On our fridge we have tacked up a quote from Martin Luther King that reads “if you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and your chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.” It’s been up there quite a while, several years. It really speaks to me,
to all of us at home.
Recently I tried to find where he said it, and discovered it in his November 1957 sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, “Loving Your Enemies”. Further along in the sermon he gives four steps for how to love your enemies; the first one is: “So we begin to love our enemies and love those persons that hate us whether in collective life or individual life by looking at ourselves.” My work on anti-racism and anti-white supremacism has been, mostly, internal. Some time ago I realized just how impatient and judgmental I can be, and I struggle every day with these facts about myself. Where they come from, I don’t have a clue, but it is hard work to try to overcome them. More recently I realized that I just have to start realizing in each moment when I am being impatient and/or judgmental. It’s a good first step, anyway.
One other piece of internal work I have been doing lately, spurred by this Lenten prompt, is to look at my life experiences of racism. My racism. In particular, I’ve been trying to recall all the interactions with people of color I had when young, at least the ones that left deep impressions, for whatever reasons.
The following is just a list, really.
I grew up in an extremely rich, extremely white suburb in Connecticut in the 1950s & 60s. My father was a doctor and we lived in a really nice part of town. We had a maid, Irene, who came to clean once a week, and who would also baby-sit and cook for us 3 boys on occasion. She was African-American, and my mother paid her in cash, I think, but also paid into her social security, which my mom was pretty proud of, but also thought was just the right thing to do. Irene was the only person of color who ever entered our house, as far as I can remember. I remember feeling that she was different from us. I knew she was much poorer than us, and lived in a bad part of the neighboring big city. In my junior high school, which had about 500 students, all white, there came a young woman student of color, Faye Young, at the beginning of 8 th grade, when I was 13 years old, in 1968. It was quite an event, with kids talking about it in the corridors a lot. Some students tried to make her feel very welcomed. For some reason, I had no occasion to meet her; maybe I even avoided her, but I don’t remember intentionally doing that. One day several students invited me to meet her in the cafeteria. I shook hands with her, and then basically ran away. I was embarrassed, for some reason. To this day I haven’t figured out that interaction. What I do remember is that I was ashamed that we had to make such a big deal out of her being black. I knew there was something wrong. I have always felt bad about just running away from Faye; I have always wondered how much I hurt her. I do not remember interacting with her at all during the remainder of junior high school, which as I think about it now, is curious, because I heard she was a smart kid and so was I, so we should have been taking similar classes.
In the 9 th grade, my science teacher took a bunch of his students to some kind of outreach program in a poor part of the big city. There we interacted with a bunch of kids of color our age. I remember putting an ornament on the Christmas tree we were setting up, and two of the black boys kinda giggled when I was doing so. My sense was that they thought I was not cool. I felt quite put down, and backed off from interacting the rest of the day. I don’t remember much else about that day, other than a vague sense of being uncomfortable. Here we were, a bunch of rich white kids trying to help these poor black kids. Who the hell did we think we were?
Fast forward many years, to when I was in graduate school, age 31, 1986, living in another big city, commuting to my lab on my bicycle, when I was “doored”, that is, a person opened their car door into me, which struck my upper right arm while I was going at a pretty good clip. I was paying attention to the traffic and didn’t see the door at all, it happened very quickly. Next thing I know, I’m sprawled on the busy road, having flown over the door. The person who opened the door was a young black guy. He loudly muttered a few times, “My sister’s gonna kill me”, and did not help me at all. I had to drag my bicycle to the side of the busy road. Fortunately I was wearing a helmet. But I was pretty shook up, so I went into the insurance agency where this happened, and they let me lie down on the floor. After a short time I asked them to call me an ambulance. It turned out that I just had a deep bruise running the length of my upper arm, and a cut where the top edge of the door hit me, which I still have the scar from. I had biceps surgery last year, and perhaps damage from that accident was one reason. I never saw the black kid again. I am still very resentful of his behavior. I probably took out the door, and I’m sure his sister would be mad at him, but really?
I think that is as much as I can handle right now. I don’t recall any other particular interactions with people of color that stand out in my memory as much as these do. This internal work is, as MLK said, the first step towards loving one’s enemies. A beginning. I have yet to embark on the rest.
Br. Bruce