We started arguing over something and the shoving back and forth began. My vocabulary was pretty good back then but I resorted to a term requiring no intelligence.
He was black. I called him a nigger.
I found myself pausing a few seconds after typing that. I hadn't spoken of that afternoon in over forty years. I keep stopping my typing and looking back up at that word, trying to sort out the menagerie of feelings putting that word on " paper" brings...
Shame. Guilt. Disgust. Judgement.
Anger. Loathing. Fear...
... But mostly, sadness...
The lunch lady broke us up and pulled me aside, scolding me. She said that was an awful word and I should never say it again. Even if that is what he is, she said....
I will tell you today that I hate that word. Whether it is footage of David Duke at a white sheet rally or an old concert of Richard Pryor, my skin cringes. Today, I react to it with the same intensity as I do when I hear someone blaspheming God, or some idiot calling his wife or daughter a "B" or the "C" word...
Maybe that is progress.
I've shared before that I never considered myself prejudiced. As this body ages and by some gentle and Godly grace, I grow up in tiny increments, and realize how so much of me and probably, so much of us, have been owned by that encyclopedia of labels..
Greedy Republican. Liberal Democrat. Communist, fascist, leftist or extremist Tea Partier...
Feminist. Sexist Neanderthal. Tree hugging hippie...
Baptist. Catholic. Muslim. Mormon. Christian Scientist. Wiccan....
The list is unending.
I look at the list and realize it concentrates almost exclusively on our differences.
I shared recently about my Muslim friend.
That was a nice experience. But not all growth is as pleasant as that..
So much of the medias attention recently, has been on prejudice.
People seem so divided in their responses to the protests going on, now.
Some call it peaceful demonstration, while others call it riot and looting.
I had my own judgements on this.
A few days ago, at work, I picked up the paper and scanned thru the articles.
There was an article by a journalist I passionately disliked and almost always disagreed with.
No "almost". Always is a much better description...
Every article he wrote that I ever read ( I read him whenever he's in the paper) has to do with the unfairness of whites to our president or racial inequality. Race baiter, I would think...
So in this particular article he begins by speaking of Ferguson and Micheal Brown and all of the suggestions made by both sides, in dealing with situations like this...
To my surprise, he dismisses most of them as ineffective, by themselves. This writer, Leonard Pitts, jr. says what we really need is education, cultural education...
My eyes rolled. I remember Afro American culture studies from seventh grade and how useless it really was in white bread, upstate N.Y..
The next paragraph surprised me, though...
Not something to give cultural pride but a hard headed, " warts and all" curriculum to show who we are, who we really are behind the pigment and labels...
A serious discussion on race and prejudice of both sides. Empathy, he said, follows understanding. My curiosity made me read forward...
In the end, in my extremely brief crib note version, Mr. Pitts says that we must " stop being moral cowards, stop embracing the idea that our racial and cultural challenges will resolve themselves if we just don't talk about them"..
As I read examples of racial inequalities I silently said a prayer to God, thanking him that my children were born white, living in a bleached clean, low crime/ high performing school Norman Rockwell town... Rather than black, in Ferguson ...
And once again, like forty years earlier, I felt shame. Shame for the feelings, shame for the prayer. Most of all, shame that even after acknowledging the unfairness and sinfulness of that thought, I still felt it deeply in my soul.
I spent half an hour a few days ago lecturing my three tween boys on the importance of playing fair. No ganging up. No cheating. Instiling the belief, quoted from Wild Bill Hickock " that a man who cheats at cards ain't got no religion "
Today I find that I really don't want an even playing field. I talk the good game about judging men by content of character, not color of skin, but when push comes to shove, I want my children to have every advantage in this life I can give them, even if it means others are deprived of it...
I always thought wanting the best for my children made me a good father. Today I see that it makes me something worse...
A big hubbabaloo went on in our town when a company wanted to buy our old, decaying mill and turn it into condominiums. I was all for it, as long as it was written into the contract that it could not be turned into low income apartments. Our town has a graduation rate of 96 percent and scores in the high nineties on our regents tests. By no means could we jeapordize that...
So all the crap I was teaching my children about fair play was just pretty bling. In my heart I had found myself content to play in a fixed game with a marked deck, while proclaiming my unbiased fairness and judgement....
Remember how I said all growth isn't pleasant, sometimes?!?
Today I stand reading this and being pulled in both directions. I am confused and perplexed on what I truly believe in my heart. I want the best for my children, that is a given.
The rub, as they say is in defining exactly what that entails...
My instincts, I think we're initially right. Teaching about fairness and true justice and standing for what is right, I believe was right on. Unfortunately, that always comes with a price. My wanting them to have an undeserved privilege, by nature of color is wrong. In my brain and somewhere hidden in the deep recesses of my heart, I actually know that.
But... I still feel it....
I want the comfortable ground of the fallacy of real equality in our world, but for some inexplicable reason my covers have been pulled, and I stand before myself to judge my own character.
I realy did always believe we should all be judged by our character, especially so, when I had an inflated view of my own..
I have absolutely no idea how to absorb this all. I have no clue how to fix these situations, even if I eventually decide I want to. I am scared of the talk about quotas and reparations. I want whats fair, I think, but am clueless in what that is.. And mostly, just afraid of what I, we, could lose.
I find myself praying for openness to Gods will. That can be a scary prayer, too.
I wonder how to teach my kids about fairness when I'm not sure what it is..
No one prepared me for this section of being a dad.. or a man...
But I do know one thing. All sides of this need to sit in a locked room and discuss their beliefs and fears. No political correct dialogue, but truthful confrontations on who we are, who we think we are and how we are all actually seen. It will not be pretty or productive for a very long time. This may make things much worse for a while, before it gets better, but it HAS TO HAPPEN!
They say the only real solution between human beings are not found in compromise, but in a win- win style of problem solving.
Putting our heads in the sand is escalating this, now, in our time.
So, if Mr. Leonard Pitts jr. would like to start a conversation, this conversation, I will join him.
I doubt we would like each other at first, but as he so eloquently wrote " Empathy will follow understanding". I do believe that. I've went thru all the possible logical scenarios. We must understand each other deep enough to find that non threatening win-win situation.
If not, Ferguson will look like a picnic to the world that's coming...
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