(Sunday, December 4, 1994)

Slogan Sets Tone For Race Dialogue
By Leslie Williams

(Click here for the printable version)



The voices of racial hatred travel far beyond their source. A celebrity's off-color comments about black people are disseminated via television. A religious leader's contempt for white people spreads via a radio broadcast. Newspapers and magazines publish stories of race-based attacks involving youths who wander outside their neighborhoods. Repeated exposure to these messages, said Rhoda Faust, creates the impression that "most of us are racists." In Faust's view, though, most of us are not.

And Erace, the nonprofit group that she and Brenda Thompson founded a little more than a year ago, continues its crusade to deliver that message.

Erace uses neither broadcast nor print media to spread the word that racism is unwelcome in this house, this neighborhood, this city. Instead, bumper stickers and T-shirts carry the group's seven-letter message: "Eracism." The group also plans to sell flags featuring its black-lettered slogan against a background of red, white and blue waves.

"Yes—erase racism" Councilman Oliver Thomas said Friday as he affixed one of Erace‚s bumper stickers to his automobile. "It may seem silly, but it's not—it's a symbol," Faust said.

Just as fingers raised to make a "V" became a potent symbol of anti-war sentiment during the Vietnam era, Faust hopes the "Eracism" motto will gain wide currency as a signal of support for those who judge by character, not skin color. Faust imagines a New Orleans in which most of the cars display this symbol and most of the homes fly the "Eracism" flag.

"Think of the message that would send," she said. "Think of how blacks and whites would feel in such a place." It would be a different message, she said, than the one disseminated through the media—the sort that prompted her to establish Erace in summer 1993.

 

 

  

 


 

After reading comments from white and black people in The Times-Picayune's Together/Apart series on race relations, Faust, owner of Maple Street Book Shop, wrote a letter to the editor. In it she shared her distress about the sometimes "ugly, hateful, ignorant" responses from white and black people published from time to time during the series.

"What will help black and white people come together?" she asked in her letter. "Since most of us don't have many close friends of the other race and therefore don't have the ideal opportunity to speak easily and openly, we must find a way to let it be known that we're trying to be colorblind.

"Let's think of ways to let each other know that we love and respect one another as God's fellow creatures. We each have to do our best to reassure the other race of that fact," continued her letter, published June 30, 1993.

Inspired by the letter, another reader—Brenda Thompson, a black woman, wrote to Faust, who is white. The two met at a coffee shop. Erace was born. It has grown from two members to 200 since the group was incorporated in September 1993.

"We have conversations about what we can all do to fight racial hatred," Faust said. Erace meets every Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Broad Street Branch of the New Orleans Public Library.