When the same place isn’t the same place
Comments (...)(MCT) — Last weekend I met some friends in Washington, D.C., and, like any proper tourist in the capital, couldn’t resist posing for a photo in front of the White House.
“Will you take our picture?” I asked a stranger.
He did, then handed me his iPhone. “Will you take ours?”
Other tourists ambled up for the ritual, strangers photographing strangers under the warm winter sun, all of us enjoying the fun of preserving an image of ourselves on this backdrop, the home of the United States president.
It was only when a couple of young black people paused for a photo op that it hit me: I’ve been here before. But it’s not the same place.
In the spring of my eighth-grade year, I went to Washington with my classmates from Macon, Ga., a pilgrimage that was a graduation rite of passage in our little Southern town. We roamed the city in noisy herds, laughing and shooting blurry photos with our cheap Kodaks, dancing to the radio in our cramped hotel rooms, exhilarated to be, finally, adult.
All of us were white. Desegregation was the law by then, the late 1960s, but it was not yet a fact of life. Some of us, by the luck of having parents who understood the moral lie of the segregated South, had been taught, in the privacy of our homes, that white people were no better than black people, that we were to treat all people with respect.
My family, in fact, for reasons I’ve never fully understood, went to Mass every Sunday at the one black Catholic church in town, St. Peter Claver, our 10 white faces the only white faces except for those of the Irish priest and nuns.
I’d like to say that because of that experience I was fully enlightened on the topic of race. I wasn’t. I kind of liked going to the black church, but I was also embarrassed, and I hid the fact from my friends, afraid to be seen as weird.
So I was unsure how to react that night on our D.C. trip when, as we lined up for dinner, a black boy darted toward us from out of nowhere.
As fast as a gasp, he kissed one of the girls on the cheek. Then he darted off.
The rest of our trip to Washington was shadowed by dismay and fear. I recall the outrage of one of the adult chaperons especially, and the animated anger of some of the girls, the expletive that was repeated.
It was understood: This was not a boy’s prank. This was a black man assaulting a white girl. This was the world out of control. Outrage was in order.
When I got home, I felt trapped and confused. I’d wanted to say, “It’s not such a big deal,” but I was afraid to speak up, and maybe it was as appalling as they said.
No, my mother assured me, it’s just that people are scared of the unfamiliar.
“Don’t be afraid to say what you think,” she said.
Somewhere I still have a photo of myself in front of the White House at 13, in an era when a black boy’s peck on a white girl’s cheek could terrify, when it was barely thinkable that a black man would one day preside over that white house.
The world hasn’t changed entirely since then, or enough. But it has changed greatly. In Black History Month, we take stock of the change, of the ways big and small that it happened, and we appreciate those who teach the children right.
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Great story.The other day at work an old timer mentioned theres no room in this world for"mixed"children.If you were in the conversation then you'd understand he was talking about White and Black mixed kids.He used the age old argument that the kids werent white and they werent black..."so what are they" he asks.I said well, theyre human, and they know how to love just like you and i do. Is that so bad? After a couple of under-the-breath grumbles the ol timer walks out the breakroom door without a dent in his Predjudice wall he's surrounded himself with.What a simple,sad sad life to be living. |
