[R]UTLAND — The Rutland Area NAACP’s provocatively titled program “How to Talk to Your Racist Neighbor” opened with a warning.
“White people have become very sensitive to being called racist,” speaker Bor Yang said. “If you start the conversation talking to your ‘racist’ neighbor, that conversation has ended before it has started.”
That’s why Yang and other diversity and discrimination experts spent the weekend training interested residents how to navigate a topic increasingly sparking headlines in the second whitest state in the nation.
Several dozen attendees came with concerns ranging from President Donald Trump’s current tweets against four congresswomen of color to Rutland City Aldermen Paul Clifford’s recent posted-and-soon-deleted Facebook meme picturing a poor white family with the caption “White privilege: The ability to suffer life’s universal indignities without blaming another ethnic group.”
Clifford since has apologized, but questions about how to address such statements continue.
“We can only rely on government and law enforcement to do so much,” Rutland Area NAACP president Tabitha Moore said, “and a lot of people have been asking, ‘What can I do?’”
Not all people who discriminate are the same, said Yang, executive director of the Vermont Human Rights Commission. Some understand what they’re doing — members of white supremacist groups, for example — and don’t care about the consequences.
“People who have come to hate others do not change because of conversations or trainings,” Yang said.
Instead, such people most often are handled by law enforcement, which divides their issues into three categories: crimes, civil violations and, the trickiest for Julio Thompson, director of the Vermont Attorney General’s civil rights unit, “lawful but awful” actions.
“Things that are offensive to us that don’t rise to that level where the law or the Legislature has decided to or may not be able to punish,” Thompson said. “That’s the most difficult area.”
Much expression is protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — a fact Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan reiterated at a Rutland Area NAACP meeting this winter after announcing authorities didn’t have enough evidence to bring charges against those racially harassing former Bennington Rep. Kiah Morris — the state’s only black female legislator — even when one antagonist stepped in front of her at a press conference on the issue and started a war of words.
“That is where, in terms of the power dynamic, our authority may be at its weakest,” Thompson said, “and the community’s may be the strongest.”
Although some people know they’re being offensive, others don’t. Moore told a story about someone who questioned a local man who was flying a Confederate flag, only to discover he mistakenly thought it was a symbol of the Union.
But that’s the exception rather than the rule. And working with people in need of diversity education presents its own challenges, starting with the concept of “white fragility” — discomfort and defensiveness on the part of a white person when confronted about racial inequality and injustice.
“It is really hard for most of us to grasp that you can be well-intentioned and a good person and engage in acts or say things that are discriminatory,” Yang said.
The program encouraged people to express their concerns about offensive behavior in a way that’s honest but doesn’t simply spur defensiveness in the listener and, in turn, closed-mindedness.
“You want to leave room for the other person to have a perspective,” Moore said.
Putting such lessons into practice is easier said than done, presenters acknowledged. After deleting his Facebook post on white privilege, Clifford issued a public apology.
“I have learned that, to many, the term ‘white privilege’ does not mean what I have always believed it to mean — primarily economic privilege,” he wrote. “I have also learned that it is very difficult to understand the way African American, Jewish or Indian people feel about their past (and sometimes current) oppression unless you have experienced that same oppression. I hope my apology is accepted and I hope that someday soon we will all accept each other, on the same level, without regard to race, gender, religion or ethnic heritage. That is certainly what I intend to strive toward.”
But many attendees weren’t satisfied and want Rutland City government to institute training for municipal officials.
“People are concerned our leaders don’t have a basic understanding around issues of fairness and diversity and equity and want to add that support,” Moore said.
Presenters, for the part, will continue their own work.
“It is complex, it is really hard and difficult,” Yang said. “The most important thing that white people can do is recognize and be offended by the same discriminatory behavior hurting people of color. And if men could also stand up and say ‘I’m offended by behaviors that are impacting women’ because they are themselves personally offended, that to me is probably the most powerful thing they can do.”