I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, a mid-sized city that's known mainly for its civil rights history. Everyone's likely seen the video footage of "Birmingham's finest" spraying Black protesters with fire hoses;
some have probably seen the images of young Black children attacked by police dogs. My grandfather was on the city council that kicked Eugene "Bull" Connor, the police commissioner and architect of that violent response to a peaceful protest, out of office. For his civic duty, he received a number of death threats from the local citizenry, so for about a month when my mother was in high school, there were FBI agents posted outside her house. These images haunt me; the city I love, the city where I grew up, the city where I'd like to raise my son, was known throughout the whole nation as "Bombingham."I carry the public guilt of that era with me, and as a White, upper-middle class Birmingham-ian, I feel that it's my personal responsibility to account for these injustices. Many of my more liberal political positions - my belief that more federal and state funding should be spent on public education, my belief that reforming the American justice and penitentiary system should be a crucial national project, and even my uneasy supprt of affirmative action policies - stem from this moment in my city's history.
But, at the same time, my family's wealth, my private school education, and my commitment to academic study has taken me further and further away from any sustained contact with the African-American community in Birmingham, a community I felt very much involved in as a child in the public school system. While education (obviously) is very important to me, I do think the American education system does as much to maintain social inequalities as it does to overcome them. And yet, I find myself seeking a job as an English professor in a top American university. These are places where I will likely be teaching White students of relative family wealth and affluence, not Black students from the impoverished inner-city - in other words, places where I will be teaching people with backgrounds similar to my own. After all, the median family income of a college freshman last year was $78,000 - a figure that 78.6% of African American families in this country made less than last year. To complicate this personal contradiction, I've just started a family, and that process has forced me to re-examine many of my long-held political positions. Whereas I have historically been somewhat supportive of policies that lessen the massive wealth gap in this country, suddenly I feel the need to provide for - and protect - my family's own financial interests. This personal tension between my desire for the public good and my desire for private security is proving difficult to resolve. I'm no longer fully comfortable with the government spending my hard-earned tax dollars on expensive social projects that have no guarantee for success.
Contradictory positions, to be sure. But perhaps by owning up to this contradiction in my own political orientation, perhaps by realizing that it has emerged out of specific historical, geographical, and familial influences, I can understand it a little better - and, if nothing else - realize that it has a profound effect on the arguments I would make in the public sphere.
