Like so many of us, during this time of grieving for the brutal death of George Floyd, I feel compelled to reflect upon my experience both as a White Woman and of my experience growing up as a White Kid. I want to know how did that experience influence, my thoughts and feeling about racism and more importantly, how does it influence any actions I can take to prevent this ever happening again and to help stop racism in its tracks.
I was born in the 1950s to a family in which, my great-great-grandfather was a plantation owner in the South. Some of my earliest memories are of how my great-great-grandmother was so loved by the “her slaves”, that they would not leave when freed. My adult self thinks, what a load of malarky. they couldn’t leave, where were they to go and how would they make their way in life. My beloved grandmother, the granddaughter of the great grandmother slave owner, hissed whenever she heard the name Abraham Lincoln because she had learned all her life, that he was responsible, by Abolishing Slavery, for the downfall of her Mother’s family, for the fact that the once-wealthy plantation owners became poor, and their millions of confederate dollars were as worthless as the paper they were printed on. When we as children recited eeny meeny miny moe catch a Tiger by the toe….my Mother would correct us, and try to replace Tiger with the “N” word, but we three blond-haired, white kids born in the 50s screamed back passionately, that wasn’t fair, it was wrong you can’t say that word the siblings would shout at our Mom.
My memories include things like a summer car vacation, driving across the country, three hot sweaty kids in the back seat of a Plymouth Fury. In Selma Alabama my little brother had to stop for an emergency hospital visit, the race riots were on that summer, and my parents were afraid to stop but my brother had a piece of glass in his eye, it had to come out. But fear was in the car. Did we little kids know how to distinguish betweem fear of the riots and fear of the dark skinned people? I have no clue, honestly.
It seems like Martin Luther King was on the news every night, and my parents cheered for him, they told us how smart he was, and how he would change the world and we wept when he was assassinated.
Many years later, as a Mom myself living in Nova Scotia, I read Lawrence Hill’s compelling Book of Negroes and I cried. My husband and I went to Birchtown, Nova Scotia. When the Loyalists, both white and black arrived in Nova Scotia, in the bitter cold of a Nova Scotian December, the white folks were sent to houses in the village of Shelburne, the newly free black people were sent 10 kilometres away to sleep in trenches covered only by pine branches and boughs. When I saw these on a summer day, I fell to my knees, the injustice of putting people in such a place was overwhelming to me.
Seeing the living conditions that the free men, women and children had to live in made me want to go out and tell this story of injustice to schools and groups, to whoever would listen….but when I volunteered to tell it, I was turned away because of the color of my skin, I don’t even know what to say about that.
And then I spent ten years living in the Dominican Republic. In our adopted Caribbean Island, we made friends that became family. Dominicans are beautiful people inside and out, generous and loving. Dominicans also have beautiful skin of all colors, brown, black, light-dark just beautiful. One day, somehow, while chatting about racism with a yoga friend, I said I didn’t understand racism, because I don’t notice what color people’s skin is I notice how big their hearts are. My friend told me that it was impossible, that I do had to notice….but I don’t think I do. In fact, the other day after George Floyd was murdered, I called a friend to talk about it because I knew we would have a loving conversation, only after he said he was grateful to live in Canada instead of the US, did I realize he has brown skin and how scary this is for him, I don’t know what to say about that either.
I had the privilege this week of hearing the Story of a Black woman about my age, who also grew up in the US in The 50 and 60s. She described some of her experiences growing up as a Black Girl. Once again I was brought to my knees with grief for the injustices she endured growing up at the same time I was growing up a little white girl.
All, I can say is that when even one human hurts, we all hurt. I now know that as a little white girl growing up I was hurting for the little black and brown kids and I didn’t know it!
