in people through verbal and nonverbal communication, a learned phenomenon that must be unlearned; to examine what keeps black people and white people apart and what can bring them together; and to reflect on the special challenges facing biracial people, who embody both the struggle and the promise of racial reconciliation.

My husband and I are a part of the first generation of interracial couples able to marry legally in the United States. In my lifetime, I have seen the end of Jim Crow, the culmination of the Civil Rights movement, forced busing, integration, and the election of the first African-American president. My story is rooted in the story of a generation that has seen the most radical change in race relations in American history. What I have tried to do is reflect on these experiences to see what we can learn from them, about society about ourselves; what we can learn about how racism can be undone.

I’m sharing personal experiences because you’ve heard enough lectures. Lectures may connect with people on an intellectual level, but racism is embedded on a deeply emotional level. It is my belief that racism endures, in part, because people view it from a distance, where they can remain safely and impersonally removed. So let’s get up close and personal.

 The unlearning begins

School desegregation was the turning point in my understanding of race relations, though not in the way that anyone — particularly my father — intended.

When integration finally came to Durham County in 1970, my parents sent me to a white flight private school constructed, it seemed, overnight. Recess at Council Christian Academy was a sad affair. There was no gym and no equipment, so we mostly walked around on the red clay grounds and gravel paths in small groups and talked. I was talking to my friend Ann when I saw them coming. The bully, who often bragged about how his father was a Grand Dragon in the Klan, was leading a group, and it inexplicably grew as he marched toward us, like some strange magnet was pulling people into the pack.

“Ann Yates cheats!” he chanted. “Ann Yates cheats!” the crowd joined in.

I watched, stunned and amazed, as they drew closer. Klan boy was clearly enjoying himself. Some of the faces in the crowd looked angry. Some looked excited. Some just looked blank. It was the scariest thing I’d ever seen.

My classmates had been transformed into a mob.

“Ann Yates cheats! Ann Yates cheats!”

Tears were streaking Ann’s face, and her eyes were glazed with fear and shock. When we tried to walk away, they followed.

“Ann Yates cheats! Ann Yates cheats!”

I looked around for a teacher. I looked around for someone who would stop this. Shock gave way to anger, flaring in my chest and making it hard to breathe. I would not let this happen. I took Ann by the hand and made her look in my eyes.

“Come on,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

I remember seeing the red dust on the ground, and the silver gray gravel my father had delivered from his trucking company. But I looked up and fixed my eyes on the building where adults presumably held sway. The group followed us, chanting, until we got there.

That was the day that the world changed for me. I am not one of these people. For me, the connection was clear. It was all the same, what the Nazis did to the Jews, what the white people were doing to black people, what Klan boy had done to Ann. Some people just needed to find a victim. I am not going to be one of these people.

That was the beginning of my rejection of racism. But there was still so much I didn’t understand. I did not see that though I believed in an abstract way that black people should have equal rights and opportunities, I still held myself apart from them. I could not see that though I had been poor for most of my life, and struggled against abuse, I was still more privileged in almost every way than any black person. I believed in racial equality, but primarily in a philosophical way. Black people were as different to me then as aliens.

Crossing the border

The envelope has my uncle’s return address. Inside is the invitation to our wedding reception. On the front is a photo of Herb’s hand holding mine, with the engagement ring displayed. It was our way of letting people know that ours was an interracial union. It only seemed fair. Like a true Southerner, I wanted to save them the shock of walking in and finding out only then that my husband was black. And I wanted to save everyone else — myself included — from the kind of embarrassing reaction that might result. It looks as if the invitation might have been crumpled. Written on the back in an angry scrawl, it says:

“This is the ugliest picture I have ever seen!!! You must be crazy. How could you do this to your mother?”

For a second, I can’t breathe. My lungs are stuffed with cotton. I take a deep, jagged breath, and tears of hurt and fury spring into my eyes. So all the times he told me he loved me were a lie, always contingent on my keeping to the customs he believed in. This isn’t about me, and my happiness. It’s about what I’m doing to other people.

It cuts me to the core, this poison RSVP, and beyond the hurt is the sting of guilt. It holds at least a partial truth. This will have an impact on my mother. If her own brother reacts this way, what kind of disapproval and rejection will she have to endure from friends, associates? My sisters, too, will have to decide who to tell and not to tell. Whether to put our picture on the mantel with all the others. For some of my relatives now, I am a source of shame.

Sociologist Erica Chito Childs says interracial couples are the canary in the coal mine of racism. The reactions we get reveal the true level of toxicity that remains in society around issues of race. We are the living litmus test of racial tolerance.

I feared hostility from strangers, but the people who would hurt me most were members of my own family. I have not seen my father in 15 years, since the day I told him I was marrying a black man. He has never met my husband, or seen my children. It is one of the great tragedies of my life.

But for every instance of racism I experienced outwardly, I uncovered another layer of racism inside myself. One of the most humbling moments in my journey of unlearning racism came a few months after Herb moved in with me. He had been living for nearly a year in Florida, and we were so happy to be together again. And I began to notice something. Black people everywhere were smiling at me, even when I was alone. Little kids, adults, old people. They were giving me these warm, open smiles. How could they know? And yet, there it was — a connection that had never been there before.

And then it hit me. They hadn’t changed. I had. For the first time in my life, I was really looking at black people, instead of through them or past them. I was looking for the face of someone I loved. Like many white people, I had been ignoring black people my whole life without really being aware of it. And it filled me with shame.

Life in the middle

Abby has grown quiet and sad as she gets ready for bed. When she finishes brushing her teeth, she begins to cry hard, in great braying sobs.

“Honey, what’s wrong?” I ask, drawing her close.

“I never want to be taken away from you and Daddy,” she says. I’m alarmed and confused. Where is this coming from? I hug her tight.
“Well, of course not, honey,” I say. “Why would anybody take you away?”

“They did that in the book,” she says, her words hardly distinguishable because she’s crying so hard. “They took the children away.”

The book is “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” a story about life under slavery and escape on the Underground Railroad. The part that so disturbed her was the practice of children being sold away from their parents.

“They took them away!” she wails again, choking with fear and horror.

“I know, baby,” I say, holding her close. “It was awful. But they can’t do that anymore.”

My heart contracts painfully as I comfort her, because she identifies with the story in a way that I can never really appreciate. She shares a heritage with people who were systematically robbed of their humanity, by people who looked like me. It will always be there, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. All I can do is try to help her understand it.

What about the children? It’s the most common and most powerful argument against interracial marriage. Much of the question is rooted in the belief that since interracial relationships are somehow deviant, the offspring of those relationships will be troubled, damaged, doomed to a life of confusion.

My children are smart, happy, beautiful kids, and they’ve taught me more about racism and whiteness than I could have ever learned on my own. Though my husband and I still use them, our children steadfastly resist the terms “black” and “white.” You may find those colors in a box of crayons, but for my daughters, they do not describe human beings.

Abby describes herself first by qualities. If asked about color, she says she’s cinnamon. Camille describes herself as cookie-dough brown, her father as “dark chocolate” and me as “peach.” They know that race is about more than color, and the value-laden distinctions embedded in those words may be why they resist them so much.

But asked if they ever wish both parents were the same race, they respond with an adamant “no.” When I asked Camille why, she said it made her special, unique. Abby saw it as an advantage: “I’m really happy to be two different things. Because then I can learn about the two different races and see what they think and do about things.”

Asian-American communication scholar Kent Ono says that mixed people often find themselves as the mediators and translators between racial groups. Consider the impact of Barack Obama, who has fulfilled this role on a national scale. It is my hope that children like mine, who will be the first generation of biracial kids to grow up with a visible cohort, can finally be the bridge across the racial divide.

And I find in my own life story reason to hope. If I can make the journey from a profoundly racist background to a member of a racially blended family, there is reason to believe that others can break the cycle of generationally transmitted racism.

How did I get there?

I had to see black people as people. To really see them as individuals with hopes, dreams, problems, ambitions just like me. The kind of seeing that theologian Martin Buber called I-Thou relating. To acknowledge the other’s humanity as equal to your own.

I had to recognize my own complicity in the system of white privilege. Whether or not I take advantage of it, whether or not I agree with it, I realize the benefits of my skin color every day of my life — when I apply for a job, walk into a jewelry store or even buy a “flesh-colored” Band-Aid.

I had to acknowledge, to myself and to my husband, my own failings in regard to racism. When you bring these things into the light, they lose their power over you. It is when we harbor them and deny them that they maintain their hold on us.

I had to realize that it is a journey. There is no single moment when the scales fall from our eyes and all is revealed. Those moments do occur, but it takes many such revelations, such moments of knowing, to effect more than momentary change. Something as pervasive as racism can’t be totally revealed in one incident, or two. It has taken me most of my life to appreciate the complexity of racism, and the ways in which it is woven into the fabric of American life.

I had to atone. And that means relinquishing white privilege on a daily basis, in the ways that I can. By making sure clerks don’t take me in front of a black person who was there first. By becoming aware of situations that subtly exclude others, and taking steps to make sure others are not only invited, but made to feel comfortable. By calling other white people on words and actions that offend, disempower or disenfranchise others, but doing it in way that promotes understanding, not argumentation.

It is hard to face our uncomfortable truths, and harder still to voice them. I was only able to do this because Herb is able to listen without judgment. The ways in which we talk about race often doom the discussion before it begins. Mark Lawrence McPhail’s excellent books on the rhetoric of racism examine the decline of racial discourse in America to what has largely become a cycle of black guilt provocation and white denial.

Overt racism has been replaced with colorblind racism — the idea that if we say everyone’s equal, that makes it so, and we can ignore the 200 years of oppression and discrimination that deny black people a level playing field even today.

My hope is that sharing my own painful journey unlearning racism will help white people recognize and acknowledge their own struggles with racism. My hope is that black people will see in my journey that some white people are really trying, and help them progress by reacting with more understanding and less condemnation. On both sides, there is a great need to talk and a great need to listen, and in different ways than we’ve talked and listened in the past.

When I think of the times when I have been most effective in helping people see and understand the destructive power of racism, it has been through sharing personal stories. Sharing more personal accounts — from all sides of the racial spectrum — can provide deeper insights into the lived experience of racism, and provide entry points for discussion and engagement.

Of particular interest would be more accounts of interracial families, who have found common ground, and of the upcoming generation of biracial Americans, who are finding ways to break free from the stratified concepts of racial identity that have defined our past.