Oppression??

Last June one of my friends and I walked to the bank down the street, which is where EDS banks. We both had reimbursement checks and wanted to cash them. In the bank, the cashier started with my friend, who is a person of color. The cashier talked to her manager who then spoke to my friend about the check. The manager explained that he needed to call the school to be sure everything was okay with the check. My friend started getting upset and expressing her views loudly. To her, the bank personnel was being racist and that was why they were taking so long and giving her problems. To me, I thought that the manager and cashier were doing what was expected of them.

Now jump to today, I have another reimbursement check and go to the same bank. I spent twenty minutes cashing this check. Again a manager needed to call the school to confirm that the check was legal. She and the cashier kept explaining that the bank's policy for certain size checks was to contact the business where it had been written.

I know that sometimes people/businesses are oppressive. I'm saddened that the first thought of my friend was that the people were being racist. Unfortunately my friend has probably experienced a great deal of judgement based solely on the color of her skin or on her gender. To her, she reacted appropriately considering her background.

When I am met with what I think is discrimination, I try to look around me and see how others are being treated. During the first incident one reason I didn't think they were acting racially was because they didn't automatically accept my check while hassling my friend. They didn't suddenly say, "Oh, you two are together. Well, never mind, ma'am, your check is good with us."

I also look to see how others are reacting. Does anyone else look awkward with what is happening? Both times, no other customers were in the bank. However the personnel appeared as uncomfortable as my friend. Both times they explained over and over that this was their policy.

Unfortunately when one has experienced oppression many times, one doesn't expect to be treated in a just manner. People don't necessarily want to decide to be fair to others when they don't experience fairness for themselves. AND I am amazed by the people who can come from a place of oppression and treat others with the respect that they often did not receive.

The chains of oppression will be broken when we don't have to consider if how we are being treated fairly or not. My prayer for the world is that these chains no longer have power of anyone.

Freedom Songs

Last night I watched Freedom Songs: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement. I expected to hear spirituals and was surprised to find out about popular songs of the time that were often written as a means to express the singer's desire for freedom. Many of the artists had to talk in ambiguity just as slaves had to sing songs with a second meanings. The people in power would have shut down the radio stations if they had known to what some of the songs referred.

I'd heard many of these popular songs before and had never made the connection between the words and the civil rights movement. I never really understood what Sam Cooke meant when he sang about how "it had been a long time coming, but a change was gonna come." Or when the Impressions sang, "People get ready, there's a train a comin'," I didn't realize that they were talking about a figurative train. I can't help but think about the underground railroad, which of course didn't really have tracks or a locomotive, but was an unstoppable movement for some to reach freedom.

When I actually look at the lyrics for Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On," I realize that sometime the words were laid out there for everyone to hear. I think the music blocked some of people's realizations that Gaye was callling for action and I don't think he means action against the Vietnam War. He sings

Picket lines and picket signs. Don't punish me with brutality.
Talk to me, so you can see. Oh, what's going on. What's going
on....

Some of Gaye's words talk about long hair, but as someone pointed out in Freedom Songs, women stopped wearing their wigs and let their afro's grow out. Gaye may have hidden his call to action for civil rights within the Vietnam struggle.

Many of these songs talked about chains. I never really thought about chains as meaning those of white oppression. Even though slavery had been outlawed in the later 1800s, people of color knew they were still not free. In some ways as I watched this doc I kept thinking, "We're not finished. We still have a long way to go." At one point a picture from the late 50s/early 60s showed a marching man holding a sign that said "End poverty" because he knew that poverty was one way to hold people down. Poverty is still holding people in a silent place.

This music still has a place in our world. When a person of color has to work twice as hard to prove him/herself, we still need to sing about "Unity" and "Eyes on the Prize". Until banks give loans equally to all people, we have to keep saying, "Stand!" and "Respect." And until all people can walk down the street without hearing names yelled at them, we have to keep believing "I Shall Not Be Moved."