EDT 563-Discovery Phase: Connecting New Ideas to Past Experience

As I listened to the interviews with Antionette Carroll, my childhood kept popping into my head. I explain here so my connections to the podcasts for this week make sense.

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I was born in November 1966 and have lived all my life in southern Maine. When I was little, I can remember having only one television station's reception come in clearly. The antenna on our apartment building's roof allowed snowy reception of two other stations on occasion, but most of the time, the only television shows I saw were very vanilla...H.R. Puffinstuff and Scooby Doo. My mother watched a soap opera, and my dad watched the evening news, but my brother and I never paid attention because to us, they were simply boring. 

In my neighborhood, everyone else's family looked very similar to my own. All of my friends had blonde, brown, or red hair. Their eyes were all shaped a lot like mine, but while my own eyes are green, I had friends with blue, brown, or hazel eyes. All of us had skin that turned tan in the summer sun and in the winter, we all became a stark, pale shade of flesh. Everyone in my Catholic school looked like me, everyone on my bus looked like me, and the only human characters on the shows I watched looked like me. 

Now, my father was a welder, and he always came home smelling of whatever grinding, cutting, or iron work he had been doing that day. And almost every day, my mother would tell him to go into the bathroom to wash up before kissing her hello. She would say, "Look at you. You always come home filthy. Go wash your hands and face before dinner because you are just black." She was usually right. His hands were always stained and looked much darker than the rest of his skin until he scrubbed with lye soap. Even then, his hands were stained, but at least their color was a bit closer to the skin shade of the rest of his body.

I can't remember how old I was, but I know I had been in school for a year or two when an incident that I recall vividly occurred. I was probably about six or seven years old. Sears used to have a small showroom one town away from where we lived, and my parents often purchased items on credit there. Each Saturday we would run errands. I rode with my mother as we flitted around town to pay the electric bill or the oil bill or the Sears bill. On one of these trips to Sears, we stood in a very long line, and there was only one clerk processing customers' orders. So there we stood for what seemed to be forever in my little girl mind. Like most kids, I became bored and started looking around at the items Sears had on the showroom floor. I must have looked at everything because I did something for which my mother would always scold me. I started looking behind me to see how long the line was. She must not have noticed that I had turned around because I remember seeing a man behind me. At first I looked at his shoes, which were black and shiny. He wore the kind of pants and suit jacket that my father wore when we attended church. And as I looked up toward his face, I saw that he was wearing a fedora, much like my grandfather wore. As I peered up, I wondered if his fedora had a blue feather like my grandfather's did, and that is when it happened. He looked down at me. I looked up at him. I didn't know what to make of what I was seeing. He smiled at me, and his teeth looked incredibly white. He had very dark brown eyes. And his skin was a very dark shade of brown. I looked at his hands and could see that they, too, were a very dark shade of brown. In fact, to my little girl eyes, his hands looked a lot like my dad's did when he came home after a particularly dirty day at work. 

My mother noticed that I had turned around and tugged on my arm to face front. But I was struck by the man I had seen. I was curious. So I turned and looked again. Once more, he looked down at me and smiled. I stared. My mother placed her hand on my head and turned me so I was once more looking in front of us. But still curious, I attempted to look behind us once more. Her breath was hot, and the expression on her face was one of aggravation as she leaned her face down to mine and asked in a whisper, "Why are you looking at that man?" 

I know what I said to this day. I responded, "Because he needs to wash up." 

My mother looked at the man quickly and hissed, "He's black." She then apologized to the man. 

I remember him telling her it was okay, and I piped up, "You're filthy. You're supposed to wash before you go out." To my little girl mind, the one that had never seen a single person who didn't look a lot like me---not on television or at school or in my neighborhood---the words filthy and black meant that a person had worked hard at a job where their skin and clothes became soiled. From what I understood, it was a simple matter of washing the skin and the clothes to restore the correct color. My mother slapped my hand and wore her mortified expression like it would be there for the rest of my life. I knew she was angry, but I was confused and didn't know why. 

She said, "Wait until you get home." I knew I was going to be spanked, probably with the paddle since she was so mad. Then I would kneel in the corner until my thighs shook. I would eat dinner, have a bath, and go right to bed. I knew I had done something wrong, but what?

The man tapped on my shoulder, but I was afraid to look at him. When I didn't turn around, he asked my mother if I had ever seen a black person before. Mom did not know what to say, but I told him that my dad came home from work all black and dirty every day. I added that when he washed, his skin became clean. The man smiled and opened his hands. He told me he had washed that morning, but that the color would stay like it was because that was the real color of his skin. He pinched a fold of his skin in his hand and tried to rub off the color, explaining as he did that he was born with a different skin color than I was. The man told me that in different parts of the world, people could have different colors of skin, and he said that people who had skin like his---brown skin---were called Black while people with my color of skin were called White. As I tried to understand, he added that his skin was not really Black and that my skin was not really White, but those were the names of the skin colors. The man said that sometimes people are scared of people with his color of skin because they think all Black people are bad, but that was not true. Just like I was a nice little White girl, he continued, he was a nice Black man who knew lots of nice Black people. He said that he was just like me, except his skin was a different color. 

"And you're a boy," I stated. The man smiled that big, brilliant smile and told my mother I was a smart little girl because I was trying to understand. Of course, at the time, I had no idea what he meant. It wasn't until I was in the eighth grade that the exchange finally started to make sense, when the first Black student I had ever had at any of my schools became a classmate.

Maine was even Whiter when I was growing up than it is now, and it took about fourteen years of my life before I had a friend whose skin was a different color from mine. But the lesson about race that happened in the line at Sears made all the difference in how I thought about my Black classmate. I can't say that canned line about not seeing his color because I did. I knew he was Black while almost everyone else in our school was White. There were a few Vietnamese students who had come to America after the war, but in general, I think most of us White kids saw them as White, too. But the way I thought of my Black classmate was different because of the man in Sears. 

My classmate endured merciless harassment at the hands of many of my White peers. Some would say he would probably steal from our lockers and cheat off our tests. In hushed tones they would refer to him as the N-word and called him stupid. It pains me to admit that I did not agree with any of these baseless assertions, but as a young teenager, I wanted to fit in. I did not want to alienate those whom I thought of as friends, and I did not often defend my Black classmate. I never thought he was bad, and I never thought I was better than he was, but in my heart, I knew that many of my White classmates did think both these things. And I said almost nothing in his defense.

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As I listened to Antionette Carroll, several things she said stuck with me. But one phrase in particular brought the man in Sears and my Black classmate to mind. She was talking about how she and her team were "building [their] humility to become empathetic" (Cherry, 2020). In essence, to address the needs of clients who called upon them to design projects, it was necessary for Carroll and her team to strip away all the entrapments of privilege in order to truly understand what the clients needed if they were to truly address the challenges they faced. For Carroll, this meant recognizing that while her status as a Black woman created challenges in her life, she is nevertheless privileged because she was able to earn a Master's degree, which allows her entree into a more privileged realm than those unable to achieve a similar level of education and the affordances that accompany it. 

I think this is an important point that is reflective of my childhood experiences because had I not had them, I don't think I would have the views I now hold. I still see or hear about many classmates from middle and high school, and overall, most of them still hold the same kinds of views about race now that they did then. Some are quite overt with their opinions while others give away their true feelings by speaking and acting with unintentional biases. 

Their assumptions about Black people are betrayed when they say things such as, "I'm not a racist. I know some can be nice." 

What they don't recognize is a built in assumption that while some can be nice, most are not. Another example lies in one referring to a Sikh man as a "towel head." While this person may see the jab as teasing for a Sikh man's fashion sense, there is a bias about which religious traditions are acceptable and "normal." 

These examples demonstrate a lack of humility because the assumptions that are built in prioritize and normalize Christianity and White skin tones above those of Sikhism and Black skin tones. In creating a false narrative of disparity, these individuals, most of whom I have known for forty-plus years, grew up with largely unacknowledged beliefs about their own superiority over others who are not like them. That sense of superiority, even if the attitude holder does not consciously realize he or she is doing it, allows no true humility, and without it, it is impossible to empathize with others who seem different.

While I know I am very aware of racial and ethnic differences, I also know my attitudes are much more open than many people I know. I do believe I have more humility about my own self worth than many of my acquaintances and family members. And I am certain that I have a higher level of empathy for people who are different from me than many. 

However, and this really matters---I have nowhere near enough humility and nowhere near enough empathy---yet. Although I like to think of myself as unbiased, I do have instances where I suddenly realize that something I thought or said is actually an unacknowledged prejudice. And when those times come, I do catch myself being judgmental and even racist in my thinking. Even though I work hard to be aware and nonjudgmental, it happens from time to time. It slithers into my consciousness. And that is what is so insidious. 

People like me think we are enlightened and evolved. We like to tell ourselves that we understand what others go through. But can I say that I truly know what it was like for my female Muslim student to walk down Forest Avenue in Portland and have her hijab snatched down to reveal her hair? No. Can I feel badly for how I could see she felt? Yes. But I don't really know what that is like. 

And what about my Latino student, whose family came from Mexico? What about his story of having been stopped because ICE assumed he was an illegal? Did I care and feel outrage for what happened to him? Absolutely. Yet, I don't know.

When I don't speak up if I hear a joke about a Black person's lips, I am part of the problem. I am not holding anywhere near enough humility to truly empathize. So like Carroll and her team, I need to purposefully force myself to be more aware and to build my own humility. If I don't invest just as much into my own understanding as the man in Sears poured into my little girl brain, and if I don't foster my own courage to speak out when I see and hear the wrongs that I witnessed being doled out to my Black classmate, I add to the pain. 

My lack of humility has to remain on my radar, and I must grow my empathy even more so my words, actions, and thoughts increasingly contribute to positive change, adding less and less to the hurt and division of our world. Only in getting better myself can I hope to make the world better for all of us.