Spiderweb
There’s a spider living in the holly bushes outside my house. Every night, it spins a web across my front path. When I go out to walk the dog before sunrise, I run straight into the sticky, invisible threads.
This time of year, though, the sun rises early, and I can see the web.
That’s how I’ve been thinking about the short racist video that’s been circulating through our community this week and about the many videos over the last months and years showing black people dying at the hands of white people, often police.
Say what you like about 21st-century technology, it does sometimes act as a kind of sunlight. Racism, racial slurs, and violence against people of color are as old as America. We know this. But actually hearing white people taunt blacks, and seeing African Americans gunned down or suffocated by police, can make those realities immediate and raw to people who might otherwise turn away.
In Swarthmore — in the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District — it has been too easy for too many of us to turn away.
These videos help us see the spiderweb.
By “us,” I mean nonblack people — particularly white people like me. Black people don’t need that help.
On the other hand, of course, these violent images have been around for years. They go back at least as far as the 1991 beating of Rodney King. And what has changed? Shouldn’t the web be absolutely visible by now? As Jamil Smith wrote in the New Republic five long years ago, “the surge of video evidence has only made our society increasingly numb to the spectacle of black death.”
Browsing in the Swarthmorean archives a month or two back, I came across an unsigned opinion piece from June 28, 1929, urging town segregation. Responding to the purchase of several houses on Union Avenue by black families, the writer praises local blacks and insists they are welcome in Swarthmore — just not in the same neighborhoods as whites. The piece says, in part:
Perhaps it is the Wesley AME Church, on a side street, that has made Swarthmore’s colored people such quiet, unobjectionable citizens. Perhaps they have tried to emulate in their own lives some of the characteristics they have observed in the white people about them here in Swarthmore.... That the people of Swarthmore are unusually unprejudiced and sympathetic towards the colored people of the Borough has been demonstrated over a period of years. Ruff, at the college gym, holds the respect and esteem of every man who ever knew him; Joseph, at the Presbyterian Church, David at the Woman’s Club, a number of the men who drive for families in the borough, can all attest to the kindness and thoughtfulness which they have received.
The condescension and the racism of these words chills me all over again as I type them here.
It’s important to remember our history as we struggle to make a better future for our town, our school district, and our country.
And, bleak as things can seem, there have been a few signs lately that our community might be taking baby steps toward a better future.
In early 2019, Swarthmore Borough Council member Sarah Graden organized an open meeting in Borough Hall to talk about race and inclusion. This resulted in an expanded Human Relations Commission with a broadened mission that includes outreach and education. The group has been convening regularly for nearly a year.
Last fall, teachers and parents at Swarthmore-Rutledge School began meeting to talk about how to address racial bias in the schools. The conversation soon expanded to include how identity, including religion, LGBTQ+ status, and ability, can be used to make children feel marginal at school.
This group, which named itself SRS Big Idea, called for the WSSD administration and school board to form a diversity, equity, and inclusion committee. At first, this proposal seemed to fall on deaf ears. In the wake of the local video’s circulation, however, the district has committed to create such a committee. That’s a step.
Nonetheless, it’s hard to feel hopeful in this moment.
It feels as if every time we take a step forward in the fight against racism and injustice, we wake up the next morning to find the spider has rebuilt its web.
