Eli Steele is a documentary filmmaker and writer.
When I learned that Boston’s mayor Michelle Wu hosted a racially segregated holiday party for the city council’s ‘Electeds of Color,’ I wondered: would I have been invited?
After all, my father is black, but my skin looks white.
The ‘no whites’ gathering was exposed this week after a city employee accidentally emailed invitations to Caucasian council members before hurriedly rescinding the offers.
If I had received an invite — by mistake or not — I would have headed over to Mayor Wu’s office for an explanation.
My mother is Jewish, and my paternal grandmother was white. But my paternal grandfather was black and had Native American ancestry.
Would I be allowed in the doors?
I have treaded these racialized waters before, so I can imagine that the mayor, when confronted with my complex identity, would have replied, ‘Of course, you are one of the ‘Electeds of Color.’
Though, her answer would be meaningless.
Neither my complexion nor my race reveal anything substantial about me or my character.
‘Throughout the year, we work to represent our communities with urgency and determination,’ Mayor Wu boasted on Instagram Friday, while posting a picture of the ‘Electeds of Color’ party. ‘At the holidays, we take the time to celebrate…’
You’re wrong, Mayor Wu.
This is not something to celebrate.
For this is not progress.
It is incredible that nearly 60 years after the Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in America — the country is once again grappling with this vile practice.
Today, in the name of social justice, K-12 educators divide students by race. Whites are told they are the oppressors while students of color are the oppressed. Teachers and administrative staff are separated into racial ‘affinity groups’.
Our universities are no better — everything from freshmen orientation to housing decisions are determined according to immutable characteristics.
Some colleges, including Harvard, hold ‘special’ celebrations during graduation week — whites and Jews excluded.
Stranger still, segregation is being re-introduced into nearly every aspect of public life while America grows increasingly multiracial.
In 1968, 3 percent of all married people in America had a spouse who was a different race or ethnicity, according to Pew Research. By 2019, that number had risen to 11 percent and it’s rising still as at least 19 percent of newlyweds are intermarried.
Public acceptance of intermarriage is 94 percent – and, of course, the Second Family of the United States is an interracial couple.
Yet here we are – as the nation comes together, there are efforts to tear it apart.
Mayor Wu and her fellow modern-day segregationists have more in common with the racial essentialists of the past than with a majority of Americans today.
At moments like these, I am reminded of my white grandmother’s funeral in the mid-1980s.
I was 10 years old.
When I walked into the church that day, I expected to hear stories of the bravery of my grandmother, a Daughter of the Revolution, who married my black grandfather in 1944 in deeply segregated Chicago.
Her sisters had turned their backs on her as she moved across the ‘color line’ dividing whites and blacks.
But she was undeterred. Alongside her black neighbors, who loved her dearly, my grandmother helped lead the nation’s first boycott of a segregated school north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Her protest brought about the opening of an integrated school that my father attended.
She and her husband built one of the first integrated churches in Chicago. And nearly every weekend, she marched for civil rights for all.
My grandparents’ goal was the realization of the one thing that had been denied to them: the right to be recognized as full-fledged Americans under the law — with no compromises.
During her life my grandmother received no recognition for her efforts. And in death, she was also denied any acknowledgment.
The funeral was hijacked by a black militant, who had recently married into the family.
I remember my family going out of their way to make this man feel at home. Yet he seemed to simmer with rage — even his smile had an edge to it.
In the throes of black power and the black liberation movement, he saw everything through the prism of race.
This militant man cared nothing for my grandmother’s good deeds. He reduced her to her skin color. She is no different from ‘the white man,’ he sneered.
To this man, my grandmother was an oppressor — unforgivable.
Back at my grandmother’s home, he ordered my mother out of the room so the black men could talk.
It was my grandmother’s old friend and fellow civil rights foot soldier, Mrs. Iola Toler, a black woman, who found my mother after she had retreated to an upstairs bedroom.
A fierce believer in Martin Luther King’s message of integration, Mrs. Toler walked my mother back down downstairs and together they sat in the living room in full defiance.
Mrs. Toler knew that my grandmother had sacrificed far too much for a racial essentialist to have the last word on her life.
The evil of anti-black racism are not defeated by anti-white racism.
Discrimination of any kind breeds division. Why separate Americans when together we’ve already achieved so much?
My grandmother and Mrs. Iola Toler recognized that.
So, Mayor Wu – would you have told my mother to leave the room?
Eli Steele’s latest documentary film is ‘What Killed Michael Brown?’ Substack: Man of Steele Twitter: @Hebro_Steele
