THE STEPS WE TAKE

A white Southerner confronts her past.

From her perspective as a white Mississippian, journalist and filmmaker Fentress writes candidly about her growing consciousness of race, responsibility, and community. Several chapters focus on volunteering, which began when she was a girl collecting money for the March of Dimes. At the Baptist college she attended, she joined Helping Hand, bringing prayer and cheer to a homeless shelter. For nearly two decades she worked for Meals on Wheels. Each experience widened her sense of the world, but she knew she was “tending strictly to the low-hanging, good-deeds fruit in my vicinity” and not addressing the insidious problem of racism. Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, she hardly knew any Black people; in high school, she dressed as a Ku Klux Klansman for a history day celebration. “I lacked both the moral empathy and even the acquaintance with a Black person to fathom that the costume choice was not fun but appalling,” she writes. In 1970, threatened by integration, her parents had sent her to an all-white “segregation academy,” one of many private schools enrolling tens of thousands of white children across the South. Fentress struggles to understand how attending the academy shaped her sense of the world, her relationships with Blacks—such as her Black house cleaner—and her identity as a white woman. She founded Academy Stories/Admissions, a project that invites former students to submit essays about their school experiences. “The essays,” she has found, “are windows into the white-centered world where we swam.” After a year of publishing the first-person stories, the project expanded to include public school stories as well, evolving into a digital site called the Admissions Project: Racism and the Possible in Southern Schools. Gathering this testimony is a way to bear witness to history and, for Fentress, “to at least try at doing better.”

A forthright reflection on the effects of segregation.