Donna Walker was born in Alabama, and she still remembers growing up in a segregated state.
Since 2014, when her husband, Bill Walker, was elected governor of Alaska, she’s been working to spread “unity and community around the state.”
Now, after a summer of racially motivated violence across the Lower 48, she’s helping host an event named “A Call to Unity!” at 6 p.m. Tuesday in St. Paul’s Catholic Church.
Sherry Patterson is leader of Juneau’s Black Awareness Association.
“There’ll be some speaking and prayer, of course, and maybe a couple of songs,” Patterson said with a smile. “We just want to join the chorus of all those who have gone before us in the past month or so, sponsoring events.”
Walker has long been a supporter of Bridge Builders, an Anchorage-based group that brings Alaskans of different ethnic backgrounds together for social events. In 2015, Walker and Patterson brought the project to Juneau. A food-themed event called “Taste of the Nations” was its pioneering program, and other happy celebrations have followed.
[Building a bridge to a better Juneau]
Now, Walker said, “we want to get more into the trenches with things.”
Segregation is illegal in the United States, and Alaska hasn’t seen the violence that many Lower 48 urban areas have, but both Walker and Patterson believe that racism and discrimination haven’t been annihilated here any more than they have in the Lower 48.
Instead of outright, visible discrimination, racism shows up in veiled forms.
“I’m from Louisiana where a lot of this stuff happens,” Patterson said.
“I know someone — and this shocked me — she told me she wouldn’t go into Walmart anymore because ‘there’s just too many people that don’t speak English,’” Walker said.
“I’ve heard the same thing about McDonald’s,” Patterson responded, alluding to discrimination against first-generation immigrants.
Patterson and Walker each said that sometimes it can be uncomfortable, but confronting concealed, dog-whistle racism is necessary.
“I was in a coffee shop here in Juneau,” Patterson explained, “and I was next up, and the guy (behind the counter) said, ‘somebody get to the dark woman. No — the dark woman is up next.’”
“I knew he was talking to me,” Patterson said. “I just stood there, and I’m looking around. Everybody around started looking at the floor. They looked at the floor.”
Patterson asked the 40-something man to step aside and talk to her in semi-privacy.
“What you did is not cool,” she told the man.
“What did I do?” he responded.
He didn’t understand, Patterson said, and so she explained it to him.
“You just called me out in front of a whole store of white people as the ‘dark woman,’” she recalled telling him. “That’s not cool. I am black. It would have been better for you to say help the black lady, and I still wouldn’t have liked that, but that would have been better. All you had to say is the lady in the pink shirt is up next.”
The man apologized to her with tears in his eyes and said he hadn’t known.
“Now, I’ve shared this with other black folks, and they said, ‘He knew — he just wanted to embarass you,’” Patterson said. “But looking into his face as I did, he had no clue. He had no clue. And now every time I go in there, I say, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ And we’re cool.”
Patterson said it isn’t always easy to confront people about something they’ve done, but she’s glad she talked to the man.
“Had I not done that, he would have gone away not knowing. I would have been mad, never patronized the store again and put it all out that the store’s racist. And that’s what happens a lot of times. People are ignorant about certain things,” Patterson said. “You would think that not in this day and age, but ignorance exists. It really does.”
• Contact reporter James Brooks at 523-2258 or james.k.brooks@juneauempire.com.
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