Editor’s note: This commentary is by Heather Eagan, who teaches in the College of Education at the University of Vermont and is a doctoral student in the College’s Education Leadership and Doctoral Studies Program.
A couple of weeks ago, Bill McKibben published a piece in The New Yorker about why Vermont has done so well in the face of the pandemic. The article was for the most part innocuous, but it followed a saccharin Norman Rockwellian shtick. High doses of saccharin are known for their bitter undertones. Similarly in McKibben’s article, the sweetness papers over the bitter fault line of racism that is as much a part of Vermont’s culture as its neighborliness and progressivism. Given the racial trauma and protests that have rocked our country these past few months, it seemed especially tone-deaf.
On the surface, the reasons McKibben gave for Vermont’s success, the general health of the state’s population, and its homogeneity seem plausible and harmless, but the question does need to be asked. “Why is Vermont so homogenous?” There is no one answer to this question as there are myriad reasons, but the bottom line is that Vermont’s homogeneity is no accident. And, it does lead to a very Vermont line of thinking, that racism is something that happens elsewhere not here in our bucolic hills and dales. We like to think of ourselves as open and welcoming, a beacon of community-minded villages shining a light onto the nation, but as cozy as these villages feel they can also harbor a parochialism that at times spills over into nativism and a willingness to overlook one’s neighbors flaws because they are just such darn nice people otherwise. This is a tendency that has deep roots.
While Vermont was building and reinforcing the strong tradition of self-governance and town hall meetings that McKibben lists as one reason for our success, we were building and reinforcing other less desirable things as well. We pride ourselves as the first state to outlaw slavery in 1777, but slavery didn’t immediately end with the law. Instead, when certain individuals ignored the law, neighbors often turned a blind eye to the slaves that they continued to hold. For example, Ethan Allen’s daughter Lucy Hitchcock Allen brought two slaves with her when her family moved to Burlington in the 1830s, over 50 years after the law was enacted, and no one appears to have said a word. Vermont had a eugenics program that targeted “defective” (read: not white and/or poor) families and instituted a sterilization law in 1931. For over 80 years until 1969, UVM held a ball entitled Kake Walk that featured white students dancing in blackface. The ball’s demise was very controversial and met with a huge outcry from alums who insisted that it was not racist. In 1968, the Rev. David Johnson moved with his family to the Northeast Kingdom. Not long after the move, gunshots were fired into their living room. The police dealt with the incident by investigating and framing Johnson who quickly moved his family out of the state in the aftermath of this trauma. If this all feels like a long time ago, we can fast forward to Kiah Morris, a black woman who was elected as a state representative in 2014. She became the recipient of such vitriolic racial harassment that she ended up resigning from office. Much of this harassment was traced to one man, a bad apple, and the surrounding police investigation was farcical. Despite widespread news coverage, there were no statewide protests defending Morris nor decrying her treatment.
This list is not exhaustive, it is merely the tip of the iceberg and it doesn’t cover the day to day indignities of people being followed in stores, having the N-word shouted at them while walking down the street or being told to go back where they came from. All experiences that my students recount to me year after year. We like to think of these as aberrations caused by those bad apples, but they are indicative of an insidious vein of racism that runs through the fabric of the state.
Shortly before McKibben wrote his piece, an animal control officer in Swanton resigned after he received pushback for wearing a mask with a Confederate flag on it to a public meeting. Two of his family members who also held town government positions resigned in solidarity shortly after, stating the town was being ruined by “transients.” Vergennes is without a functioning city government after multiple resignations following infighting about police oversight, and in the aftermath of the BLM protests that McKibben mentioned, pro-police supporters held a rally that resulted in a confrontation with BLM counter-protesters. While many in Vermont are finally confronting issues that have been brushed under the carpet for far too long (and I hope that they continue to do so) we are hardly living up to the state motto of “Freedom and Unity” that McKibben refers to.
To be fair to McKibben, he does mention that our state’s population of color has been disproportionately hit by the pandemic, but he seems to spuriously dismiss this as in line with the norm across the nation. That is a lot to brush over. If Vermont is doing so well, why has our population of color still been hit hard? Why in progressive Vermont, haven’t we done better? Is the virus just attracted to melanin or are there deeper more pervasive injustices at play; injustices that don’t gibe with our progressive values or Rockwellian town meetings.
McKibben goes on to address the impending arrival of large numbers of college students, proposing that we teach them to “think at least a little bit like Vermonters.” I too work with students, many of whom come because they are attracted by Vermont’s progressive values. My white students are generally satisfied and comfortable with the culture of the state that they find. My students of color often experience disillusionment and a realization that much of the state runs on a color-blind progressivism that doesn’t see them or their struggles. This is what I see being reinforced in McKibben’s article. There is nothing wrong with many of the values that he outlines, but we need to be honest with ourselves about how those values are applied and who they apply to. In the classroom, I tell my students that it is important to understand our history in full with all of the good and the bad. The same applies to our present. There is little value in telling ourselves fairy tales about who we were and who we are. Rather if we are honest with ourselves, we have a better chance of identifying the ways in which our “Vermont values” are preventing us from being who we want to be.
Like McKibben, I am a transplant to Vermont and love my adopted state. But, to truly love something it is necessary to recognize and openly acknowledge flaws and blemishes, otherwise, you run the risk of leaning towards nativist idolatry. Vermont is full of wonderful people who hold strong values but are often blind to injustices around them. This isn’t something that is unique to Vermont but is endemic to our largely segregated society. Vermont is mostly made up of white Vermonters and we tend to not see things that do not impact us or our identities. As a side effect, when injustices do occur we are quick to doubt and to make excuses for the inexcusable behavior of friends, family, and neighbors that we know instead of standing up for those who are often seen as strangers in our midst. When forced to reckon publicly with racist actions, we can be quick to mobilize into public protest, but the perpetrators are too often framed as a few bad apples. Afterwards, there is little digging deeper, we just recycle our signs and return to our lives. We are happy with being better than most and content with resting on our laurels.
White supremacy is insidious and pervasive and we perpetuate it through the stories that we tell. When we pat ourselves on the back for how well we have done protecting our fellow citizens during this pandemic while glossing over the disproportionate impact on our citizens of color, we are participating in this perpetuation. When we refer proudly to our state motto of “Freedom and Unity” without recognizing how unwelcoming our state often feels to people who are not white, we are sending out a subtle message. Vermont has done well in the face of the pandemic, but not all Vermonters have benefited from this equitably. We need to ask ourselves why and find ways to do better. Our nation has been going through a collective racial reckoning this summer, Vermont included. As Vermonters, if we want to live up to the image that we project of ourselves, we need to make sure that our reckoning isn’t limited to a few public protests and shared memes on social media. We need to dig deeper and when we look in the mirror it shouldn’t be to see ourselves as the fairest of them all but to continually reassess and see where we can do better.
