What I'm going to say, I wonder why I even try. But this is a blog of humility and vulnerability, of opinion, but certainly not one in which I would ever tell you I have the answers. I don't. But I'm desperately trying to understand the questions.
Let's begin by saying Phil Robertson is 67, and he grew up dirt poor in the white South. In remarks to a national publication (has anyone not heard or read this?), he said, "I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. We're going across the field … They're singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, 'I tell you what: These doggone white people'—not a word! … Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues," Robertson said in the interview.
Those remarks were missed by many because they were concentrating on Robertson's GQ interview in which he said things about homosexuality.
I couldn't let it go without commenting, however. Let me say this to begin: I'm 60, white, male, and grew up in the South, although I wouldn't describe us as dirt poor or if we were, I didn't know it.
And I must tell you, never, with my eyes, did I see the mistreatment of any black person. Not once.
There. For all the liberals out there, understand this point. If that sentence is enough to have me condemned, so be it. It wasn't because my eyes were shut, or that they were focused on such things as growing up and playing ball, though they were.
But that's not even close to the whole story.
I read this morning of a story by Jemar Tisby, president of the REformed African-American Network, in the Christian Post.
Tisby, who lives in Jackson, Ala., said that he personally found Robertson's comments frustrating because of the disparity between his remarks and his wife's grandmother's experience growing up in the same time and place where the "Duck Dynasty" patriarch lived.
Tisby interviewed his grandmother-in-law to learn how find how she had felt toward her white bosses growing up as a sharecropper in Louisiana, clarifying that her animosity toward whites eventually subsided because of her "faith in Christ."
"Oh, I hated [the boss man and white people.] I really, really did," she told him. "I was mad at what they did to us. I had to walk eight miles to school each way. Rain, cold, hot, whatever. The school bus used to pass us by. We couldn't ride it because we were black. Sometimes there'd be this big 'ol bus and only two white children riding it. The bus would pass by close enough to splash water on us, but they wouldn't pick us up."
Tisby attributed the differences in interpretation to the impact of centuries of segregation.
"[Segregation] makes it that much harder for us to see life from the other person's point of view and that is even more complicated when you're talking about the dominant or majority culture, trying to see from minority or subdominant culture," he said.
I could not agree more. If you're not seeing the other person, you're not seeing the other person's pains and suffering.
I seriously, seriously doubt Robertson meant for a national debate to begin on sexual orientation and race, but maybe, just maybe that could happen.
Much of what it takes to understand the other person, it seems to me, is to attempt to the best of our limited ability to see things through "their" eyes.
I've tried. I played in an all African-American basketball league when I was 19. Learned a lot after being cussed at and asked why I was there. But I can never totally understand what it was like to be my black friends who are of the same age as I am or maybe a bit older. I can't understand because I didn't go through what they went through. And we were segregated. Two races, two churches in my denomination, two this and that.
But understanding comes through talking, seems to me. No, I didn't see any of the atrocities that were happening in the state I grew up in, but I'm not an idiot. I understand they were happening. My question, once again, is how do we come together if we continue to have white churches and black churches. Just asking.
My mother, who died six years ago today, would have been 86. I never really understood her in terms of race, but I do know they were dirt poor. I do know they didn't have much. They truly lived through the Jim Crow era, and never much understood the other race, and I reckon never tried. And yes, I heard the N-word often growing up, even to describe a part of town (Meridian, Miss.) that I was driven through quite frequently, it being down the hill from my aunt's house.
She died with a bit of understanding and love for everyone. It can, and has, happened. It is really disconcerting, however, for folks who didn't grow up where I grew up to make judgments about those like me, or heck, even my parents. I judged them enough for both of us.
Time, and conversation, and a baby named Jesus changes everything. Did those of us in the white south understand that one day we would have black mayors of major towns in Mississippi. No.
But let me end with this. My senior class in high school was the first to integrate. It was a hard transition. But we came together in sports. The linebacker behind me, playing middle guard badly on defense, was Edward "Killer" Mosely. First black friend I ever had, I guess. Years later, he became the principal at my high school, his high school.
Time heals. I suspect it will for race, for sexual orientation, and for sinners just like me.
Let it be so, Lord. Let it be so.
No comments:
Post a Comment