Ignorant, Maybe, But Loving

I hadn’t planned on writing about race. I was simply listening and learning from the voices coming out of the George Floyd tragedy. Then it occurred to me that my life experience may actually help the dialogue in some way…

My grandmother never told my mom what her heritage was. When I was young, I asked my dad why he thought that was the case, and he pointed me to an old photo of my mom’s grandmother and what looked like some aunts.

“That’s probably why,” he said; “What do you think her heritage was?” Sitting in the photo were three older women of obvious Native American descent.

“Oh.” I realized. Though their faces couldn’t hide it, their words, or lack thereof, had tried to.

My mom was bewildered about my dad’s supposition; the thought had apparently never crossed her mind. She grew up in Florida in a loving home with parents who never jibed with the division of black and white around them, evident in separate fountains, separate bathrooms, and separate schools. She and other girls picked cotton in Kentucky a few summers to earn money, and she later made her living as a nurse at Charity Hospital in Louisiana where 99% of patients were black and penniless.

“Black newborn babies are beautiful,” I heard my mom say many times when I was growing up. “White babies look like they need more time in the womb to develop!”

My dad grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin, a hard-working Norwegian boy in a family barely scraping by. He figured he’d work in the local auto plant all his life, but the GI Bill gave him the opportunity to go to college and become an engineer after training as a tank commander in Belgium.

When my dad was growing up and his parents didn’t want their kids to know what they were saying, they’d quietly speak Norwegian with each other. ‘Uff da’ is the only expression my dad ever learned.

“Why didn’t your parents teach all of you how to speak Norwegian?” I asked.

“I guess they didn’t want us to learn it.” I took that to mean that his parents didn’t want to be known as Norwegians; they wanted to be known as Americans in this country.

Both of my parents experienced a silencing of their forebears’ heritage for the sake of equal treatment and feeling normalized in the melting pot. I never heard one word of superiority or racism come out of either of my parents’ mouths.

I grew up a white girl in a white school in a white suburban town in Texas. We were basically cultureless; we had no traditions that we celebrated or “did” based on those who came before us. The most culture that ever came in our door was in the form of National Geographic magazine, and I loved soaking up the photos of the African tribes that routinely covered its pages. Because of that magazine, from a young age I dreamed of going to Africa. Everything there looked so different; so interesting; so full of life compared to the hot, cement life I lived in my cookie-cutter neighborhood.

When I was 11, we moved to a little town in California where there was only a tad more diversity than what I grew up with in Texas. When I went to college, majoring in Cultural Anthropology and studying people like Mangaian Cook Islanders, the Dobe !Kung of Africa, and hermaphrodites, there were only two black people living on my dorm floor. In all of the jobs I’ve worked, I’ve had only one black coworker. I now live on Orcas Island, which is primarily white. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think there are about ten black people who live here. In all of my 46 years, I’ve never had a close black friend; there just weren’t that many black people around me.

I have to stop here and say that I don’t like the word black. Or white. Or yellow. Or brown. I never have. Until George Floyd’s death, I thought ‘African-American’ was more appropriate until I saw “Black Lives Matter” written a thousand different places. I guess the words associated with color make it easier to communicate, and I suppose calling someone African-American is about as misleading as referring to myself as Norwegian-Irish-Scottish-American or European-American, seeing as I’ve never stepped foot in Europe. For the sake of this article and for lack of a better alternative, I will reluctantly continue to use black and white, though I wonder if in a few decades it will be considered wrong.

I have a few black African friends now, from traveling to Africa twice. I used to bake brownies and peddle them on the streets of Santa Barbara with our three-year-old in my backpack in order to raise money for one of them named Innocent. He had walked from Burundi to the southern tip of South Africa to escape the Hutu-Tutsi fighting in order to escape the danger and try to get a job. His brother had already been killed and his father, a pastor, told him to flee while his parents stayed to look after their people. When I met him, Innocent was living off a cup of tea and a piece of bread each day. He eventually walked back to Burundi a few years later, only to find that his parents had been slaughtered. (Interestingly, our biggest donations for him always came from homeless people who excitedly wanted to help someone else in need.)

While in South Africa, I toured Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years, guided by two of his fellow anti-Apartheid friends, one of whom was hosting me at his house while continuing to work on changing laws that still hindered the black people of his country (and he was white).

Several years ago, our church invited a traveling performance group from a Ugandan orphanage, and we hosted four of the young men at our house for the night before they had to move on to another town the next morning. I felt such a connection to them and had a hard time watching their bus drive away.

For years I’ve been writing to the Ugandan and Ethiopian boys we help support, and we send monthly support to a Kenyan orphanage we stayed in two years ago.

I don’t say all of that to gain any kind of weird favor. I say it to communicate that these are some of the only experiences I’ve had with black people, and my intent is one of love, as it is with anyone of any background.

In fact, some of the most loving acts toward me have come from women from other countries, living here in America.

I sold books door-to-door one summer in New Jersey to earn money during college. I worked 13½-hour days, walking in the hot sun through one neighborhood after the next. One day, as I stood dripping at a doorstep, a Syrian woman with no intent to buy anything invited me in her house purely out of kindness. She offered me a seat on her pure white couch, as sweaty as I was from the heat and humidity outside. I remember feeling so nervous about sweating on her sofa, but wanting to respond properly to her gracious generosity. Set before me on her large coffee table was a beautiful, bounteous spread of all shapes and types of baklava. I was treated as a guest of honor; no one else was around. She didn’t know me; she didn’t even know my name. I politely and gratefully ate some of her amazing creations, and I’ve never forgotten her kindness at a time when I was not exactly at my best.

A few years later while renting a room in a family’s house, I was introduced to my new neighbor, a Persian woman who would be renting the room next to mine. I figured she avoided calling herself Iranian so that Americans would not discriminate against her, after all the conflicts the US had with her country. For the next several weeks, whenever she made dinner for herself she made sure to make ample amounts of it to offer me. Even when I was out, I came home to a huge plate of food left on my doorstep. I had a hard time keeping up with her generosity; she had obviously grown up with more hospitality instilled in her than I could possibly reciprocate. It didn’t seem to matter – she made food for me no matter what, even though we didn’t know each other. I’ve never forgotten her overflowing kindness to a complete stranger either.

I didn’t digress just then. I love all people. I tend to excitedly seek out people of backgrounds different from mine, and my excitement to meet them can border on unintended stupidity without my knowing it until I stick my foot in my mouth. A few summers ago, I saw a black man out walking through town who wasn’t a local. I had recently returned from Kenya and my husband had recently finished a book about the natural talent of Kenyan runners. He looked spot-on Kenyan, and his legs looked just like those of runners my husband had showed me videos of. As we passed each other, I said exuberantly, “You look like a Kenyan runner!”

“Oh. Okay,” he said seriously in the most American, un-Kenyan non-accent. I had killed a conversation before it had gotten the chance to start. I didn’t even know how I had killed it; I had to mull it over for a long time as I walked home. Here he was, visiting a predominantly white town on vacation, and I had immediately put him in a category based on his looks. A category that had no bearing on who he was.

About a year ago I lost my driver’s license, ATM card, and credit card while out walking, and asked folks on Facebook if they could help me get in touch with a local black man who was out walking about 100 yards behind me at the time. I so wanted to ask him if he had happened to find one of my cards since he was the only one I saw out on the road around the time I was there, but a white woman on Facebook inserted a comment that what I was asking was racially accusatory. I felt instantly sickened. I stayed up half the night trying to process it, trying to formulate a loving response to her that she couldn’t put an incorrect spin on. I understood that she was on guard to defend, but accusation was not at all what I had posted; I meant absolutely nothing offensive. Several people lovingly defended me, like character witnesses, including a friend of the black man who said, “I know him, and he would not at all be offended by what you said.” Unfortunately, one person chimed in and attacked my accuser back with some overly strong words, and I deleted the whole thread instantly.

I’ve lived in so many “white pockets” of society that I didn’t even realize black people were experiencing the kind of prejudice in America that was revealed when Trump ran for President, which brought out a lot of things I was ignorant of. I remember asking a local black woman if she’d ever experienced racism here on the island. “Oh yeah,” she said. It was so definitive that I was shocked. I thought we as a nation, even we as a caring little community, were so much nobler than that.

I grew up white, middle-class, and happy – more safe than imaginable. Perhaps more ignorant than imaginable. I don’t know what it’s like to fear or be feared. I can walk in the dead of night and not have my motives questioned. I can dress shabbily and not be perceived as something I’m not.

I’ve learned a lot during all of this, like why saying “All Lives Matter” is an affront to “Black Lives Matter.” I’ve inferred that I’m not the only one who needed educating, since explanations have criss-crossed Facebook endlessly.

I’ve learned that there are myriad opinions that black people have, based on their individual or collective experiences – some are protesting while others yell at protesters to stop; some are bursting with anger while others carefully articulate their thoughts. I’m not judging any of them; I’m taking it all in and processing it, trying to put myself in the shoes of each person as best as possible. Based on how each has been wronged, over and over, it’s hard to blame any one of them.

I am quietly listening. Quietly learning. Quietly dismissing people who are misguidedly using all of this as a cause to release their unrelated need to fight something. Quietly ignoring some of the white people who want to appear politically correct. Quietly watching black people who are peacefully protesting to absorb and be educated by what they’re saying. Quietly watching people of various ethnicities selflessly support black people because their conscience demands it. Quietly internalizing that I am an ignorant white person who doesn’t claim to know what it’s like to be black but aims to understand it more.

A lot of people like me probably exist – people who don’t have a racist bone in their body but whose lack of experiential knowledge render them silly-sounding or whose words are spun by others to imply harm that was never, ever intended. Coming from a cultureless upbringing, culture and color have always pulled me to travel, to meet people, to document the world around me, and to learn about people’s life experiences.

I stand with you as I learn and grow, and please understand that my lack of knowledge is simply a result of growing up with a completely different experience.

I stand with you in love. I believe that the matter from which every black life is made comes from the image of God.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out –

because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out –

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me –

and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niemoller

The photo is a painting on the fence at Salmonberry School here on the island. Every graduating eighth-grade class does a painting on the fence that symbolizes peace or unity in some way.