|
Toledo Truth Telling (TTT)
is one of those grassroots, community-centered efforts. TTT
is a project of the Padua Alliance for Education and
Empowerment, which since 2007 has brought graduate students
in the fields of education, counseling, and public health
into conversation with community members. The goal is to
learn the basic research methods required for their jobs
while also learning truths about Central City neighborhoods,
particularly Kwanzaa Park, where the Padua Center is
located.
As reported in The
Sojourner’s Truth earlier this year (vol. 32, no. 4,
March 4, 2015), David Ragland, Ph.D, a graduate of the
University of Toledo and founding participant in the Padua
Alliance, helped to establish the Ferguson project and
remains active as one of its directors.
It was at Ragland’s
invitation that members of the Padua Alliance, including
both UT graduate students and community members, traveled to
Ferguson last March to participate in the first Truth
Telling Weekend.
The Padua Alliance’s main
work is in “participatory action research,” a process that
puts student researchers in the service of research needed
by the community. The Alliance relies on community elders to
engage with the students, helping them to define the right
questions researchers should ask about Central City
communities, and serving as “gatekeepers,” to open the way
for students to observe key events and talk to knowledgeable
individuals.
This year’s project is led
by Rahwae Shuman, Twila Page and Oscar Shaheer, in
collaboration with Mary Ellen Edwards, Ph.D, and Lynne Hamer,
Ph.D, both of the University of Toledo. All five traveled to
Ferguson last March to learn about truth telling. After the
Ferguson trip, Shuman, Page and Shaheer led the decision to
focus the Alliance’s work this year on truth telling.
TTT is looking at how
structural, institutionalized racism in all types of
institutions—including health and educational in addition to
law enforcement and judicial systems—is experienced. TTT
includes all persons’ experiences with institutionalized
racism as relevant, and is not limited to a particular
ethnic or “racial” group.
Structural racism, or
systemic racism, is a sociological theory that focuses
attention on how racism is systematized throughout all
institutions in U.S. society. Though individuals’ beliefs
and actions are important, far more important are the ways
in which racism is perpetuated despite individuals’ claims
not to be racist. As Smedley (1993) explained, to understand
racism the focus must be on “racist systems,” i.e.,
institutions that regularly privilege one group over
another, with groups identifiable by the social construct of
race.
Feagin (2010) has
explained this concept further: “Systemic racism includes
the complex array of antiblack practices, the unjustly
gained political-economic power of whites, the continuing
economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines,
and the white racist ideologies and attitudes created to
maintain and rationalize white privilege and power” (p. 6).
Research on systemic or
structural racism (the terms are used synonymously) helps
the researcher focus on and reveal relationships and
privileges that have been normalized to the point of being
otherwise invisible. That is the project of truth telling:
to reveal and work toward understanding truths that have
been excluded from discussion.
But understanding the
effects of systems must be gained by understanding the
truths of individuals subject to those systems. In an
interview, Rahwae Shuman explained what constitutes
“truth.”
One’s truth is learned
from one’s own experience, he explained, but at the same
time, “I know my experience and my sensibilities are
limited. What I see may not be the truth. My truth is
determined by my experience and also, if the experience
cannot be proved as false then I accept it as true.”
Shuman sees TTT as an
important way for people to hear others’ experiences and use
those experiences to consider for themselves the limits of
their own truths, based on their own experience.
He explained, “If a person
doesn’t have the same experience, then I can't convince
them. For instance, I cannot convince a middle-class, white
woman from Sylvania that I suffer every day. They don't see
racism, they don’t see it. So how can they accept my truth
if their experience is different than mine?”
TTT is based on the belief
that listening to others’ truths is a necessary first step
toward accepting others’ truths. Shuman explained, “There's
an old saying that ‘the truth will set you free.’ I believe
it's in all of our interests to tell the truth, black people
and white people. Because I think if we all are truthful
with each other, I think it will be a stronger country.”
Truths can be in the
distant past. In an interview, Oscar Shaheer focused on the
need to tell the truth about black history in the U.S. He
noted: “We think the truth is, when you do damage to a
people, sometimes you leave scars. It can be mental scars or
whatever scars that you may leave, but it would affect the
people.”
Shaheer recalled, “Growing
up as a young boy, I saw terrorism. I call it terrorism,
open terrorism. As a young boy, it affected me, and it
affected me mentally, it affected me to the point that when
if I saw any kind of an attack, either it be a policeman in
Toledo, or a policeman in the South now, when they take a
black life, it affects me mentally. And my question is why
do you have to kill them? Why do you have to hurt that
particular person?”
Shaheer summarized, “The
truth I’d like to tell today is the fact that racism still
exists. Maybe not lot of occasions, maybe not as openly as
it was when I was born, but it still exists.”
Truths can also be in the
recent past. Twila Page discussed the need for a Truth
Telling Project in Toledo. She noted, “Toledo to me is very
… unaccepting of black people—people of color, Hispanics,
gay people, any ‘other,’ other than the white majority.”
Page noted that different
groups “never come together, unless it’s in a clashing
manner.” Page recalled the event in 2006 when a Nazi rally
was allowed in the diverse neighborhood surrounding Woodward
High School.
“It shouldn’t have
happened, because these were black people living in their
neighborhoods,” she said. During the demonstrations, “The
police came in and told them they [black residents] had to
leave, and they were at home--- so, they brought in these
white Nazis into a black neighborhood and said, ‘You all go
home.’ ‘Well, we’re already home so… where do we go?’”
Whether about the distant
past of childhood, or the recent past in Toledo, Shaheer’s
and Page’s accounts focus our attention on the individual’s
view, the individual’s pain and fear when surrounded by
racism. The need to bring people together to hear each
other’s truths in a cooperative way motivates Page’s
leadership in the project. She noted that although we “don’t
know if it was designed to be like that,” we need to listen
to each other because “it kind of feels like it.”
Thus far the TTT has
collected truths from a dozen individuals of various
ethnicities. Students on the research team have begun to
analyze the accounts for what we can learn about structural
racism and how we, as individuals, can challenge and change
it. As students and community participants begin to share
understandings of truth, they will also be considering what
next steps to take, hopefully together.
References
Feagin, J. (2010).
Racist America: Roots, current realities, and future
reparations. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Smedley, Audrey.
(1993). Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a
Worldview. San Francisco: Westview Press.
Lynne Hamer, Ph.D,is co-director of the Padua Alliance for
Education and Empowerment and instructor for the graduate
research course in which the participatory action research
takes place.
The Toledo Truth Telling Project makes its first
presentation next Thursday, December 17, at the Padua
Center, 1416 Nebraska Avenue, Toledo. A community dinner at
5:00 pm precedes the presentation, which will begin at
5:45. All are invited. Questions, call or text
419-283-8288.
.
|
