Living as a Racial Minority

Growing up in North Miami, I couldn't help but know that I was one of the few white kids in the neighborhood. My parents bought a house they could afford, in an area that was experiencing the tail end of a white flight, and, to their credit, they decided to stay there for over fifteen years and raise their kids there. The education I got at North Miami Senior High (Go Pioneers!) included a lot more than Trigonometry and English Lit. I learned how to navigate the world without the safety net of being in the majority everywhere I went.

I was reminded of my childhood the other day, listening to an episode of the podcast Pass the Mic with Tyler Burns and Jemar Tisby. They did an interview with Michael O. Emerson, author of several books on Christianity and race, including Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America. I'm constantly challenged by the Pass the Mic podcast, which tackles controversial issues pertaining to both American society and the Christian Church, but this episode hit home a little more than most. Emerson talked about how he, as a white man, came to some of the conclusions he has about race in America. He said that as a relatively new father, he felt called by God to live as a racial minority. He believed, literally, that God wanted him to uproot his family and seek out a neighborhood, church, and school where he and his children would be some of the very few white folks in the area.

At hearing about his decision, people around him said he was crazy, maybe self-righteous. They questioned whether this was safe, really betraying their views of non-white people. But in the end, he maintains that living as a racial minority gave him and his children a perspective on racial issues that they couldn't have gotten otherwise. 

It reminded me a lot of how I grew up. I don't know if my parents' decision was spiritual, or political, or just economic, but it had the same results. What seemed normal to me growing up - the experiences of my friends, classmates, and neighbors, the languages and other ways of communicating - gave me a sort of inoculation to the things I heard on the news and other media. I remember very clearly hearing Sean Hannity putting President Obama on blast for allowing a "gangster rapper" to perform at the White House. Because this sounded so absurd to me, I looked into it, only to find out he was talking about Common, the least gangster of all rappers in the entire hip-hop history. I could never hear Hannity's voice again without having my guard up, knowing that he would lie to defame anyone not on his side, and all because of the music I listened to growing up. 

I resonated so much with Emerson's experience and his discussion of race and the church that I picked up Divided by Faith and read it. By "read it," of course, I mean I listened to it in the gym and while driving, like I do with pretty much all nonfiction books. In chapter seven, "The Organization of Religion," Emerson tells the story of an African-American pastor in Seattle with a vision for a truly multiracial congregation. Because he wanted to plant this church with forethought and intentionality, he partnered with local pastors of either majority white or Black churches to pitch his idea and call out members willing to charter this new congregation. At first, when the church held its first service, the staff as well as the congregation was split pretty evenly between white and Black folks. Then, as Emerson describes it, "as the church grew, something happened to its mixed-race nature - it disappeared, and the congregation became nearly all African-American" (147). Emerson goes into the reasons why this shift happened, using some very technical social science language, but the gist of it is this: to most white people, a church that is fifty percent Black is a Black church, and they don't want to attend a Black church. The only new members joining the church were Black, and as the balance tipped from the halvsies that the white charter members signed up for, they left. Ironically, the reasons they gave for leaving were mostly that they no longer felt heard or seen, or that they felt the church had lost its vision of diversity. To me, this seems like a really diplomatic way of saying that they wanted to be in a diverse church, only so long as the diversity was kept to a comfortable minimum.

I call this ironic because the thing the white families cited for leaving is the default setting for Black folks in most neighborhoods, churches, or schools. People of color have to navigate spaces of racial and cultural minority all the time, and have learned enough survival skills in that arena to fill volumes. But, generally, the example of this church, among others, the history of white flight in America, and the current hysteria over immigration all show that white folks simply refuse to remain in spaces where they are not the majority, where most of the faces they see reflect their own back at them. And even then, whenever Black folks carve out spaces for themselves, little enclaves where they can experience the majority existence that white folks take for granted, they are met with suspicion and derision. The new thing is to call these spaces and organizations racist, or reverse racist, or whatever, whether they are HBCU's, Black caucuses in politics, or other Black organizations.

I would have loved to hear the exit interviews of those white charter members of that Seattle church. Reportedly, all those families went to majority-white churches. I'm sure the pastor was a good and wise man, and certainly hopeful and well-meaning for embarking on such a difficult vision. I'm sure he listened to all the concerns and complaints of the white families leaving his church, all the talk of not feeling heard, being pushed to the margins and out of the loop. I'm sure he looked them in the eye and told them that while he wished they would stay, he prays nothing but the best for them, and made one request. I'm sure he asked them to remember how the last few months or years felt, the feeling of being a minority, of being a little late to the party or left out of the inside jokes. I'm sure he asked them to take that feeling to their new church, and look out for the handful of Black members there, since that's probably their exact situation, as long as they want to be the "diversity" in so-called diverse churches.

I Told You So

My daughter is a single mom. Whether she wants it or not, she's got parents, step-parents, grandparents, godparents, uncles, aunties, and play-aunties giving her advice about how to navigate this phase of life. Sometimes she follows that advice, and sometimes she doesn't. Sometimes the advice she gets from one learned elder differs greatly from what the others tell her. Sometimes she listens to me, and sometimes she chooses the counsel of people I disagree with. And sometimes, she throws out everyone's wisdom and follows her own path.

Sometimes when she rejects my advice, always graciously, of course, is easy for me to get judgmental and annoyed with her. How could she fail to see the vastness of my experience, the superiority of my insight? At least that's what I tell myself. When she takes that road less traveled by and finds nothing but thorns and dead ends, I'm always there to guide her back and provide her the love and support to keep pushing forward.

But that little voice inside.

I can't help it. That little, insidious voice inside me wants to say it, or at least to make her know it without me saying it. I told you so. You should have listened to me. If you had just taken my sage advice, you wouldn't be in this mess.

But I'm learning to shout down that voice. I'm learning that my daughter might be right for questioning my judgment sometimes, that her situation is different from mine, and that what worked for me might not work for her, or just might not be attainable at the moment. After all, I was married to her mother for fourteen years. As far as I knew it at the time, I was doing everything right, everything the elders told me to do to be a good parent, to have a good marriage. Stayed in the church, check. Married Christian, check. Wait until marriage, difficult, but check. Be ambitious at work and a leader at home, double check. And then after fourteen years of ticking all the right boxes, reading all the right books, and listening to all the right people, I ended up a divorced single parent, exactly where she is now. On second thought, not exactly where she is, because while I was older, degreed, with more earning potential, I had fewer years ahead of me and so much more baggage to unpack and lessons to unlearn. So much less potential, in a way.

And after looking around with those older eyes, that unpacked heart, and a willingness to really see, I discovered that a lot of the people I counted on - the books, the elders, the experts, the play-aunties - didn't know what they were talking about half the time. I saw marriages that looked polished and perfect that were really cold and sometimes miserable when you peeked through the cracks. I saw parents who looked like geniuses with dutiful kids, only to see those same kids flee their homes to run amok in the far country like prodigal sons. And I saw that everybody is doing their best.

My daughter became a mother way too young, but now she's at the age I was when I first became a father. Looking back, I can't say I knew any more about parenting, or that I did a better job. Just about every parent I talk to about these matters has regrets, things they wish they had known, things they wish they had done better, including me. And just about every child I talk to has grievances against their parents, hurts and resentments that they have either reconciled and forgiven or still hurt over, including me. Including my own kids.

But the thing about having much older and much younger kids is that they don't all have the same parents. The older ones joke about how the littles have it so good, how the littles get to do stuff and have stuff that the older ones begged for, how they have a whole different home life than they remember. And they're not wrong. I'm still making mistakes, still learning the craft, and still hoping for grace and forgiveness, even as I grow and improve as a parent. More than that, I'm still giving advice to my older kids as they're making decisions about their relationships and their own kids.

Still advising, but not judging.

Because while my life is much better now, and, hopefully, so are my parenting skills, most of what I know now I've earned with many failures and years of painful setbacks. The older kids lived through it with me, but there's so much we don't let our children see, so much we don't let them know about what's going on with us. There's so much that we ourselves don't understand about why we parent the way we do, why we listen to one voice and reject another, so how can we teach that to anyone?

In the end, my hope is that my advice is true, because it's certainly well-intended. I also hope that all the elders in my kids life, from the grandparents to the play-aunties, are not only insightful but honest with them, and that my kids listen to the right ones at the right times, even if the right one isn't me. Last, I hope they forgive us all.