Naperville panelist: Race relations really about 'heart, life'
Kim Brown had a confession to make during a North Central College panel discussion on race relations.
Brown is a former English professor at the private college in Naperville, a black woman who now lives in Georgia. Her sons are young black men, and yet she didn't care about the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
"I didn't care because it didn't have anything to do with my life, really," Brown said. "Even though I have a black family and black sons, it just wasn't germane."
Her 25-year-old son, however, took the news differently, Brown told a crowd of about 90 North Central students, faculty and community members Wednesday during the panel called "Beyond Ferguson: Race, Class and the Journey to Justice."
"This was so important to him; he was really concerned about it," Brown said. "My son said, 'How am I supposed to live in a world that a black man like me can't drive and can't be safe around police officers? I don't know what to do. I don't know how to survive in this world.' I thought it was deep and I thought it was important, but it didn't really mean anything to me."
Her son took his life about a month after that conversation, Brown said, and then the police killings of black men that have been in the news took on overwhelming personal meaning for her. The headlines became human, emotional, real. Now Brown said she wants others to see racial justice issues through a human lens, too.
"We forget about the heart and the life," she said.
Brown's message that social justice issues are personal connected well with the views of other speakers on the panel, which included a Naperville resident who participated in the 1960s Freedom Rider movement, a radio host and civic activist, two North Central professors, a student and an alum who works for the college in transfer admissions.
Panelists discussed the importance of having meaningful - possibly even uncomfortable - conversations about race and justice in real life and the challenge of transferring those discussions into action beyond social media posts and trending topics.
Critical thinking is the skill that will help people transition from idly Facebooking or tweeting about sensitive topics such as police brutality or racism into taking productive action, panelist April Yvonne Garrett, a radio host and civic activist, said.
"On social media, you're constantly bombarded with people's opinions and emotions and you have to be able to filter that," Garrett said. "Civic engagement can't come unless you own your own thoughts, which become words, which become actions."
Those on the panel encouraged listeners to take responsibility for their interactions with people of all races and to remember that race relations affect us as individuals, not as stereotypes. Recognizing connections instead of separations could be a start, several panelists said.
"Blacks talk about race to blacks; whites talk about race to whites. We've got to talk together about race," said Thomas Armstrong, a Naperville resident who went to jail during the Freedom Rider movement when he was attending Tougaloo College near Jackson, Mississippi. "Blacks have to talk to whites; whites have to talk to blacks, and we can't talk to each other in a condescending manner. No one is less than you."
Translating the message of panelists such as Armstrong, Garrett and Brown into action will be the challenge for attendees, who spent the last half-hour of the event sharing their views on race and social justice in small groups. The event was part of North Central College's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy, and Dorothy Pleas, director of multicultural affairs, said the college intends to continue engaging students in discussions about how to relate better among races.
"The common thread of connecting just really came through in all the things people talked about and I was really happy to hear that," Pleas said. "This is going to be a start of a series of events we have about these issues on campus."