A Meditation on Race, Tribes and Me
The Hard Conversations Are The Important Ones . . .
Writing about race is hard. As an old white guy, it feels daunting. But for us to heal, all voices need to be heard.
Here is my story, and my voice.
When my mother and father were growing up in Minneapolis in the forties there was an unwritten rule that Catholics did not date Lutherans. In one suburb of Minneapolis there was a covenant that forbade owners from selling their homes to Jews or “non-Christians.” Another covenant read, “Mongoloids” are permitted during the day as service staff but they will not remain in the area after dark.”
In the sixties, when I-35, a four-lane freeway was built from the suburbs to downtown Minneapolis, it precisely split white Minneapolis neighborhoods from black neighborhoods. When I-94 was built around the same time, it virtually destroyed the historic black Rondo neighborhood. Six hundred black families were displaced.
We lived outside of Minneapolis, in a town called Eden Prairie, a thousand miles away from the city, my dad would quip, by phone. It was rural and all white. Norwegian and German white. It was pointed out when two of us enrolled in a tiny rural Catholic school that we were the only Irish Catholics in the sea (small lake really) of German Catholics. Distinctions made. Lines drawn, faint but apparently discernible.
Later, in a public high school, amidst the rise of the Civil Rights movement I proposed to our student council that we do an exchange program with a predominately black school in Minneapolis. I didn’t really think it through, I just thought it was a cool idea. The council voted yes. The adults in the room nodded and I thought we were off and running.
Within two days the adults called me to task. First, the Superintendent told me in no uncertain terms that he would not allow “Negros” on campus because they would take advantage of the white girls. Next day I was called in to meet with the Assistant Principal and was told the same thing with the addendum that he had been in the Army with “Negroes” and when they were on their own, they would revert. To what, he never said. It was just understood that I should understand.
At the same time, I had a girlfriend and friends who liberally used the N-word. I broke up with the girlfriend but my friends were my tribe.
This is uncomfortable to write, because most of us — myself included — were just not the heroes we would have liked to have been.
But from the perspective of a white, suburban teenager this was the way it was. There is a saying that captures this perfectly, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.” We swam in a racist and divided society and few people I knew got out of the water and said, “Wow, we are so racist!”
This is simply history . . . And we are our history, from what happened yesterday, to how we were raised, to the generations of our relatives, back to the clans of our forefathers and the deep pre-historical hunter gatherer tribes and farther back to our hominin ancestors and how their DNA was shaped.
Millions of years of history have constructed us in a specifically human way. We come out of the womb not as racists or xenophobes, but certainly ready to learn who is “us” and who is not. We learn how we will paint our faces and whose faces we should despise. Lutherans don’t marry Catholics. Jews are banned. Negros “reverted.”
As the descendants of hunter-gatherers, we didn’t evolve to be objective, fact-based, truth-seeing beings. A hundred thousand generations of “us” were tribal. We evolved to be exquisitely tuned to our tribe. Belonging and social status were crucial to survival. Not being able to tell between family, friend or foe was fatal. As some animals evolved to be swift or fierce, we evolved to belong: Family, clan, tribe.
The unintended consequence is, as the writer Barbara Kingsolver wrote, “We hold that children learn the discriminations from their parents, but they learn it fiercely and well, world without end. Recite it by rote like a multiplication table. Take it to heart, though it is neither helpful nor appropriate. . . a preference for the scent of our own clan. . .”
And once learned fiercely and well, it can be excruciatingly hard to unlearn.
But that is our — my — work: “unlearning.” Unlearning what the principal said, unlearning the stories and “truths” we learned as children about others.
We need to reflect and dig deep, ask ourselves, “Where did my animus for that stranger come from?” “Why do I hold these generalizations about this group of people?”
We need to get out of the water to see the water.
If we are lucky, we can have revelations. Mine came as an unintended gift from my sisters. They were much more rebellious than I. All of them at one time or another were made to kneel in front of a male principal because their skirts were too short. One sister punched a boy in the face under the bleachers for daring to kiss a younger sister. All of them dated who they wanted to date, regardless of color or creed. They were a tribe unto themselves, and the cause of my awakening to a larger and more diverse world then the farm fields of Eden Prairie.
Since then, they have constructed a history of “getting out of the water.” They have taught us to be independent of thought and fiercely loyal. Because of my sisters, our next generation is a bundle of colors and creeds. We — I — am blessed to be a part of it.
Yet still those hoary voices of tribe and clan can rear in my head. The difference is now I know where they come from; from the fact that I’m human and from the racist waters we swam in as children.
I was lucky to have sisters who were rebels but wise and parents who were kind and accepting. Given other circumstances, I might have been an Irish Catholic throwing rocks at the “prods” during the Troubles, or a Christian Serb hunting Bosnian Muslims or standing at the school in Arkansas protesting integration.
St. Augustine wrote, “Never confront evil as if it arose entirely outside of yourself.”
I would add, “Never see hate and think that you could not be infected.” The blend of genetics and history are powerful forces. Add leaders who trade in hate — there is no other word for it — and who point fingers at a religion or a race and say, “They are the cause of your fear” and the Holocaust is the next door to be opened.
A final thought, a plea really. Each of us may have questionable and murky histories when it comes to our tribes. The narrative that we have spun for ourselves describing our clan and who is in it and who is not is deeply personal and often operates at the edge of our consciousness. It is that collection of the voices and the stories of friends, principals and parents. It not necessarily rational nor sensical, yet it can drive how we act.
And here is where we are accountable. You and I are responsible for living our lives as close to the truth as possible. We are accountable for finding and ripping out the hoary voices. Only then will we see the world as it really is, as Carl Sandburg wrote, “One big family close to the ball of Earth for its life and being.”
