President's Blog: From the Heart

By Eric F. Spina

If we don’t want to live in chaos, we must choose community and build a bigger tent — a larger circle of care and a place for all to thrive. That’s the challenge Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, one of the country’s premier scholars on race relations and former president of Spelman College, delivered at UD’s annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prayer breakfast. Here's the full text of her inspiring, thoughtful speech.

Creating Community: Listening to the Stories that are Hard to Hear
Delivered by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D.
Jan. 22, 2019

Good morning! It is my honor to be with you in celebration of the life and leadership legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If Dr. King were alive today, he would be 90 years old, an elder in our community. If we were to ask him his view of what is happening in our society right now, it’s not hard to guess what he might say. It’s not hard to guess because in his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, published in 1968, Dr. King offered commentary which seems quite relevant to our current context, even though it is 50 years later. Our society has changed in some ways over the 50 years since Dr. King’s assassination — the U.S. population is a lot more diverse, Latinxs are the largest population of color, approximately 18 percent of the population, African Americans are 13 percent, Asian Americans are 6 percent, and the fastest growing part of our population, only 1percent of babies in 1967 were multiracial, today 10 percent of U.S. babies are multiracial. But many of our schools across America are still segregated, and many of our neighborhoods are segregated. Young people growing up in racially divided communities are almost as separated from each other’s daily lives as they were 50 years ago.

In his book, Where Do We Go From Here? Dr. King wrote, “Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. What we find when we enter these mortal plains is existence; but existence is the raw material out of which all life must be created. A productive and happy life is not something that you find; it is something that you make. And so the ability of [racial groups] to work together, to understand each other will not be found ready-made; it must be created by the fact of contact."

But it’s not just enough to be in the same neighborhood, or even in the same room. We have to create contact that allows for genuine empathy across lines of difference. The development of empathy requires listening to each other’s life stories. But some stories are hard to hear.

Today, I’m going to tell you a hard-to-hear story. This particular story had a powerful effect on me the first time I heard it. It is a modified version of a Chinese folktale about a king who wanted to create a large bell that could be heard across the countryside, one that would be astonishingly beautiful in tone. He commissioned the most highly skilled bell maker he could find, and the bell maker worked diligently to produce a wonderful bell. The first bell he made was good, but not great. The sound quality just wasn’t what the king was looking for. A second bell was cast, and still despite the bell maker’s best efforts, it wasn’t good enough for the king. Finally, in frustration, the bell maker told the king that the only way to get the beautiful tone he was looking for would be to sacrifice a young maiden in the casting of the bell. And so the king ordered his soldiers to find a suitable candidate. In a nearby village they found a poor woman with a young daughter, and snatched her away from her pleading mother. She was sacrificed for the bell, and indeed the bell that resulted was both beautiful to see and had an astonishingly pure and lovely tone. All who heard it marveled at the sound, but the poor mother who knew firsthand its terrible history cried with grief each time the bell rang. There was injustice literally baked into that bell, but those who did not know that history never had to think about that injustice, they never had to think about the poor mother’s grief. They simply enjoyed its sound.

When I first encountered that story, it caused me to think about what metaphorical bells are ringing today whose sound I enjoy, but whose continued ringing is, for someone else, a reminder of terrible injustice. Whose story don’t I know? Whose sacrifice is invisible to me? What good thing — like the sound of a beautiful bell — am I enjoying at someone else’s expense?

Certainly my perspective, or yours, about the value of the bell and its sweet sound is certainly going to be shaped by your knowledge (or lack of knowledge) about its history.

Sometimes we prefer not to know such history. If we knew, what would we do? What would be our obligation? Would we stop listening to the bell? Would we condemn the king and try to overthrow his rule? What if the king is long gone? Can we just forget about the price that was paid? Would we demand reparations for the poor mother whose daughter was sacrificed?

Or would we shrug our shoulders and say “I didn’t order that bell. It’s not my fault. It’s not my responsibility.” How you respond to that question, your perspective, is likely to be rooted in your life experience, and may not reflect the life experiences of others. Whose perspective might be missing? Whose history don’t you know?

These might seem like theoretical questions, but in fact, they have real implications for what is going on around us today. If we extend the metaphor of the “beautiful bell” to the United States, we must acknowledge that there is injustice baked into our bell.

Jim Wallis, a well-known pastor and publisher of Sojourners Magazine, writes from his perspective as a white European-American man about this embedded flaw in a book entitled America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America.

In it he writes, “The United States has the most racial diversity of any country in the world. This diversity is essential to our greatness, but it has also given us a history of tension and conflict…Ironically and tragically, American diversity began with acts of violent racial oppression that I am calling America’s “original sin” — the theft of land from Indigenous people who were either killed or removed and the enslavement of millions of Africans who became America’s greatest economic resource — in building a new nation. The theft of land and the violent exploitation of labor were embedded in America’s origins.”

The injustice was baked in, and a racial hierarchy created that we still see evidence of today. All of that is part of our American bell. And when we hear the bell’s song (the National Anthem) or recite its pledge, some, particularly those at the top of the hierarchy, may hear a beautiful sound while others, particularly those identified with the people at the bottom, feel the pain of past and present injustice.

In the last year we’ve heard a lot about the controversy sparked by former NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s decision not to stand for the National Anthem as a silent protest. He was using his sphere of influence as a sports figure to remind us of the injustice baked into the bell, injustice that still has not been completely purged from the bell’s core, and that is still resonating from the bell today.

In the last couple of years we’ve also heard a lot of discussion about other symbols and what they represent. We could talk about the differing responses to Confederate flags and statues, for example.

What do you hear when you hear the National Anthem or recite the Pledge of Allegiance? What do you see when you spot a Confederate flag or a statue of Confederate soldiers?

Sometime ago I came across an essay by Tom Ziller, a sports writer who captured two different perspectives — that of Colin Kaepernick and that of another football player, Saints quarterback Drew Brees, who criticized Colin for his silent protest.

Ziller writes, "Brees hears the anthem and sees his World War II veteran grandfather and the dozens of soldiers he’s met through his involvement with the USO. Kaepernick hears the anthem and sees Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner. These are not mutually exclusive visions."

As Ziller points out, both perspectives are valid but I would argue that the first perspective is based on an incomplete history, even of veterans and their World War II experience. White veterans and veterans of color were not treated the same. After World War II, the veterans of that war received several major benefits under the GI Bill — providing funding for education, job training, and home loan guarantees, a major factor in the growth of the middle class in America in the 1950s. Yet, during the same period, thousands of black veterans in both the North and South were denied housing and business loans, as well as admission to whites-only colleges and universities. To give you a sense of the degree of discrimination, of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill in New York and Northern New Jersey, less than 100 of them went to support home purchases by veterans of color, according to Wallis. When we don’t acknowledge this aspect of our history, we fail to acknowledge the pain that was and is still being baked into the bell.

Similarly, people with different life experiences hear different meanings when they hear protestors chant the phrase, “Black Lives Matter” — a rallying cry that began as a hashtag on Twitter in response to the police shootings of unarmed black men and women.  I gave a talk last summer, and an elderly white gentleman told me during the Q&A why he objected to the phrase. He felt excluded by it. When you hear the phrase “Black Lives Matter” does it sound like “only Black Lives Matter” or is it “Black Lives Matter too”?

To me, it is obvious that the phrase highlights the ways that black lives have been devalued historically and currently, not just because of police shootings, but because the health of black citizens (both children and adults) can be disregarded when water known to be contaminated with lead was allowed to flow from their faucets for months without taking action as was the case in Flint, Michigan. And, predatory lenders can get away with offering subprime loans to black and latino borrowers, even when they have credit scores comparable to white borrowers who are being offered more conventional, less risky loans, just to name a few recent examples. Such discriminatory behavior can happen for months, in some cases years, without public outcry, because those lives, it seems, are considered less valuable. But if you don’t know those stories, you don’t understand what those affected are talking about. And without that knowledge, you can’t have empathy.

Social scientists know that those at the bottom of any hierarchy usually know more about those at the top than those at the top know about those at the bottom. It’s easy to understand why. The maid that cleans her employer’s house will know a lot more about the employer’s life than the employer is likely to know about hers. She sees the inside of that house and every room in it but it is entirely possible that the employer has never been to the maid’s house or visited her neighborhood and may not know much about the maid’s life away from her job.

When we don’t know the stories of those at the bottom of the hierarchy, our knowledge is incomplete, not just because we don’t know the stories of those at the bottom. It is incomplete because if we don’t know the stories at the bottom, we can’t truly know the stories of those at the top, because the stories are linked. The fate of one is linked to the other.

How can we fix this American bell we call the United States? Certainly, efforts have been made in my lifetime. I have seen progress. My father was born in 1926 (just three years before Martin Luther King, Jr. was born.) My dad was 90 when he died in 2016. He was fortunate to have grown up in a family of educators, and was able to attend college in the 1940s (a time when that was uncommon for an African American). He earned his undergraduate degree at Howard University (a historically black college in Washington D.C.) and then a Master's degree at the University of Iowa and become a college professor, first teaching at Florida A&M in Tallahassee and Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (both also historically black colleges) before moving to Massachusetts in 1958 when he became the first African American professor at Bridgewater State College (now known as Bridgewater State University).

I was born in 1954 when my father was still teaching art at Florida A&M. As I mentioned, he earned his Master's Degree at the University of Iowa, and he wanted to get his doctorate in Art Education. Florida State University, which is also in Tallahassee, had a graduate program in Art Education, and it would have been very convenient to attend since it was in the same city where we lived. Unfortunately, because of the segregation of universities in Florida in 1954, my father was not allowed to attend Florida State. But because of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, the state of Florida was legally required to give my father access to graduate education. The state of Florida met their obligation, not by admitting him to the school across town, but by paying his transportation to Pennsylvania where he enrolled in the Art Education program at Penn State and earned his doctorate there.

Today we see the foolishness of the state of Florida — instead of trying to keep talented people like my dad in the state, their behavior drove them out. Florida’s loss was Massachusetts’ gain. My dad had a wonderful 30-year teaching career at Bridgewater State, free of many (though not all) of the constraints of racial discrimination.

Today, I can say that when I applied to graduate school, I did not have the limited choices my father had. I was not prohibited by any segregationist policies or practices from applying to the schools of my choice. Neither were my children. But I will tell you that when my sons became old enough to drive in Northampton, Massachusetts, their dad and I both talked to them about the hazards of being stopped by police and the importance of keeping your hands visible at all times. Because even well-behaved, good-looking, and well-educated young black men could fall victim to the racist assumptions of others, and unconscious bias is dangerous when someone has a gun in their hands.

Yes, in my lifetime, there has been progress. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. And in my lifetime, I have seen it bend. But lately it seems that the arc is stuck.

Progress of any kind is rarely linear. It is often a matter of two steps forward and one step back. Martin Luther King, Jr. made a similar observation in 1967, writing, “This tendency of the nation to take one step forward on the question of racial justice and then to take a step backward is still the pattern.” Periods of progressive reform are often met by backlash — as others, perhaps fearful of what is unfamiliar, try to return to an earlier status quo.

There are many examples in history of that pattern. If we are paying attention, we can see that pattern in motion right now. In fact, I sometimes feel like we are living in the 21st century version of the end of Reconstruction! In case you don’t remember, following the end of the Civil War, there was a period of reformation in the South that included the establishment of the Freedmen’s Bureaus to help those newly released from bondage. Blacks were given the right to vote, and some elected to Southern state governments. Many social reforms, including the establishment of public schools, were instituted during that period. However, there was also massive white resistance from the former Confederates, which became violent with the rise of the KKK. As Northern law enforcers eventually withdrew from the South (marking the end of Reconstruction), white supremacists reasserted control and “took the South back” through the institution of Jim Crow laws, and the disenfranchisement of Black voters. It was during that period that most of today’s Confederate statues were erected, an effort to demonstrate who was in control in the South.

Though as a nation I believe we have moved far beyond that period in our history, I watch with alarm the systematic institution of restrictive voting laws not just in the South, but across the nation, clearly intended to suppress the voting behavior of historically marginalized voters. It is a tactic rooted in our history. We should pay attention to it.

We are at an important historical moment with regard to our nation’s legacy of dealing with race. It is a moment that contains both dangers and opportunities. We can allow the forces leading to greater segregation to drive us further apart as a nation; or we can use our leadership — as active citizens — to make a positive change.

As a psychologist, one thing I know for sure is that leadership matters. Fundamentally, we know that human beings are not that different from other social animals. Not unlike wolves, we follow the leader. Yes, we have an innate tendency to think in “us” and “them” categories, but we look to the leader to help us know who the “us” is and who the “them” is. The leader can define who is in and who is out. The leader can draw the circle narrowly, or widely. When the leader draws the circle in an exclusionary way, with the rhetoric of hostility, the sense of threat among the followers is heightened. When the rhetoric is expansive and inclusionary, the threat is reduced. It sounds simple, but we know it is not. It requires courage, and sometimes means we must speak up against strident voices. But that is what authentic leaders do. And everyone here — regardless of who you are or what you do – each of you has the capacity to be such a leader, to influence others whether they be family members, friends, classmates, or colleagues.

The leader has to ask the question, how is the circle being drawn? Who is inside it? Who is outside it? What can I do to make the circle bigger? We live in a time when anxiety and fear are rising — and us-them lines are being drawn in a way that does not bode well for the health of our society. As Martin Luther King once said, we are caught in a “web of mutuality,” and that means we have to know the stories at the bottom of our society as well as at the top. We need a much wider perspective, seeking out the stories, the histories, we don’t know. Each of us — everyone here — has the opportunity to broaden our perspective, and a learning environment like this one is a good place to start.

Before I became a college president, I taught a course on the psychology of racism for more than 20 years, and as my students learned more about the enduring nature of racism, they often felt overwhelmed and helpless to do anything. I used to say to them, the same thing I will say to you: You have more power than you think. Everyone has a sphere of influence — family members, friends, classmates, co-workers, colleagues in your book club, members of your house of worship — when you think about it, your social network is broad. Use it!

We are all part of a chain of change agents, men and women — white and of color — who in large and small ways have taken action (not unlike Colin Kaepernick), people who asked the difficult question at the meeting, risked some discomfort, and used their social power and privilege to interrupt the status quo — regardless of its source. We must not break that chain of courage and commitment if we want to see continued progress — if we want to fix our bell.

In 2016 while I was working on the new edition of my book, I traveled to Texas, speaking on the campus of Texas A&M. Something happened there that gave me some hope. By coincidence, the week before I arrived there had been a racial incident. A group of black teenagers from a high school in Houston were touring the campus. During the tour they were approached by a small group of students who yelled racial slurs at them. “What’s hopeful about that?” you might be asking yourself. Nothing. What gave me hope is what happened next. The student body president, a young white man named Joseph Benigno issued a statement on YouTube (just 31/2 minutes long), but clear, concise and courageous. Acknowledging that he himself had been silent in the face of racist and sexist remarks, often made behind closed doors, he recognized that his and other’s silence gave permission for the hateful remarks to be made publicly. “Our silence fosters hate. Our silence enables the hateful to feel comfortable and welcome…”

He urged his fellow students to take responsibility for making a change. I was very impressed with his statement — you can watch it yourself on YouTube. His example of leadership was for me a sign of hope.

As Dr. King said, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. Are we creating it? We could be. In 1967, Dr. King ended his book, Where Do We Go From Here? with these words: "We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.” But he warns, “This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.”

Chaos or community? Our only healthy choice is to build a bigger tent, a larger circle of care, a more inclusive sense of community. If we don’t want chaos, we must choose community. Each of us has to make that choice. That is our call to shape the future if we want to build a place for all to thrive. We must choose to listen, even to the stories that are hard to hear, and work for lasting change so we can all enjoy the sound of beautiful bells, bells harmonized with the tuning fork of social justice, as a united community, together.

Thank you very much.