Amy’s Early Race Education
In Greenville, Ohio, where Amy grew up, there were not many kids — or adults — who were focused social equity or progressive ideas. For this reason and others, Amy stood out. And among her friends, very few shared her willingness to look honestly at whiteness and racism — except Shannon Edwards, who was two years ahead of Amy in school. One afternoon in 1987, when they were in tenth and twelfth grade, Amy and Shannon fixed up their hair and shot video of themselves dancing and singing to the song “I Wanna Dance” by Whitney Houston. Amy had big wild hair and danced and sang with unadulterated joy — and then she turned to Shannon and said that she was in the wrong skin. Inside, she told Shannon, she was a Black girl.
“People didn’t talk about stuff like that in Ohio,” said Shannon. “But Amy did.” There was no time when Shannon knew her that Amy wasn’t fiercely feminist, with a firm bent toward racial justice. “There was something inside her that was always accepting and open, even though we were both raised in conservative white families.”
Amy might have been open minded as a high schooler, but not until college was she challenged to question her own bias and recognize her white privilege. Five years later, as a sophomore at American University in 1992, Amy wrote an essay about participating in a discussion section that followed a class viewing of a filmed called “The Magnificent African Cake,” about European colonization of Africa.
Here’s that essay, which might mark the first time Amy had to reckon publicly with her own white privilege – and far from the last. It’s a glimpse in the very first seeds of a race awareness that would continue to grow:
“Following the movie, I joined my group in order to participate in an in-class assessment of the film. The goal was to create a balance sheet of the cost and benefits the Africans received from the European colonization. The cost in the situation were quite obvious while the benefits were not. In our group that essentially came down to two white women attempting to convince two black women that they were some actual benefits.
My reaction to the situation was very strong. I tried desperately to show how the transportation systems, hospitals, schools in mere assimilation could, in the end, be considered beneficial. Though the price paid during occupation was high they were tangible benefits afterwards.
The two black women were immovable, not for lack of trying or mere stubbornness, but due to their personal grief. So though they tried to contemplate my ideas, they were too emotional over the subject to be ‘rational’ like me. My friend and I were unable to communicate with them. The longer I kept trying, the more I began to feel as though I were defending the colonizers. It felt similar to defending Hitler from World War II to an individual of the Jewish faith.
I was wrong. Though I have never been prejudiced, I felt like I was being a racist. It was a horrible feeling. These girls had a heritage, a feeling for their ancestors that I have never felt. I watched the film and felt sympathy for the Africans who are suffering and disgust for the narrow-minded attitudes of the Europeans, but during our discussion, I felt I was insensitive and callous. For the first time in my life I truly felt guilty for being white.
“When I walked away from this class, I felt a change. For several days afterwards I continued to think about what happened. I’ve begun to question my open mindedness, which I had always prided myself on, and my basic lack of experience. The situation, as well as the class in general, has made me look closer at people of another culture with strong heritage of another culture.”
What stands out most in this early writing is Amy’s willingness to look frankly at her own lack of experience and insight – at her own implicit bias. Years later, colleagues she met through her coaching and mentoring work talked admiringly about Amy’s capacity for learning, especially when it came to talking about race and owning her own privilege — she wasn’t perfect, they said, but she was always mindful of her own limitations, always working actively on getting better.