Understanding the legacy of racism | Eva Abram to present lecture at Depot Museum

“[There was a] hierarchy of races that was set up in the 1700s, with Caucasians at the top and Africans, black people, at the bottom,” Abram said. “Everybody knows this hierarchy, but today not everybody thinks about it.”

By Daniel Nash • February 25, 2016 2:50 pm

Eric Garner in New York. Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.

Each name represents a black man who has died at the hands of police since 2014. Each one was a high-profile case — two of them were documented on video. And each has contributed to a national conversation on institutional racism.

As that conversation has snowballed in the two years leading to the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, the weeks and months following his election in 2008, when pundits wondered aloud if the first black president marked the beginning of a post-racial society, has come to seem very long ago.

Our personal memories are short. But Eva Abram would argue history’s memory is long.

Abram is a lecturer with Humanities Washington who presents American stories from an African-American perspective — stories like the life, escape and legal woes of Charles Mitchell, one of Washington state’s few documented slaves. A trained actress and storyteller, she augments her lectures with monologues taken from her subjects’ correspondence.

Abram will present “Defeating Racism Today” 11:30 a.m. Saturday at the Issaquah Depot Museum. The lecture discusses how explicitly institutionalized racism survives as an insidious implicit institutional racism today.

“In my talk, I use the example of housing,” Abram said. “If you look at Levittown [a suburb in New York], that was a community that was established as a whites-only suburb. It’s no longer institutionally segregated, but you now have a legacy of a place where black people could not get the loans necessary to secure housing for themselves.”

She said the Tri-Cities area has a similar history — and though the area isn’t explicitly whites-only today, modern residents cannot help but be influenced by the preceding generations from whence they came.

This information can take audiences aback.

“They are maybe surprised by the extent of the racism here in Washington,” Abram said. “And they won’t normally think about it because they are living their own lives.”

But the manner in which these values are quietly passed down has to be understood. Without that understanding, conversations about race can be unproductive, such as when people respond to the Black Lives Matter movement with the phrase, “All Lives Matter.”

“When we say black lives matter, we’re saying black lives haven’t mattered in the past,” Abram said. “When you look at the laws, you’ll see black lives did not matter then, because people could shoot, maim and kill black people at will. Generally, you could get away with murder.

“That attitude hasn’t really changed that much and you can, perhaps, see these instances where black people have been shot by police — you can see that there is an attitude that they may have a right to shoot these people.”