Kansas City, you’re scared of the hard discussion about race. Quit hiding behind ‘nice’

When talking about race in Kansas City, you have to keep it simple.

Because too many white people think, “It’s not so bad here compared to other places.”

Because too many Black people know the price of rocking the boat.

Because too many other non-Black people of color get too concerned about being stung by the stigma of association with Black people.

Because Kansas City is scared toothless that it might be known as anything other than that nice, friendly, Midwestern city with barbecue and jazz and pretty fountains that would never have the racial controversies of sister city St. Louis or any other “rougher” metropolis.

No, when talking about race in Kansas City, you have to keep it simple. Keep it passive. Sweep it not under rugs but under buildings.

For example, we held a “talkback” session after the performance of one of the plays that I wrote last year.. The show was staged at a prominent cultural institution, which an older Black woman told us allowed Black people into only one day a year when she was growing up. Other Black audience members backed up her experience.

But about a week later, I bumped into a white person who had attended the event. She made a point of telling me that she didn’t believe that this institution had that history. I pointed out the obvious: that the time being discussed was the Jim Crow era, and most places had prohibitions against Black Americans freely going where they wanted when they wanted. Her answer to that both puzzled and infuriated me — because she asked, “Why wouldn’t they have gone anyway?”

This wasn’t a socially conservative person. She’s a well-regarded, civic-minded philanthropist, old enough to have been around at the time of legal segregation. And yet she actually said to me that while she thinks there are Black people who may believe they weren’t allowed to visit this institution (one I’m deliberately not naming because this would apply to most cultural and entertainment facilities in Jim Crow America), that belief didn’t make it true.

People had to be mistaken or naive or chicken, because their reality didn’t match up to how she viewed Kansas City, or at least that particular institution.

And that, for me, sums up the state of race relations in Kansas City — both Jim Crow Kansas City and today’s Kansas City. Race relations built on illusion and pretension, with a smidge of gaslighting, masquerading as civility and friendliness. A city that constantly looks for ways to recharacterize reality to make it look not nearly as bad as other places — even as J.C. Nichols, the architect of discriminatory racial covenants, still had a prominent fountain and street named after him until just this month.

When the Ferguson uprising happened in the St. Louis area following the death of Micheal Brown, I heard many people wonder whether the same thing could happen in Kansas City. For the most part, the answer was no. The reason from most white people I talked to was that Kansas City doesn’t have that kind of simmering racial animosity. That made most of them feel comfortable. The reason from most Black people I talked to was that they thought Black Kansas Citians are generally too passive. That made most of them feel frustrated.

I recently moved away from Kansas City to take a job in Louisville, Kentucky, in the middle of the city’s biggest public racial protest since probably the uprising in 1968 after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Before I left, however, it wasn’t lost on me that from Day One, the single most important priority in Kansas City’s reaction to the protests here seemed to be guarding the iconic Country Club Plaza by literally surrounding it with a police presence.

And that to me symbolized the simplicity of how Kansas City handles race: Let’s protect the city’s crown jewel by any means necessary. Because historical and current systemic racial issues aside, let’s please preserve Kansas City’s nice Midwestern reputation.

Michelle Tyrene Johnson is a fourth-generation Kansas Citian, playwright, public radio journalist and former attorney. She was The Kansas City Star’s “Diversity Diva” columnist from 2008 to 2015.

This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM.