Frank Daniels, God bless him, over at The Tennessean has heard about allegations of racism at the Nashville Farmers' Market and now proclaims: "The accusations of racism and discrimination do not seem warranted."
He, a white guy, determined this by asking the person, a white gal, accused of being racist if she, indeed, is racist.
Council members Jacobia Dowell and Erica Gilmore, both African-American, questioned farmers’ market director Tasha Kennard on whether changes in the market’s strategy were unfairly discriminatory toward minority merchants.“This space is paid for by the taxpayers of this city, but it’s not open to everybody in this city to participate,” said Dowell, who represents District 32 in Southeast Nashville.
She referenced a conversation with one African-American merchant, “What we heard last week was that people of color, specifically people of color, have been put out of the market. They’ve been intimidated and told not to come back. And so, I think it’s something of concern that we need to look at and address — how many vendors have left the market and for what reasons?”
[...]
“There has been a culture of the Nashville Farmers’ Market for generations — not recently — that when a merchant is unhappy about their placement or about their opportunities, they have come to you and they told you that they are being discriminated against. It is not true under my watch,” she said.
“I will not stand up here and be told that I’m a racist.”
Whoa!
“I just lost my cool,” she said Friday during a wide-ranging discussion about the challenges and changes that the market has been addressing to make it more sustainable and relevant. “I still can’t believe I said it, and I apologized the next day.”
Daniels goes on to list all of the improvements being made at the farmers market and what a good job he thinks Kennard is doing. Daniels does not talk to any of the black council members who are concerned about the farmers' market. He doesn't talk to any of the black merchants displaced from the farmer's market.
He just declares the farmers' market situation racism-free without involving any of the people who think they're experiencing racism to weigh in on the discussion!
That is not a great way to have an honest conversation about whether something is racist.
More importantly for this discussion, no one is saying that Kennard is coming home from work and hanging out on the Stormfront forums. No one is accusing her of deliberately looking to purge black people from Nashville's civil life. No one's accusing her, in other words, of having some deliberate white supremacist agenda and of deliberately setting about to assure that black people are kept down.
But we have all stewed in American racism, our whole lives. You can be an awesome, lovely person and still have racist thoughts, ideas, or assumptions. And those thoughts, ideas, and assumptions, as unintentional as they are, as unaware of them as you might be, can adversely affect your friends and neighbors of color.
Like, say, if you just assume that being called racist is more terrible than being affected by racism. Or if you believe that a certain group of people of a certain race have an unreasonable generational predisposition to complaining about the farmers' market treating them unfairly. Or if you write a whole piece about racism and don't include the voices of the people affected by it. That's all racist.
That doesn't happen because people are evil jerks. It happens because we don't always think things through and we fall into old habits that we learned from this racist culture. But the good news is that, if you've done something racist not out of malice, but just out of thoughtlessness, it's not the end of the world! You can do better next time.
That's how we become a less racist city — by actively working to break old bad habits — not by white people sitting around reassuring each other that we are not, certainly not, racist.
