Race – Quinby & Co.

Blowin’ in the Wind? I think not.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the song Blowin’ in the Wind.

Like many millions of people, when I first heard it I was moved; and I appreciated the depth and meaning in every line, every question posed by the author, each one pertaining to a fact of human history consistently revealing itself for each new generation.

I couldn’t help but be a little disheartened by the fact that these questions are still so relevant, so many years later.

Yet in the years following my first encounter with the song—for all it’s undeniable eloquence and power—the chorus still struck me as frustratingly flat.

To ask questions like “How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?” only to say that the answer is blowin’ in the wind, felt a little bit cheap, as though each of us might as well throw up our hands and just say ‘oh well.’

It was the only thing about the song that bugged me. However, lately I’ve been looking at it differently.

Bob Dylan w/shades and hat, Copyright © by Daniel Kramer

Maybe I’m just slow and people have been hip to it all long, or maybe I’m taking shots in the dark and totally inserting my own meaning into the song, but that chorus means far more to me now than it did before.

What I think now is that if it feels underwhelming and flat to the listener, then that’s a good thing, because it should feel underwhelming and unsatisfying.

The song was never about spoon-feeding us the answers to age-old questions anymore than it was pointing its finger at any one group of people. If it’s pointing its finger at anybody, then it’s doing so at everybody.

The real subject of scrutiny isn’t any one country or group or individual, but something deeper and typically more silent, something to which all of us are vulnerable.

Apathy. The very thing that bothered me about the song might actually be the main point of the song in the first place.

The answer, actually, is not blowing in the wind. If it is, it’s only because we’ve given into the same apathy, hopelessness, bitterness and fear that convinces people to throw up their hands and give up right from the start, and leave it to some unseen force outside of their control.

In the last verse, Dylan writes “How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?”

There could be a lot of ways to interpret that line, but for me, it’s the one time throughout the song in which the author winks at us, as if to undermine that seemingly disappointing chorus.

As far as we know, there is only a sky above us, and it seems to care little if at all about the affairs of men and women. It will provide no answer to our problems, beyond the possibility of serving as a mirror. One that allows us to recognize that the answer to these questions is in our hands. It always has been and always will be.

To me, that’s a timeless truth. Elemental as the wind.

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In Focus: The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020

John Lewis has received a great deal of praise over the last several weeks following his passing in July.

Everyone from former presidents and congressional leaders to the innumerable voices in social media have highlighted his legacy fighting for Civil Rights both on the streets as he marched with Martin Luther King and in the halls of Congress where he served as a Georgia Representative for over 30 years.

We’ve heard about his near-death encounter with Alabama State Troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge while peacefully marching for the equal right to vote, and his multiple arrests in the name of what he called getting into good, necessary trouble.

What few people may realize is how the very thing for which he fought has been jeopardized these last seven years, and how its restoration formed a driving cause to which he dedicated his remaining years as a legislator and citizen.

In 2013, the Supreme Court removed a key component of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one that required districts with a history of voter suppression to get federal approval, or preclearance, before making any changes to their election laws.

The Court ruled that the provision as it stood was based on antiquated data, essentially stating that the barriers which once disenfranchised Black voters in those districts no longer exist. If the Federal Government wanted to reclaim its oversight, the Court ruled, it would have to do so based on contemporary data.

So while the preclearance provision still exists, it’s no longer being applied, since the specific districts once required to get the federal approval are no longer required to do so. Many of these districts are comprised of southern Black communities.

“Today the Supreme Court stuck a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” said Lewis at the time of the ruling. “They’re saying, in effect that history cannot repeat itself. But I say come and walk in my shoes.”

While it’s true that the more overt forms of voter suppression are gone–such as poll taxes and literacy tests–many others still remain such as the restricting of early voting, the arbitrary re-drawing of district maps, strict voter identification laws, and the closing of over 1,600 polling places between 2012 and 2018 in those same districts once required to get federal approval before making any of these changes. In Texas, 750 polling places closed following the Court ruling. Most of these closures took place between the 2014 and 2018 mid-term elections.

In December, the House passed a bill to restore the Voting Rights Act. Congressman Lewis led the drafting of the bill, which was based on the updated data the Court had ruled necessary. After the congressman’s passing in July, the bill was renamed in his honor–The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020.

It has yet to be passed in the Senate. It currently sits on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s desk, as it has for well over 200 days.

Without a Democratic majority in the Senate, and while President Trump remains in office with his power to veto, it is unlikely the bill will be signed into law.

Note: Election Day has yet to be declared a federal holiday, though it consistently falls on work days in which many Americans don’t have the time to get to their polling place and vote. Colombus Day, meanwhile, is still a federal holiday. Let’s all vote this year, yes?

Here are resources to take action.

https://support.naacp.org/a/john-lewis-voting-rights-act-passes-house”>https://support.naacp.org/a/john-lewis-voting-rights-act-passes-house

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*The following data was compiled by the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a research arm of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/reports/Democracy-Diverted.pdf

My (Latina) White Privilege

I am Latina. I am a Woman. I’m a child of immigrants. But I am also white facing, meaning I have benefited from white privilege all my life. While this isn’t news to me, I never really understood the true gravity of such privilege until a few months ago.

Our Black and Brown communities have been on the receiving end of violence, terror, extreme injustice and racism for hundreds of years. I have grown up in a system that continues to oppress and quiet BIPOC, along with their respective histories, their achievements, their beauty and most importantly their humanity.

I’ve always considered myself lucky to be a free American. I was equally lucky to have been raised speaking Spanish at home with family while spending my childhood summers in Colombia, experiencing another culture in a country that is home to vast populations of Black and Indigenous communities.

I felt like I was part of a diverse and open-minded community. I still feel that way. However, the privilege of being white was never addressed, so I was oblivious to how it positively affected my life and, more importantly, how it negatively affected the Black and Brown lives around me.

While racism runs deep in Colombia–as it does for much of Latin America and the Caribbean–what’s more specifically common is colorism, which is the preferential treatment of those who are lighter-skinned compared to those who are darker, even though both are of the same race. In Latin communities then, it’s especially common to hear things like, “you’re not Black, you’re [insert country here], or even comments about the type of hair you have, “at least you have good hair,” etc.

As children, we are essentially taught that having lighter skin is more beautiful and that darker skin is less preferred. If you do have darker skin, you are constantly warned, not quite half-jokingly, to stay out of the sun so that you don’t get any darker.

Even the telenovelas we are so used to watching are filled with light-skinned actors taking up the major roles, while the darker-skinned actors usually portray the ‘help.’

And so while I never grew up around any overt displays of racism, I also did not grow up with any understanding of what it meant to be anti-racist, or much less why it is vital.

As detailed above, the society we live in and the system by which this world functions is inherently racist, and built to mainly benefit white people while simultaneously oppressing BIPOC. As it’s embedded within everything around us, it becomes more natural for us to grow up harboring certain prejudices about people and their skin color without even realizing it.

Salento, Colombia - Quinby & Co. — Andrea Pavlov in the Valle de Cocora; Quindío, Colombia

It’s imperative for us to acknowledge this fact and then get to work on changing it. As Ijeoma Oluo, NYT Best Selling Author of ‘So You Want To Talk About Race’ (@ijeomaoluo) so eloquently puts it:

“The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be an anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward.”

I have engaged in behavior that I regret, making excuses for family members who “don’t know better” because they’re of an older generation, staying quiet when someone has made an offensive “joke” or has said something ignorant or offensive because “they probably didn’t really mean it.” Colorism was very much a part of being raised Latina.

I now realize the dangers of staying silent and I am committed to actively participating in unlearning the harmful ideologies to which we’ve grown accustomed. We are talking about racism at home regularly, and addressing our own white privilege. I have addressed these topics with family and we’ve talked about the ways we can be better and change and eliminate colorism from our vocabulary. I have done a “clean up” of my social media feeds, getting rid of accounts that do not serve in uplifting BIPOC and subscribing to new voices I’d never heard before whether they’re in the arts or civic action.

I recently found Rachel Cargle (@rachel.cargle) who offers a wealth of knowledge and resources for anyone looking to be an ally to BIPOC and specifically Black women, who are the most affected. She founded The Loveland Foundation (@thelovelandfoundation) which provides free therapy for Black women and girls, and she curates a monthly self-paced syllabi at The Great Unlearn (@thegreatunlearn) where she currently has a free 30-day course called #DoTheWork. I began the course earlier this week, and I’m now on day three.

I really encourage you to do more research, ask questions, learn and unlearn, and when you know better, do better. It is perfectly ok to change your mind when you’ve learned more about a subject. That is how we grow and evolve. These are small steps we must begin taking in order to begin dismantling the systems, institutions and ideologies that continue to negatively affect BIPOC and their communities.

Black lives matter. All black lives matter and are beautiful and worthy and deserving.

We are in this together, friends. As white people and Latinxs, we must step forward and stand with our Black and Brown family.

And above all, we must no longer stay quiet.