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(Chyna Roundtree). And that's kind of
sad that you have another existence when you
are with your family and with your friends, but even like when
we were talking, I remember in my neighborhood when my mom
first bought our property, we moved from a predominantly black
area that was lower SES.
And my mother is real young, but she went to school and handled
her business so we moved out.
I remember when the white people moved, I remember thinking, uh
oh, the "white flight".
It must mean the school system is going to be bad, and I
remember my mother was going to send me to another school
because she didn't want me to go to school,
you know, in that area.
Because all the "white" people were leaving, so that meant all
the teachers and the houses were up for sale and it was around
that time when we were talking about all the people from the
projects were moving out towards the suburbs.
We moved from Chicago to the suburbs.
So, it ended up they changed the border, so I went to a school
that was more racially diverse, but even when they moved the
borders it was amazing because that community was mostly a
Caucasian community again white people left.
Then guess what they said about the school now.
Education is terrible, supposedly.
It's ridiculuous.
(Dr. Leitschuh). Ari, you had told
a story last time we spoke when you
recognized some things, some reactions you had when you were
working in a store about people of color coming in.
(Mr. Tukes). I was a manager
in a store in Champaign, and I noticed, this
was something that I was doing, I was
discriminating against my own people.
Black people would come in the store, and I would monitor and
observe when white youths would come in the store and black
youths would come in the store.
I would base it upon, and that's what killed me when I had to
think about it, was how they looked, how the group was, what
they were talking about when they walked in.
I would do exactly what I didn't like being done to me.
I would walk down the row, I'd walk from behind the register
and I'm trying to see, you know, I'll go up to
them and say how are you doing?
What do you need?
"We all good, we just walking around".
They're walking around, and I study my own people a lot.
So we walk in groups, and that's for a person who may get fired
from his store coming up in a lot of
loss prevention, you walk with that group.
So I walk with that group, and I'm monitoring, and I'm noticing
that they just looking, but it is trained.
I was trained to really look and monitor a young black kids
between the ages of 15 to 25.
You know, watch 'em, you know what I'm saying.
When young white kids come in, if they came as individuals they
cool, if they come in twos they cool, but three, four, five,
I'm looking too because there's too many.
But I just found myself looking at African-Americans the same
way and was targeting them the same way that I was being
targeted, and it just taught me that I am a
part of the problem, okay.
What do you do?
I don't know, I had to try, what I tried to do was
do it for everybody.
I followed everybody because I realized that I still needed to
watch my store, I don't want to make judgments about people.
But I was judging my own, I was judging my own, and I wasn't
doing the same thing for or towards blacks or African
Americans as I was doing Caucasians or white Americans.
I wasn't following them the same way.
I wasn't always, when I would go to a white person, sometimes my
mind I knew they was willing to buy so I was willing to sell.
I would go up to a black person, and I would say, "Do you need
some help with anything?"
"Naw, I'm just looking, I'm not really trying to buy nothing".
And I wouldn't press it.
So I said okay, you are a part of this cycle, so then what I
would do is just hit everybody.
I'm following you [unclear dialogue].
[audience laughter].
(Mr. Tukes). Because I realized
something, money is green, and yeah there
are races, businesses that have people that are ignorant, not
racist business.
But people that work behind those registers and open up
those doors and work there.
There are some ignorant, racist people, but money is green.
So I had to really come at everybody the same way and
follow people around if I was curious and target
everybody as far as trying to sell something to them.
My own as well as those outside of my culture, but at first for,
I worked with the company for about 2 and 1/2 years and for
about a year I was really targeting my own people.
(Ms. Peppers). But it's no different
than, you know, teaching our kids,
you know I teach my son already look for this,
don't do this, don't do that.
It would be nice, on the one hand, you're sitting in these
multicultural classes and you're talking about okay moving
forward and trusting and all this other stuff.
But the reality for me sets in really quickly, in saying really
quickly we can talk about this in class, but I need my
son to go out prepared.
In some sense I still perpetuate the same cycle,
but it's like which is more important to me right now.
It's more important that my son knows how to go
out and deal with the police.
As opposed to saying, you know, if you want to wear your pants
without your belt hanging down your behind, go ahead.
I wouldn't dare let him go out of the house like that.
(Mrs. Tukes). You know better.
(Ms. Peppers). If he wants to
be comfortable like that, I should let him be
comfortable like that, but I don't because this other part of
me kicks in and says okay, you knew that at home,
don't go out in public like that.
You know you're, internally, you know you're doing that.
(Ms. Johnson). Yeah, I have to
explain that to like my male cousins and my
brothers, you know they like their waves in their hair so
they wear their do rags and stuff.
And it's like a lot of my mature relatives, myself included, even
though I"m still of the young bunch, I just have a lot of old
fashioned values, if you will.
And life experiences have taught me, you can't go outdoors
looking like anything or looking like the particular group that
is targeted by the police or getting picked on
for "probably shoplifting".
You know, you have to present yourself in a conservative
manner, and if you're not conservative looking then you
better believe you are going to be an outcast and it's
going to draw some uncomfortable attention to yourself.
And I had to explain like bit by bit to my youngest brother,
because he clearly did not get it, and
he's told me thank you after I have taken it bit by bit.
See his experiences wasn't like my older younger brother's and
mine, so we have to school him, we have to teach him.
Life was better for us financially when he came along,
as a family, but as older kids, we could remember living in a
two bedroom apartment having to share the same bed, having to
share the same room, everything.
Kids kept multiplying, but we still had to share tight
quarters, but it's not like that for him.
His dreams are much bigger, our dreams okay they were big for
the time, but they weren't nearly as big as his.
We would've never thought of having an in-ground backyard
pool, that was just unfounded to us,
so for him to have to hear that.
You don't, you don't wear do rags or any kind of scarf, you
don't see me going down doors in rollers do you?
(Ms. Peppers). Right, exactly.
(Ms. Johnson). You know, you don't
see me going to the store in house shoes or
you know just looking.
If it's not conservative, I can't do that, it fits the
stereotype and draws attention in a way that's not comfortable,
you don't want to set yourself up for that.
(Ms. Tukes). That's why I don't
understand when we have brothers and
sisters who do do that.
Because you know you are already targeted.
You already know that no matter where you go, you know what I'm
saying, if you walk out of your house with your pants hanging
down, a do rag on, you know, house shoes, looking crazy,
you've got to know that people are going to look at you and
say, "I wonder".
You know what I'm saying?
You've got to know that.
(Ms. Peppers). It's a mixed message
we're sending, like I said, when we
send them a mixed message.
I tell them okay, you can hang out like this at home, but don't
go out in public like this.
You talk this way at home, but don't talk like this in public,
I mean it's like for them, the other thing with
them is they're so sheltered.
Our kids are really very sheltered, they are with
us a lot, they are in activities where they went to a
predominantly black school.
Now my son is at a pretty much all white school, and he has
pretty much learned how to just adapt
from one situation to the next.
So we really are teaching them that, and it would really be
wonderful if everyone had this class in first or second or
third grade every year, and you could say
racism would be wiped out somehow.
But I don't know how to get past teaching him that,
when I know that that still perpetuates racism.
It still, those stereotypes and all that stuff.
(Mr. Tukes). I know the reality
is that that is the world we live in.
So the reality is that we don't have children right now, but we
one day desire to have a child or two.
And I know that I have to learn from my experiences, and I know
that we're going to make mistakes in what we teach them.
But the fact of the matter is that we're going to have to
teach that they will have different faces.
It's not fair, no it's not fair, but they got
to have different faces.
Because we are people that have to act on survival, we don't
have to think that this is what I want to
do first, then survival.
We have to think survival first and then
map our plan off of survival and that's the way it is.
I know my mother, my mother had me dress,
I was the oddball kid growing up.
She put me out there [unclear dialogue] my mother and my dad.
My dad couldn't dress, and my mother, I don't know what she
was, what she was trying to do was trying to make me not look
like the neighborhood I was from.
So I wouldn't get targeted by the kids in the neighborhood and
people outside of the neighborhood.
It ended up happening anyway because I looked like,
I stood out like a sore thumb.
I was wearing sweaters, expensive $300 and $400 sweaters
in a community that didn't even really wear sweaters, and I was
dressing out of my social class and social peers.
And I felt like an oddball doing it, and I didn't, I understood
why she was doing it because she explained it,
but I didn't like it.
And it wasn't until I got on my own and begin to experience the
ugly faces of the world that I began to
put two and two together.
So I realized that there would be things that would have to
pass on to our children about the realities of African
Americans in America.
I don't know what it is for African Americans in Africa, and
I don't know what is for African Americans in Europe, but I do
know about African Americans in America, and I know I would have
to teach my daughter or son that you're
going to have to have some faces.
And you're going to have to think survival, and you can
still enjoy your youth and do that at the same time, you
understand what I'm saying?
If we continue that cycle then our kids
will continue that cycle.
And though they know that they can shoot for their stars for
their education, they klnow they can be anything they want.
But they also know that when you are around your people, there
are some survival techniquest you have
to do within your own culture.
And there is a different set of survival techniques that you
have to do outside of your culture, in order for you to be
successful in both.
You're going to scrape your knee a bit.
I've scraped my knees, but you gotta learn.
(Ms. Johnson). You got to know
which tools to bring out the toolbox at the right time.
Yeah right, and that's just like talking, just like you were
saying, you had to learn how to, that was my same experience.
I was going through an identity crisis when I came to Champaign
for the first time entering the sixth grade.
Because I was in accelerated classes, who was mostly in
accelerated classes.
Who was in the accelerated classes?
The white children were and maybe one
or two Asian kids okay?
If there was someone from the Middle East that happened to
come in, they were there too.
After they learned the language of course, but it was just
really something.
I wasn't liked by the black girls for a while, for the ones
that were in the more remedial classes.
They said, "She thinks she's better, who
does she think she is?
I can't stand her".
They didn't give me a chance to express how I was.
"Then she talk white, she act like she white, and she's smart,
and you see what class she in right".
It was maybe one other African American girl that was in there,
but she had to deal with some of the same things.
But because she grew up in the same neighborhood as them, I
don't think she got ridiculed as much, but by me living in a
white side of town I even got that more
from black [unclear dialogue].
So it took that whole middle school experience, I didn't
start picking up any black friends until my 8th grade year
and then they said you know I thought you were like this but
you are not like that at all.
Then it took even into highschool for others, they
said, "I used to think you were stuck up".
I was thinking that, and one guy just told me after hearing some
of the guys you've dated, clearly from the hood, you know,
and that's a different story in itself,
I guess opposites attract.
We won't go into that, that a whole nother subject.
[audience laughter].
(Mr. Tukes). That's that whole other
face I was talking about.
(Ms. Johnson). You're right there are
different faces, and it was like he had to
tell me, and my mouth almost fell open.
I'm like finally you validate me for the person that I am, he was
like "I used to think that you were stuck up, but Malinda
you're not stuck up" he said, "I've got that confused with
sophistication, I just didn't know what [unclear dialogue]".
I was like, no he knew not [unclear dialogue].