Tyson talks race relations

The author of next year’s summer reading book brings a range of experience to a discussion of race relations in America.

Here, Timothy Tyson addresses some of the issues in “Blood Done Sign My Name,” an account of the culture of white supremacy and black uprising, and the circumstances surrounding a racial murder, in 1970s Oxford:

What is it that you want readers to take away from the story?

I want people to understand that we have to have an honest confrontation with our actual history — not the one we wish had happened, the one that actually happened — in order to move forward. I’m trying to do what I’m asking the country to do, which is to have an honest confrontation with its past, in all its complexity.

In many ways this story hits close to home. What would you say to students whose parents grew up in the area?

I think it would be really useful if the parents of UNC students also read the book and talk to their kids about it and then tell them what it was like for them. The parents of these kids are about the right age.

Does every generation discriminate less than the one before it?

Oh, no. One of the great illusions that you can pick up without really thinking about it in American education is that somehow progress is inevitable and that we are on this ascending arc toward a better world. The world that I am living in now — most of the time — is more segregated, racially, for example, than the one I grew up in.

So what’s your assessment of race relations in the South today? Are they much worse, slightly worse, just the same?

Things don’t go in straight and uncomplicated lines. Things get better, just like in our own lives, things get better and worse at the same time. The South has a lot of advantages. I don’t mean to sugarcoat anything, but I think race relations are not as acid and distant in the South as they are in the urban North and Midwest.

As a professor of Afro-American studies who is also white, what does your personal experience bring to a discussion of race relations.

Learning this history and coming to teach it has been a way of really coming to grips with the world I grew up in here in North Carolina. So in that sense, I’m always bringing my experience to bear, and also I’m going at the history and trying to come to grips with my own experience, which is what I’ve tried to do with this book.

At UNC there’s been a lot of debate about historical revisionism. What is your opinion about that and your opinion about discussing America’s difficult past?

I’m not sure what people mean by historical revisionism. Historical revisionism tends to suggest that there was this history that was a fact, and these revisionists came along and changed the facts. So that is to assume that somehow we had this history right, but now these people are messing with it. And I don’t think that’s true.

I’m not of the school that says we have to rename every building in the world because the people who it’s named after somehow weren’t saints. I think they were people like us: equally flawed human beings trying to do the best they could.

Contact the A&E Editor at artsdesk@unc.edu.