McMusing: Listening to the Smoke Again
A repost of a 2020 Blog with additional insights on institutionalized bias.
The blog below was posted on my website on June 1st, 2020. It was a summer of riots, including here in Seattle, and the media hype that made it seem like the whole world was on fire likely impacted many voters who believed that “law and order” was the answer. Being near riots was not new for me, and the images sent me searching to understand my high school experiences with the East LA riots. I researched for days while writing this piece, but this morning, while reading historian Heather Cox Richardson’s post on the same subject, I realized I had missed key elements.
One fact I missed was why Chicanos in particular were protesting the Vietnam War. The world Richardson described in this paragraph was my world; Garfield High School was only a few miles from where I lived:
Los Angeles County had the biggest Latino community in the United States and sent more than 130,000 students to the public schools. But officials expected the students to become manual laborers and made little effort to steer them toward college, while they denigrated Mexican American history and forbade the students to speak Spanish. Graduation rates were abysmal: at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, the dropout rate was 57.5%. Those who did make it to college despite their lack of college preparatory classes fared little better. Mexican American students had a college graduation rate of about 0.1%. —Heather Cox Richardson
The crucial part of my story that I didn’t understand related to this was when I realized that they were encouraging students with enough graduation credits to graduate early and go get jobs. I remember the conversation I had with a Latino classmate who explained this to me. When I realized I could graduate early, I went to the office to inquire about it. My counselor said, “No, we don’t want you to graduate early; this was not meant for you.”
Why didn’t early graduation apply to me? I have always wondered, but was certain there was bias in there somewhere. The following quote confirms my suspicions that my classmate’s Latino heritage was the key to understanding the push for early graduation and also explains why so many in my school participated in the “blowouts” (walkouts) to protest the Vietnam War:
Meanwhile, the escalation of the war in Vietnam dovetailed with the high school blowouts to push Chicano organizers toward anti-war protests. Because the public schools did not encourage them to go on to college, Mexican Americans did not qualify for the draft deferments that kept middle-class white Americans out of the war. This meant the government drafted them in disproportionately high numbers. —Heather Cox Richardson
Early graduation didn’t apply to me because I was white and college-bound. My high school in Montebello was not mentioned in the post, but it could have been. All the same dynamics were there. It was institutionalized bias, and it was so embedded in the world in which I lived that I could have easily missed it, but I never stopped listening to the smoke.
Institutionalized bias is the unfair, discriminatory treatment of a group of people that is embedded in the procedures, policies, laws, or objectives of large organizations. Unlike individual bias, which is the result of personal prejudice, institutional bias can occur even if individuals within the organization do not have biased intentions. It is also known as institutional discrimination or systemic bias. —Google AI Definition
Can You Listen to the Smoke?
Seeing the recent [2020] images of rioting took me back to the summer before my senior year in high school. I lived in Montebello, CA, just outside of East LA, where a peaceful protest rally turned violent (and deadly). It wasn't Blacks. It was a Chicano Vietnam protest.
I was very much the minority in my high school of 3,000. None of my friends were blonde. My friendships helped me feel as if I belonged in a world where I clearly stood out. My three years in Montebello provided a perspective not available to everyone. I still treasure the friendships built there.
As the protests began, I understood the purpose; when they turned violent, I also understood some of the conditions that fed that violence. When a reporter, Rubén Salazar, who supported the peaceful protests, was hit by a tear-gas canister and killed, it escalated the tensions. I could smell the fires and see the smoke from my house, which was less than three miles away. I watched the news and wondered if there were any from my school involved in the rioting. Completely possible, I had brushed up against their anger occasionally in the school and community. But mostly that anger was ignored--or labeled. Seldom was it given the honor of legitimacy.
Yesterday, as I saw the images of rioting here in Seattle, my teen emotions surfaced. They were a mixture of fear, frustration, and sadness--that the violence would overshadow the root causes of the anger--just as it has done since my youth. The root causes are societal problems that continue to be ignored--not just for Blacks but for all People of Color. And eventually, the voices demand to be heard. While I understand that many who are looting do not appear to be connected to the original protest, the protest gave them an outlet for their anger, which they may not even fully understand. This is not to excuse them, but to merely judge them does not address anything at all.
This angry response was aptly expressed by Martin Luther King Jr., "A riot is the language of the unheard." My teenage experience helped me understand this truth. As I watched the smoke rise in the distance, I knew that those who were looting and setting fires were not just protesting the war. They were expressing the underlying anger I felt in my community every day. By judging behavior and labeling it with character traits, we excuse ourselves from listening.
It is interesting that during this time, in a poem written for a class, I proclaimed Jesus as the answer. I can still remember finishing the poem and wondering exactly how that could happen without the help of humans. And for 50 years, we as a nation have continued not to listen. That includes me. Because just like my teenage self, my primary response to the riots over the years has been fear and concern for my own safety. (Completely normal human response). This was juxtaposed with also seeing the rioters as the people who lived, worked, and went to school with me. I knew their lives were more difficult than mine and recognized how my fair skin was to my advantage in many ways.
As a nation, we must realize we are judging behavior, and failing to see it as a symptom of deep societal trauma. This is trauma caused by a society that spends more time punishing than listening to those who need us most. Unless we listen and look for root causes, the riots will continue, and this week has shown us how it will no longer be contained in the city where it begins. It will be coming to a city near you unless we begin to address the cause.
I can do better; we can do better. We are in this mess because we did not listen and act and that should give us hope because now we know exactly what we need to do. For me, that means writing. And here I am. I am listening to the smoke.