It’s Black History month. I’m white. I’m also at a loss.
I want my children to understand and reject racism. I want to be a good person. I want my kids to be good people. I stand on my pulpit and teach them that everyone is equal and deserving of respect.
I attempt to model love and acceptance and avoidance of judgement “Because…”, I tell them stoically, “…we never know the whole story. We can’t begin to put the puzzle pieces of other people’s lives together because we’ve never worn their shoes.” Not even close.
So, we watch Selma and Loving and 12 Years a Slave and we all cry because it hurts. I wonder how African Americans feel watching these movies. I attempt to bridge the gap I feel so profoundly. We have conversations. I struggle to articulate what I want them to know because what I want them to know has no dialogue. White people don’t really absorb this stuff. We don’t usually really talk about it.
My beginnings were in the southwest corner of Virginia and I can affirm that in my childhood, racism was still alive and well. I kid you not, these were common phrases;
“Don’t put that penny in your mouth. N****** might have touched that.”
“You got any N****** Toes?” (Referring to Brazil nuts)
Even being immersed in this type of colloquy, I was raised by parents who were somewhat progressive in that time and that place and was able to dodge a majority of that indoctrination. Having both served in the military, they had been exposed to many races, ethnicities and religions and gained a modicum of understanding of equality and tolerance and what it was supposed to mean.
My mom became involved in race relations in the army and struggled to work with others toward dismantling that great divide in our country. The progress was slow and the road stony, but it changed her outlook and perspective as a poor white woman in the south.
The most far reaching effects of these experiences impacted her parenting. The takeaway for me was this: Everyone deserves respect and we are all equal. I understood that.
But it wasn’t enough.
In elementary school, we lived on a horse farm in the guest house of a palatial estate owned by a doctor. My mom managed the riding academy there. The doctor’s family “employed” a black woman named Inez. We called her Inee. Inee was, for all intents and purposes, an indentured servant.
She had lived with this family since she was a teen and didn’t know her birthday but thought it was somewhere around 1919. She was born on a cotton plantation and regaled my brothers and me with tales of peeing in her cotton sack to make it seem like she picked more than she did and how she boiled chicken feet and ate them.
Inee had raised the doctor’s kids and cooked and cleaned for the family for nearly 50 years. My mom hired her to help clean our house and to watch us when we were home sick from school. She’d fawn over us and kiss our feverish foreheads and make us soup. I may or may not have faked being sick in order to stay home and be spoiled by Inee.
Fast forward to my teenhood when we moved to a diverse suburb of Denver, light years away from a tiny southern town where there may have been one student of color in my school. Maybe. I honestly can’t remember.
The school system I attended in Colorado was 85% “minority”and over half the student population received free lunch. I knew poor. I knew loving a black granny intensely. I did not know diversity.
I got myself in trouble.
I had never had someone tell me I could not sit in a certain place at lunch. But it was a thing in my middle school. White girls couldn’t sit at certain tables in the lunchroom because there was a group of black girls who sat there and it was their table.
I ran my mouth.
“I don’t see your name on this bench. I can sit here if I want to,” I declared in my southern accent.
The extent of what I considered racism to be was a story my aunt told me, who lived in Mississippi. The black folks only shopped under cover of night at the Jitney Jungle for fear of being harassed or worse.
I couldn’t believe these girls had the nerve to try and boss me around and I let them know how I felt. Not in the context of you’re black and I’m white, rather “we’re equal and we can all sit wherever we want because this is America.”
I was threatened all the time. “The white girl who runs her mouth.” I think my best friend was terrified to walk home with me for awhile because I caused so much trouble. There were slap fights, hair-pulling and stare-downs. Apparently I was the only one stupid enough to question the hierarchy.
I did not compute the silent understanding that the white kids had with the black kids at my school. We were to keep to ourselves and not question the flow of nature there. They got on the bus first. They sat in certain places at lunch. They were the boss.
High school was better. Maybe we were all older and more mature. Maybe I learned the pecking order and what was expected of me. We all tolerated each other fairly well – black, white, Asian, Latino.
My boyfriend was Mexican but my friends were mostly white. I also dated a black guy for a short while. My main friend group was referred to as the “White Boy Cracker Crew”. A gang of sorts, I guess. I don’t know how that moniker was birthed. I was questioned regularly about this dichotomy in my life. I had no answer.
Then my family uprooted to rural Minnesota for my senior year. A whole new landscape of culture to navigate and learn. Most curious to me, were the boys who draped confederate flags across the back windows of their pickup trucks and shouted things like, “The south will rise again!”
“Um, I think maybe ya’ll are confused. You were born and bred in the NORTH. Far north.”
The only diversity we knew in Minnesota was the children of Mexican migrant farm workers who came to school during harvest while their parents were working the fields and then were gone as quickly as they came. We didn’t know where they went. There were occasionally some black or brown kids filtered through foster care because there was a children’s home somewhere in the countryside near our school.
Fast forward a few more years. I’m married (to a white guy) and living in north Texas. Not as colorful as Colorado, but plenty of multiculturalism. We lived in a mostly white neighborhood with a few Mexican and black families sprinkled in. My husband and I both got jobs at a major, well-known company who is celebrated for their dedication to diversity and the workforce was beautiful and varied. Seemingly, someone from every race, religion, creed, lifestyle and ethnicity was represented.
The black girls hated me again.
From day one in my training class, I was in the minority as a white woman. I don’t think I did anything wrong, but I’m not sure. They rolled their eyes at me. They ignored me at worst and tolerated me at best. I wanted them to like me so bad. I tried hard. Probably too hard. I vexed myself into a frenzy trying to convince them I didn’t see color. They did not appreciate my efforts.
Jump forward a few months and I’m pregnant. I begin to show. The black girls love me.
They open doors for me.
They smile and make eye contact.
They bring me donuts.
They call me ‘Lil’ Mama’.
What the hell?
My boss was a black man who had pretty much not even been aware I existed and suddenly we were chatting all the day long and he was going out of his way to make allowances for me to pee and have extra breaks so I can feed my baby belly. Did I need a stool to put my feet up?
I reveled in having friendly relationships with black folks again. They revived fond memories of Inee loving me. It made me curious why it wasn’t like that all the time. Why couldn’t we love like that even when I’m skinny and white and not carrying a baby? What could I do to convince them I wanted to be like that all time?
What had changed?
Now I have six kids. We live in rural, backcountry Texas on a farm in the middle of nowhere. It’s rare to see a black person at the grocery store in our town, but there are lots of Latinos. When I do see a person of color, I go way out of my way to smile at them and send a subliminal message to their heart, “I see you and you’re welcome here.”, because that’s how I feel. Sometimes, I think I overcompensate. I wonder if they’re thinking, “Why is this idiot smiling at me like a lost fool?”
We homeschool our kids and they’ve never been to public school. I’m scared every day that I will fail them – in too many ways to count, but especially in terms of racial intelligence. I know most white kids are racially underdeveloped and I want to find out why. I want to be the change, right? Right.
Where white kids are told in a very sanitized way, “We’re all equal,” brown and black kids are being educated on where to put their hands when they’re pulled over and how to talk to police so they won’t be misunderstood. They’re being schooled on how to interact safely with authority figures while white kids are being told “police are safe and find one if you need help.”
Meanwhile, over here, I’m inadvertently teaching my kids that we never discuss politics, money or religion. Oh…and also racism. Because that’s bad. Everyone’s equal. Everything is awesome. The end. Except that’s a lie because we talk about all the nitty gritty at our house – just not with people outside the family. Because we might offend someone with our ignorance and white privilege.
So how do they learn? How do I teach them? It’s like I’m only teaching them addition and then expecting them to successfully complete calculus equations out in the world.
We go to a homeschool co-op and I remember being surprised – and super happy – on our first day when there were more than just white people there. I went home and reported to my husband, “There are black families there! Multiple homeschooling black families! And the dads are there, too.” Then I considered what that exclamation might be translated into by my kids, those families, the world. What is my dialogue saying?
My eyes start to slowly open to my biases, my stereotypes, my racial intelligence – or lack thereof – and all the things I don’t know or understand. Because I am a white woman. But I want to understand.
As the co-op has grown, so has the patchwork of humanity in its membership. Miscellany in race, abilities, conditions and beliefs abound. Word has traveled that there is unparalleled human variety in our group and it’s exciting. Unusual, but exciting. Let’s face it, the homeschool demographic is typically very homogeneous. But in our group, we all work together with a common bond and goal of giving our kids the best education we possibly can and embracing our differences is at the helm of that collective. It’s incredible to experience.
As I age and strive to cultivate intelligence and wisdom and understanding, I struggle to make my devotion to loving all people more than just rhetoric. I fight to put action behind the desire. I push to release my own personal biases and experiences and put on the shoes of other people so I can try and process even just a tiny part of their truth.
I don’t know the answers. Most times, I don’t even know the questions. But I’m going to keep asking anyway. Even if I sound stupid. Even if it looks insincere or contrived. Even if everyone is sure I’m just privileged and naive. Even if I clam up and appear like a deer in headlights when race comes up in casual conversation.
I’ll keep reading the books and watching the movies and documentaries with my family to try and figure out where the missing pieces of the puzzle are hidden. I’ll keep the conversation flowing with my kids about why there’s not a white history month and how by being intimately acquainted with history, we can change the future.
I like to imagine that I might have been courageous enough to walk across the Pettus bridge with Martin Luther King – that I am that kind of person. But I don’t know if I am or not.
We’ve come a long way, but even I know the journey is far from over and the complexities of racism are a deep, deep chasm. I’ll keep plowing through calculus with my kids even though I was only taught addition. I wish for those fluent in the high level “math” to help those of us who aren’t. I pray for their patience. I believe most of us want to learn, but the learning curve is steep.
