february 2025 Edition
On Colorblindness
Some Americans, who grew up in predominantly or entirely white communities, have a hard time seeing what’s wrong with the concept of colorblindness. After all, didn’t Martin Luther King, Jr. advocate for it when he said he dreamed of a day when his children would live in a nation where they wouldn’t be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character? Doesn’t it mean treating everyone as equals no matter what?
Unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding harbored by too many white Americans - who don’t have an opportunity to interact daily with other people and cultures. They can’t see it because they are blind to the whiteness that surrounds us. For so many people, whiteness is comfortable. It matches the history they learned in school. It has the same vibe as the television shows they like, the movies they watch, and the people with whom they hang out. When they encounter a person of color, they just assume they have had all the same experiences and enjoy the same opportunities and pastimes as they do. There is an incredible unifying aspect to the culture of whiteness for those who are, or act as if they are, white. Stepping outside of that paradigm feels disorienting and discomforting at first.
“In a colorblind society, white people, who are unlikely to experience disadvantages due to race, can effectively ignore racism in American life, justify the current social order and feel more comfortable with their relatively privileged standing in society. Many people of color, however, who are regularly hindered by race, experience colorblind ideologies quite differently. Color blindness constructs a society that denies negative racial experiences, undermines cultural heritage and invalidates unique perspectives,” wrote Maurice Asare and Abdullah Hashimi, students at Bowdoin, before adding, “the notion that someone in the U.S. can lead a completely colorblind life is not plausible. The awareness of race is woven into our nation’s history and its implications thus cannot be completely erased.”
West Point History Professor Ty Siedule learned the hard way just how deep this perspective permeates across the country. When the native Virginian made an educational video on the US Civil War and correctly stated it was fought over slavery he went viral - his phone, his inbox, his life blew up.
The majority of comments were negative, “Some people wrote to me that I had caved in to pressure to accept the politically correct government position,” he states in his book, Robert E. Lee and Me. Other people’s words were brutal, comments were at times “deranged,” and some even threatened violence.
In response, Seidule wrote the book to explain his reckoning with the historical myths whiteness created and the racism it engendered in him. Growing up in Virginia, Siedule said, he learned to believe “a series of lies about the Civil War and its legacy. The same lies that have infected our nation.” His whole identity, he realized, was based on a false history.
“The problem is that the myths I learned were just flat-out, fundamentally wrong. And not just wrong in a moral sense, as if that weren’t significant enough, but wrong factually, whether through deception, denial, or willful ignorance. The myths and lies I learned promoted a form of racial hierarchy and white supremacy.”
Siedule found that “nothing I could say would refute” white people’s “upbringing, feelings, history.” Evidence, he said, didn’t matter - people chose the facts they wanted to believe based on the culture they grew up in, or chose to be a part of. The poet Robert Penn Warren referred to it as “our felt history.”
In his book, Siedule explained the upsetting discomfort he experienced as he realized the history he believed that he knew so well, that he identified with was - a set of well-established, well-fortified lies. But it wasn’t just discovering the truth, it was the way the history was passed down - by beloved grandparents, an awesome history teacher, officials at state-sanctioned holidays, in favorite books and in popular movies. It would be easier not to listen at all - to double down on the myth and deny the truth - but that perpetuates injustice.
In The False White Gospel, Jim Wallis describes a similar problem the Christian church is having with truth. At a meeting of American clergy, white pastors from mainline denominations, said they were afraid to tell the truth to their congregants “about race in American history.” When some had dared to challenge false narratives they were met with “aggressive pushback.” Black colleagues “plead” with them to share our honest past - truth before reconciliation. But the white pastors said they couldn’t compete with the misinformation congregants were getting from right-wing radio and television.
Among Americans who most trust Fox News, a majority; along with 70 percent of those who trust One American News and Newsmax, believe “God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world,” according to polling by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI).
The idea that America was and is meant to be a divine example to the world illustrates the power of whiteness because it requires us to ignore whole swaths of our history— what person of faith could argue that God condoned the enslavement of others for 400 years, or their segregation from others de jure and de facto, the denial of their rights, their criminalization, first for profit and then to continue segregation and impoverishment? The lived experience of people who are not white has forced them to exist in the tension between these myths and reality. While white people remain untouched and unseeing.
Head of PRRI, Robert Jones, said the view that America is divinely ordained as a Christian nation is “Strongly linked to denials of structural racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Semitism, anti-LGBTQ sentiment, support for patriarchal gender roles, belief in conspiracy theories such as QAnon, and even support for political violence.”
The recent attempts to usher in an era of colorblind meritocracy threaten the progress we have made toward understanding our shared past and one another. The colorblind approach is an ideology born out of obliviousness to the ocean of whiteness in which we wade.
Author Grace Elizabeth Hale explains in the preface of In the Pines, “Being able to live relatively free of the bonds of history has been one of white Americans’ greatest privileges. I have come to see this particular entitlement as foundational, the one that supports all the rest. The process has taken most of my adult life, but I have finally learned that taking responsibility for the past is, for me at least, both an intellectual project and a personal one.”
That is why Hale went against her family’s wishes and told the truth about the lynching of Versie Johnson. The Black man was murdered by the Sheriff, her Grandfather, who had lied and said he tried to save Johnson. Hale, like many who dare to confront race, was called an agitator, a disrupter, a radical. “If being able to understand yourself as living free of the past is a foundational part of white supremacy, then putting your own family inside the stream of history is a part of the project of dismantling it,” Hale said.
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., reflected on the modern Civil Rights Movement in his essay, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? “Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”
Rev. Dr. Benjamin Boswell agrees with Dr. King, and argues that in 2024, we still have work to do, “We are suffering from blindness to our own Whiteness.” In an attempt to begin to identify the many planes on which whiteness works, ACRP’s faith leaders are holding a Courageous Workshop at 6:30 on March 10 that will be led by Dr. Boswell. Learn more and register below.
Upcoming Events
Meaningful Conversation: Safety and Self-Actualization
February 20, 2025
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM
Alexandria Black History Museum
902 Wythe St., Alexandria, VA
Free
The meaningful conversations explore and celebrate the diversity of cultures and peoples in our area, address the attitudes and behaviors that still divide us, and seek remedies grounded in the recognition that we are one interconnected, interdependent human family. Join us this month and meet two amazing Alexandrians, Rubie Williams, CEO, and Bernice Williams Vice President of Believe, a nonprofit that serves people in Virginia and the DMV.
Concert for a Cause
Sunday, Feb. 23
4 p.m.
Old Presbyterian Meeting House, 323 S. Fairfax Street
Freewill Offering for ACRP’s Memorial Scholarship Program
No reservations necessary
The Old Presbyterian Meeting House welcomes the William & Mary Choir in a Concert for a Cause. Now in their 101st season, the group will conclude their 2025 tour with a program on the theme “Begin Again”—a fitting sentiment to motivate and inspire us to pursue justice in a challenging world. Members of the OPMH Choir, alongside William & Mary alumni, are invited to join in singing “Shenandoah” at the close of the program. A freewill offering will be collected to benefit the Alexandria Community Remembrance Project and its memorial scholarship funds.
Confronting Whiteness: Seeing Beyond Colorblindness for Deeper Conversations on Race, led by Rev. Dr. Benjamin Boswell.
Monday, March 10
6:30-8:30 p.m.
Charles Houston Recreation Center, 901 Wythe Street
Multipurpose Room
Registration Required
Free
This interfaith workshop will help people better understand the pervasive culture of whiteness that seeps into our everydayness. Those attending will gain tools to challenge the growing belief in “colorblindness” and on a personal level, will help us recognize and end practices and habits that support white supremacy. This is the foundation we need to build better relationships and repair our community. Please register soon for this free workshop as space is limited. Some snacks will be provided.
In Remembrance of Joseph McCoy, Robert P. Jones will speak about The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Program begins at 6 p.m., book signing from 7-7:30 p.m.
Roberts Memorial United Methodist Church, 606 S. Washington Street
No registration necessary
Please join us as we honor the memory of Joseph McCoy, who was lynched in Alexandria in 1897, with a program that exposes the tangled roots of White Supremacy in America and the Western World. Dr. Robert P. Jones, the award-winning author of The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, will reframe our origin story and expose the paradoxical impact and legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery, while also sharing stories of other communities doing similar work as ACRP. After speaking there will be a book signing, books will be available for purchase at the event. Don’t miss this opportunity to Remember Joseph McCoy by engaging with the more difficult parts of our past.
New! ACRP Committee of Inquiry into Post-Civil War Alexandria
ACRP is launching a Committee of Inquiry in an effort to establish the definitive version of major incidents of injustice from the end of the Civil War to 1902. We want to tell the truth and create a new narrative that encompasses our shared history during those years while finding opportunities to use legal and legislative levers to rectify past injustices. We are looking for researchers with post-graduate backgrounds in Reconstruction, African American History, 19th Century elections, and politics, policing, courts, and constitutional and human rights law. The researchers will be given six months to complete documentation of an assigned five-year time period, or an assigned issue.
These volunteer research positions are an opportunity to be a part of a city-wide Inquiry into Post War Alexandria, a blue ribbon panel, headed by the former Director of Human Rights and advised by Alexandria’s Commonwealth’s Attorney. The recommendations developed from this research will inform legal and legislative initiatives, as well as establish agreed upon facts of this City’s shared history during this time period.
Those selected to serve will be expected to attend a monthly meeting starting in March 2025. If you are interested in being considered, please fill out this short application by midnight, March 7, 2025.
Committee Reports
ACRP Steering Committee met for their annual planning retreat on Jan. 31. The work plans for next year includes continuing the work of the Interfaith Initiative workshops and holding clergy coffees as well as supporting the Remembrance Student Club at ACHS with a focus on local African American history. The Schools and Libraries Action Committee will monitor legislation and news that impacts the teaching of history to our public school students and/or affects minority students. Finally, the Steering Committee will launch a Committee of Inquiry into Post-Civil War Alexandria headed by Jean Kelleher. New members to the Steering Committee including, Dr. Emerald Christopher, Rev. Josette Franklin, Paul Glist, Rev. Dr. Taft Quincy Heatley, Jacquay Plummer, and Kim Young.
Upcoming Committee Meetings
ACRP’s Schools and Libraries Action Committee will meet on Feb.26 at 6 p.m. at the Alexandria Black History Museum.
ACRP’s Steering Committee will meet on Wednesday, Mar. 12 at 5:30 p.m. at the Alexandria Black History Museum.
Alexandria Community Remembrance Project
The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project (ACRP) is a city-wide initiative dedicated to helping Alexandria understand its history of racial terror hate crimes and to work toward creating a welcoming community bound by equity and inclusion.
In Memoriam
Write "ACRP" in Comments on the donation form.
Office of Historic Alexandria
City of Alexandria, Virginia
ACRP@alexandriava.gov