THE RICHMOND MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACY

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To liberate themselves from the curse of racism and the damage it inflicts upon white souls as well as black souls and black bodies, whites must in a sense "become black," must become involved in a process of liberation of the blacks ... in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind. — James Baldwin (from an interview in Time, May 17, 1963)

[W]e talk about the way white people who shift locations ... begin to see the world differently. Understanding how racism works, [they can see] the way in which whiteness acts to terrorize without seeing [themselves] as bad, or all white people as bad, and all black people as good. Repudiating us-and-them dichotomies does not mean we should never speak of the ways observing the world from the standpoint of "whiteness" may indeed distort perception, impede understanding of the way racism works both in the larger world as well as in the world of our intimate interactions. — bell hooks, Black Looks

In 1991 a special traveling exhibit was installed in the Richmond Museum of the Confederacy, a small collection of Civil War memorabilia and records in Richmond, Virginia. The exhibit, entitled "Before Freedom Came," contained photographs, artifacts, paintings, tapes of music and interviews, all pertaining to American slavery. I had come to see this exhibit along with more than a hundred other college teachers from universities across the country, all of us participating in a Ford Foundation grant to "explore multicultural perspectives in higher education," a nationwide effort to diversify college curricula.

I passed by the entrance to the permanent exhibitions on the first floor and headed up the wide staircase to the wing which, for the next several months, would house an addition to Virginia's traditional testimony to the Civil War.

Even after twenty years of living in a Black family, and at least ten years of teaching African American fiction and autobiography, I was not completely prepared for this face-to-face encounter with life-sized portraits of human beings who had been enslaved in the United States of America.

In an autobiographical essay about writing, Virginia Woolf talks about "moments of being" — transforming and often suddenly conscious experiences when what she describes as the cotton wool of daily life is unexpectedly parted, and behind habits of ordinary consciousness one senses a truth, a pattern, as Woolf puts it, a perception of "what belongs to what." As I understand such moments, one does not experience a sudden conversion out of nowhere, proverbial veils falling from the eyes. Rather, changes long in the making coalesce. They slowly take shape in semiconscious alterations of perspective, inchoate shifts one may be aware of only as vague discomfort, accumulations of small pieces of knowledge instantly "forgotten" or buried again, each time less fully, so that they surface with increasing frequency. And these changes of consciousness are often accompanied by the perception of a broade