“I sure did live in this world.’
‘Really? What have you got to show for it?’
‘Show? To who? I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.’
‘Lonely, ain’t it?’
‘Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you.”
-Toni Morrison, Sula

 

Maybe I don’t want to change the world as much as I want the world to change me.

Of course that’s complicated by the fact that I don’t live in isolation.  I live with a husband and 5 kids.  And when we choose to change, it affects the people around us.  Hell, even choosing to embrace the status quo affects the people around us.

And when it comes to kids, it’s hard.  I am not an overprotective parent by any stretch of the imagination.  But I’m also not actively out trying to introduce them to the world.

How do you introduce them to a world that can’t get its act together?  We have hidden our issues with our parents from them so they won’t be biased against their grandparents, for example.

But how do you shield against something without blinding them to it?

*****

We went to our city’s parade last weekend, and there was maybe one or two other white families in our section of crowd.

There were 2 policemen who kept patrolling the area, and I wish I knew if that was normal at parades, or if it really was that a large crowd of black people, however innocently gathered, equals police presence.

And I kept wondering where the other white people were who lived in our area, but then I realized that a lot of them were probably at soccer games.  Which of course, requires money and transportation.

It’s one thing to know in theory that you live in a lower-income black community.  It’s another thing to be surrounded by it.

*****

I read The New Jim Crow a while ago, and somewhere in the middle of it I had a mental and emotional shift.  It was an agonizing read, and I think I was feeling both guilt and an overwhelming sense of white privilege.  So I kept closing the book and walking away.  But at some point I realized, again, that it’s not about me, but even more importantly, this is the way the world works and I need to know about it.

So as I sat in that crowd, black faces on every side, I realized this is really how the world works.

There are race and class issues playing out in front of my eyes, oh and look, there goes the Confederate flag on a float.

And then the public high school marching bands came by, and as a good southern city does, the schools are mostly black.  And as tends to happen, the schools are rated badly (actually in danger of losing accreditation here) and most of the white people I know rip on the parents for being to blame, for not caring about their kid’s education.

As the music marched by, the families around me cheered and called out to their kids, their friends.  These people cared.  These kids were proud of their music, their uniforms, and they were good.  It’s not their fault they are caught in a biased system.

Then I watched the two white academies march by and I was embarrassed.  And I wanted them to be embarrassed, too.  I wanted them to see what they looked like, this puddle of rich white privilege in a sea of black poverty.

But when the sun is shining so brightly on you, how can you see anything else?

*****

Somewhere in-between the 95% black bands and the 98% white ones, in-between the stars and bars and sea of black humanity, we ran out of reasons not to send our 3 youngest to the public high school.

And so it’s time.

It’s time for my brokenness, my broken heart, my growing eyesight to trickle down to my kids.

It’s time for them to meet the world.

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