Yesterday, I drove down Mildred Shute and I came home wondering who the hell she was. All I could discover on my own about her was that she also had a park named after her. After asking around, I learned that she was a community activist, who did a lot of good for the projects there off Murfreesboro Road (or is it still Lafayette there?).
But you can’t tell that from searching the city’s site. Or from searching the internet. Someone who knows has to tell you.
As I’m sure everyone now knows, Steve McNair was killed this weekend. I don’t have anything to say directly to that, except that it is a horrible tragedy and my heart goes out to his family and friends. If you’re not from Nashville, I’ll just also point out that McNair was always around town (shoot, even I saw him out a couple of times and I’m anti-social) and he did a tremendous amount for our community. A tremendous amount.
And I don’t want to downplay that.
But I keep seeing this idea popping up about how important Steve McNair was for the black community here in Nashville. Now, if black people want to talk about how important Steve McNair was, fine. I will shut up and listen.
But when I hear white people going on about how people who aren’t from Nashville just don’t understand how black kids in our city just don’t have any role models and McNair was the first person they could really look up to?
I want to just ask this: how the hell would you know?
Maybe McNair was the first black person who was on your radar, but the first black person?
I say this as a white person, but this to me is the real ongoing problem with whiteness as a social construct–if something is not real to us, unknown to us, it is unknown, not real. No matter how many non-white people may know something, until it permeates white consciousness, it’s somehow unreal in our society.
On top of that, I think the problem of Mildred Shute illustrates something more. Here’s a woman who clearly meant something to this city (once we view Nashville as a place where everybody who lives here actually lives and has history and culture and community), enough so that she had a street named for her and a park.
And yet, somehow, she was unimportant enough for the city to bother to make sure that it was clear on its own website who she was and why she has a city park named after her. Not even a sentence or two giving you a little hint about who she was.
If we consider history to be a large blank canvas and each of us is throwing mud at it, hoping to make a big enough contribution to be noticed by those who come after us, in order to shape their decisions about where they throw their mud, I’d hope we might see how some folks’ mud clumps get hosed off the canvas at a much higher rate than others. We loose sight of those contributions.
That white folks can talk about Steve McNair’s contribution to our city as if it is unique is only evidence of how much of our own history has been hidden from us and we don’t even notice.
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I didn’t even bother to bring up the Civil Rights stuff because I hope it’s self-evident that there are a lot of people in Nashville right now who did a lot for Nashville in that regard.
Filed under: About Town
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Well said.
Charles E. Davis. Perhaps some of those out of town folks need a little help for some of the other community role models in Nashville.
I heard that.
“But when I hear white people going on about how people who aren’t from Nashville just don’t understand how black kids in our city just don’t have any role models and McNair was the first person they could really look up to?”
You must hang out with strange and ignorant white people, expand your circle of friends before painting people with broad brush
Oh, rbt, please, please, please, be my wise white friend!
I didn’t even bother to bring up the Civil Rights stuff because I hope it’s self-evident that there are a lot of people in Nashville right now who did a lot for Nashville in that regard.
There’s probably a number of people around who still think of James Lawson as a trouble-maker/terrorist.
If I was Bill Hall, Mearl Purvis, or (for a time) Oprah Winfrey, I think I’d take a little exception to the statement that Steve McNair was the first person black kids in Nashville could really look up to.
And probably a lot of other names on the news EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR YEARS, non-news, and otherwise that are just escaping me right now (sorry, I’m struggling a little bit to be able to think or communicate properly right now but y’all understand the point I’m sure).
I don’t like the sports guys as role models stuff much. Fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, people in the neighborhood, business people, etc can serve as role models better than many athletes. Especially since they can actually be in a child’s life.
I never lived in Nashville, but I can remember black althetes going back to Perry Wallace playing basketball for Vanderbilt. I believe and he and another Vandy player were the first black basketball players in the SEC. And, I’m sure there are plenty of people, black and white, whom kids, black and white, can look up to.
Charles Davis? Uh, he’s a good guy I guess. Nice car. See him at the Y all the time. Black community doesn’t necessarily consider him a role model.
Oprah? When was the last time you heard about her coming to Nashville, or doing anything for the city? She has personal problems with this place (or at least TSU).
I was only born here, reared elsewhere, but my folks lived here on and off for many years. The names of “role models” here are mostly names that “y’all” don’t really know. They are people who taught at Meharry and Fisk and TSU and worked in the AG’s office and designed homes and sat in the Legislature. Their walls are filled with plaques from some small civic organization, some had real accomplishments and some just made a lot of money.
I think people conflate “role model” with “celebrity” often times, and that a functional part of being a role model is having wide ranging visibility. Perhaps that’s becoming more accurate in the modern age given the strong gravitational field of multimedia distractions. But you don’t have to be a multimillionaire to be a role model.
Maybe black athletes are most likely to show up on a lot of white folks’ radar because they tend to be regarded as the least threatening (and most easily disposable) of potential black role models.
Muhammad Ali was a controversial (and widely despised) figure in his prime, because he was the buck Negro who refused to just ’shut up and play.’ It’s no mystery why he became more widely embraced by the dominant culture as an iconic champion only after he was stricken with Parkinson’s. His intelligent, articulate, lively, and often militant voice was effectively silenced. Michael Jordan, on the other hand, maintained a highly positive public image by studiously avoiding politics; he kept his mouth shut and counted his money.
“But you don’t have to be a multimillionaire to be a role model.”
You make a very good point and one that I need to remember.
Gandalf -
I only brought up Oprah because she too was an African-American newscaster in Nashville FOR A TIME – and thereby could well have been a role model AT THE TIME SHE WAS HERE for young black people – much like the also aforementioned Mearl Purvis, who was here for MANY YEARS, and Bill Hall, who has been part of the news scene in Nashville for many years more than EITHER OF THEM.
I thought it was pretty obvious by my previously clarifying “for a time” that I certainly didn’t mean Oprah was an ALL-TIME EVER role model in Nashville but obviously I didn’t make myself clear enough.
(And my apologies to everyone if the above came off exceptionally shrill, really I just paused here for a moment away from my breakdown because the names Bill Hall and Mearl Purvis immediately sprung to mind and I was reading but I probably just should have not commented anyway.)
As the universe would have it, I was on Mildred Shute today.
Well, not ON her, but, you know.
So Sar, you don’t mean you were driving down Mildred Shute Blvd today, do you?
Another great post, Aunt B.