Story for the Week
I would never say that I was raised not to see color. We all see color. We live in a beautifully diverse world made up of all races, ethnicities, heritages…and colors. I have always thought that’s what makes this world amazing. But I was raised not to look at color, not to consider color, not to base my decisions and feelings on color. And I hope I’ve done that.
I was raised in a white neighborhood, and I went to a primarily white grade school and middle school. In high school, my classmates were probably half white and half a variety of other races. I never based my friendships on the color of someone’s skin. I hope that I am viewed as being a decent human being, and I looked for friendships with people who I believed were decent human beings. I still do.
When I started kindergarten, my parents bought a grade school memory book. Every year, I was able to include a class picture, list my teacher’s name, my favorite subject, etc. I was also able to list my five best friends. The last time I saw the book was probably when I moved 20-some years ago. I certainly don’t remember all of the friends I listed, and if I could find the book now, I would look, but I do remember two of the friends I listed for kindergarten.
Bonnie was a little blonde girl with beautiful ringlets in her hair. We were great friends all through grade school, and while we lost touch through middle school and high school, we reconnected as adults when she married someone from my church.
Joe was my first Hispanic friend, although we didn’t call him Hispanic back then. He was Mexican. Through the years, he went by a couple self-created nicknames—Taco Joe, The Beaner. Joe and I had a lot of the same teachers through grade school, and we ended up in different crowds in middle school and high school. But one of the things I loved about my high school is that it didn’t matter what clique you were in. Friends from kindergarten were still friends in high school. Joe rode in the back of the bus with the smokers, and I did not, but we still always said hello. We didn’t stop being friendly just because we ran with different crowds. Years later, after we found each other on Facebook, we had a conversation about how we had known one another our entire lives, and I never thought of him as anything other than a friend.
I have continued to befriend people based on who they are, and I don’t think that makes me a better person, but it helped me to not close off my options when I met the man I eventually married. My husband grew up in Trinidad, and his heritage is Chinese, Indian, and British. He likes to tell me that his family varies in skin tone from black to whiter than I am. (I’m half Polish, so I burn after 10 minutes in the sun.) My family went from everyone living in the States to having family living all over the world. My husband has some family scattered across the U.S. (California, New York, Florida, Kansas), but he also has family and friends scattered across the globe in Trinidad, Barbados, Canada, Brazil, London, Australia, Venezuela, and I’m sure dozens of other countries. When we married, suddenly my family went from being completely Caucasian to being the most diverse circle I’ve ever been a part of.
In spite of that, there is still no way I can fully appreciate what my black friends and family are experiencing right now in our country. My Facebook feed, my Twitter feed, newspapers, magazines, everything that I have been reading lately (i.e., not books) is focused on the inherent racism in our country. I watched the video of Ahmaud Arbery, and I was heartbroken. I watched most of the video of George Floyd, and I had to stop because I emotionally couldn’t bring myself to watch it to the end. I mourned with the rest of the people in my firm when Botham Jean was killed in his own apartment two years ago.
I cannot comprehend what the families of these people and so many others have gone through. I can empathize and I can support them, but I can never understand what they live with day in and day out. I will never experience fear if I’m stopped by the police because I don’t have to. But my family has to, and I fear for them. My friends have to, and I fear for them. I don’t fear for myself, but I fear for them because some of them, many of them, are not white. And I will never, ever understand what that means. I am white, and that shouldn’t make me privileged, but in this country, it does. It shouldn’t, but it does.
There are good and bad people in every race, in every profession, in every neighborhood. I have seen so many posts recently that not all police officers are crooked and not all blacks are criminals. The color of someone’s skin doesn’t determine their value. Being a decent human being, that’s what matters because our hearts are all the same color.
Each day, I stand with people of every color, every race, every heritage. But this day, with the state of our country and the chaos in our cities, I stand with my black friends and family because their lives do matter.
I want to close this with a recent Facebook post from my niece Therese. She is mixed and experienced bullying in every predominantly white school she attended. She proudly told me that I could share this.
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